As companies around the world brace to weather stormy market trends, project management offices and project management professionals are already feeling the pinch. Project management offices are facing increased pressure to deliver more with less and, in some cases, will be forced to work with smaller budgets and fewer resources.
As leading experts in project management software, we know there are simple ways organizations can build business resilience to help bring stability in the face of market turbulence. Building business resilience involves eliminating the wasted time and resources costing businesses in the knowledge industry over $60M each year due to productivity challenges, canceled projects, and employee churn.
We recently published a groundbreaking study on the Dark Matter of Work, which is the work that falls through the cracks when teams are working only in synchronous apps. The Dark Matter of Work is what gets lost in the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated.
Our study outlined how workplace complexity is eating into companies' profits and harming employee engagement. In project management offices and departments, that involves teams struggling with cumbersome resource forecasting and allocation, ineffective project management practices, and inadequate scoping. All of those struggles lead to missed deadlines and cost overruns.
Our research shows that those everyday struggles waste time, money, and your team’s energy — a single worker’s wasted time might run as high as 13 hours each week, costing a company as much as $16K every year.
That’s not the position you want to find yourself in during a turbulent market cycle.
The good news is that eliminating even a fraction of the Dark Matter of Work your team faces will help you recoup that wasted profit. Robust work management software is the key to recapturing the energy and resources currently being lost. Work management software pulls entire organizations into a single platform, strips out wasted time spent switching apps, and provides visibility into projects so that tasks don’t slip between the cracks.
As uncertainty riles the market, PMOs need to double down on flexibility, adapting to changing environments quickly and efficiently. They’ll also need to build business resilience frameworks that will help them better manage existing resources — while showing data that underscores how they’re driving their organization’s ROI.
To help you build better business resilience for your project management practice, we’ve rounded up 13 Wrike features, templates, and integrations that will enable you to power through uncertainty.
Key features for building business resilience in project management:
- Real-time visibility: Wrike’s dynamic project dashboards give project managers instant insight into every aspect of single or multiple projects. Our drag-and-drop interface helps you quickly adjust in real time to avoid burnout and increase ROI with balanced workloads.
- Workflow versatility: Wrike’s industry-leading Custom Item Types (see below) enable users to mirror their team’s business practices and daily task scenarios in their Wrike workspace. That means you can use your team’s preferred terminologies and behaviors, reducing wasted time further.
Resource management features for PMO teams and organizations:
- Accelerate resource planning: Quickly estimate project resource needs and request job role resources. With Wrike’s resource planning capabilities, you’ll be able to ensure the highest priority projects have ample coverage with visibility into resource allocation across your whole portfolio.
- Optimize workloads: Assigning and managing workloads has never been easier. Get an understanding of team members’ availability, capacity, and strengths at a glance, and drag and drop tasks to balance workloads more efficiently.
- Clear budgeting: Weathering upcoming uncertainty will put pressure on budgets, so Wrike’s budgeting tools (see below) will be critical in helping you accurately determine project budgets and margins. As team members track time spent on projects, you can monitor budget spend in real time to keep projects profitable.
Pre-built templates:
At Wrike, we know that one of the biggest barriers to launching projects is getting processes in place. That’s why we’ve set up a wide range of templates to help jump-start your processes, streamline your workflows, and get your team working faster. You can try any of these templates with a free Wrike trial.
- Business continuity template: In times of change, you need a roadmap for maintaining operations. This business continuity template allows you to see at-risk projects, mitigating that risk quickly by identifying the projects that require immediate attention. It also helps you track employee availability and ease communication across your entire organization.
- Business process management template: Wrike’s business process management template is perfect for shoring up business resilience. It allows you to outline your teams’ current work methods, identify opportunities for improvement, and implement company practices to increase productivity and effectiveness.
- OKR template: Keeping individual, team, and department goals at the forefront can help ensure increased productivity by helping employees connect their work with organizational goals. This OKR template (see below) offers a place to clearly record objectives and metrics and set regular check-ins so you can course-correct before things go off track.
Built-in integrations for PMO teams:
Did you know the average knowledge worker logs into 14 apps every day? The time spent jumping from one window to another is the epitome of the Dark Matter of Work, wasting valuable time that could be spent on critical tasks. Wrike integrates with over 400 of the most popular apps on the market, so you can take back that time.
- Wrike for iOS and Android: Whether you’re on-site or working on the go, Wrike for Android and Wrike for iOS give you the freedom to work anywhere. You’ll be able to access the same powerful features as the desktop app from your phone — anywhere you go.
- Business intelligence: Automatically bring your Wrike data into apps like Tableau with our powerful business intelligence features. Run advanced analytics and reports and provide your internal teams with even greater visibility into the work happening in Wrike.
Helpful tools on Wrike’s ROI
As you strive to maximize resources and achieve more with less, determining the ROI of your work management software is more important than ever. These tools will help you understand the ROI of Wrike.
- Try our Wrike savings calculator
- How Wrike customers save time, money, and increase productivity
- Learn four ways to measure the ROI of work management tools
With this set of resources, you’ll be ready to protect your organization from market uncertainty by creating a strong business resilience framework.
Start your Wrike free trial or request a free demo to see how Wrike can help you streamline, strengthen, and thrive.
