In part one of our “selecting the best CWM solution” series, we discussed that having a centralized project intake method and managing all your team’s work using a system of record are essential to working efficiently. Without these in place, you’re likely struggling to keep track of work, managing projects in multiple programs, and chasing down stakeholders to get project details. Part two highlighted the pain of slow asset approvals and siloed teams trying to collaborate.
Today, we’ll focus on the advantages of workflow automation and working intelligently.
Pain: You can’t automate repetitive tasks
Most projects and tasks go through predictable stages before completion and always with some repetitive work. Assigning tasks to the correct teammate, advancing work to the next stage, and completing and archiving work. Administrative work translates to lost time on productive activities like interviewing customers for case studies or writing a new product announcement blog article. Why not use workflow automation software to auto-assign and notify the correct person when work is ready for their sign-off? There’s a finite time in the work day, and teams shouldn’t waste a second doing admin work that can be left to automation.
Pain: The rate you scale is too slow
Business growth can often be a blessing and a curse. Blessing because revenues increase and teams grow but a curse because as organizations scale, projects and workloads increase, which could introduce resource availability constraints. As work demands escalate, teams don’t have time to dig through piles of data for decision-making insights. As a result, collaboration gets tougher and boundaries between work and personal time become blurred.
With increased workloads, it becomes challenging for project owners and managers to manually track and analyze the progress of high-level initiatives and granular tasks. Assessing risk becomes equally challenging and determining risk levels based on intuition and experience is less effective and nearly impossible at scale.
Project owners and managers need an efficient way to identify at-risk initiatives at a glance and prioritize them without manually checking in with team members and digging through multiple project levels. Once a potential risk is identified, they need insight to accurately diagnose the cause and determine next steps, whether it’s notifying stakeholders, alleviating bottlenecks, adjusting resources, or updating timelines.
Machine learning and AI continue to seep into our everyday activities and routines. Smart devices act as personal assistants to help manage calendars and set reminders. Help center bots are more prevalent to provide great customer service. Our most used applications provide auto-generated responses, such as Gmail, LinkedIn, and many phone messaging apps. All this technology is available at our fingertips to be more efficient, collaborate, and do more. Why should work be any different? Workflow automation tools free up teams to do their best work.
As workload and collaboration ramp up, team members may sometimes get buried with notifications in need of timely responses. This is noteworthy because most work-related communications and responses are short and require simple decisions, but it takes too much time and manual effort. Plus, there’s pressure to respond quickly while juggling more responsibilities. Yet with notifications piling up, it can be overwhelming to respond without a quick way to answer. You need a workflow automation software solution that empowers you to act quickly and move work forward without much manual effort.
Even in the digital transformation age, not all work is digital. Ever get a printed document or handwritten note from a colleague that the rest of your team should see? Even if you could digitize the file and upload it, the editing process would be painful. Physical document sharing, editing, and collaboration is unrealistic across distributed organizations and teams because members don’t have access to traditional office technology to digitize print assets.
Common problems meet Wrike solutions
Wrike Integrate, our workflow/process automation software add-on for all complex and multi-app workflows, has teamed up with our new Automation Engine to automate repeatable processes within Wrike.
The Automation Engine can automate your most-used workflows to reduce operational busywork. Based on if/then logic, account administrators can build automation rules using triggers and actions to create custom reminders and notifications, move and organize work, update work status and assignments, initiate approval workflows, and take action based on project risk levels. No coding experience is necessary to create the automation rules.
There are many advantages of workflow automation. By removing repetitive tasks from a team’s workload, you can reduce errors, streamline processes, and save each team member hundreds of hours per year — another way of improving productivity.
Project Risk Prediction
Wrike’s built-in Work Intelligence™ features Project Risk Prediction, where we use machine-learning technology to predict potential project delays and alert project and team leaders of the possible causes. This allows them to take action fast to reduce or avoid delays. Our workflow automation software uses signals like start and end dates, tasks extending beyond project deadlines, and prior outcomes from similar projects to assess medium and high risks, and sends email digests to alert users. The predictions can be used as inputs to the Automation Engine to trigger actions that automate the activation of different scenarios based on project risk.
Smart Replies
To address the need for quick, short responses, Wrike’s Smart Replies allow users to take quick actions to move work forward by responding to notifications and activity with automated replies generated with machine learning. Each reply is based on the context of the conversation and allows users to select from up to three responses for each @mention received in their Wrike Inbox.
Document Processing
Teammates don’t have to fumble with physical documents anymore when they want to share with the group. Wrike’s new Document Processing functionality, an optical character recognition (OCR) technology, digitizes and converts printed documents and handwritten notes into editable text files. Just use your mobile device camera as a scanner, save the file as a task attachment, and upload to Wrike.
House of Design automates their workflow
Ryan Okelberry, COO/Principal at House of Design details how Wrike’s automation speeds up his team’s workflow to deliver results:
“... [Wrike] has been simple enough to allow us to write recipes fairly quickly and easily without having a lot of programming experience. It is often the little things that we can write recipes and automation for that really enhance the Wrike platform.”
Work smarter with automation
Automate your workflows, identify at-risk work, respond quicker, and collaborate on physical documents. It’s all possible with Wrike’s Automation Engine and cutting-edge Work Intelligence™. Let Wrike show you how by starting a free trial today. While you’re at it, download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the four key areas to consider when evaluating a CWM solution, including the top 16 features for hypergrowth and enterprise teams.
