How quickly can you check the status of everything your team is working on? For most managers, this requires some digging. Let’s look at three scenarios:
Scenario 1: Let’s say you need to send out an email to your team of 10 employees asking them for status updates. Some respond right away, while others don’t see the email until that evening or possibly the next morning.
Verdict: 1-2 business days.
Scenario 2: OK, that takes way too long. Instead, you decide to schedule a team meeting to go over everything your team is working on. You want to leave enough time to ask questions and hear about next steps.
Verdict: 1 hour.
Scenario 3: One hour for a simple status update? If you want updates weekly, that’s an hour a week and four hours a month of lost productivity. Your final option is to go around to each individual separately and ask where they are with their projects. Let’s say you spend around three minutes with each individual.
Verdict: 30 minutes.
With all three scenarios, you also have to consider the complexities. If some team members are remote, that can make things more difficult. If follow-up is needed, you must track the correspondence. If a task is stuck or a sudden issue arises, there’s no place to jump in and take action. Tracking down status reports and getting answers to outstanding questions is time-consuming.
Time is money, and inefficiency is consistently costing companies time, money, and retention. In fact, having the materials and equipment to do the job right is a huge factor in employee turnover, according to James K. Harter, PhD, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management. Not to mention that inefficient communication and collaboration are two of the top causes of stress in the workplace. Providing your employees with efficient and easy-to-use software to get the job done can reduce stress and frustration, which helps with employee retention.
So, what’s the best solution for tracking all ongoing projects across a team? A central location to view, organize, prioritize, and measure all work. Enter: Wrike Dashboards & Reporting.
We asked Justin Liles, Chief Product Officer at Advice Local, a local SEO technology company, how long it takes him to check the status of his team’s work with Wrike.
Let’s dive deeper into how you can achieve total visibility in project management and maximize efficiency across your organization.
Use Dashboards for X-ray Vision on All Projects
The first obstacle to gaining full visibility on workflow is having too many processes. When everyone is tracking their work differently, there’s no consistency in how the work is managed or documented.
“On average, we’re launching 3-4 different content pieces a week,” says Lauren Beth, Head of Global Marketing and Communications at Euromonitor International. “We are constantly evolving so it’s imperative I get a bird’s eye view of all ongoing projects.”
Without a birds-eye view of all ongoing work, you have limited control over what you can actually see. This can lead to bottlenecks and roadblocks that might derail the entire project.
Dashboards organize this data all in one place, so processes are consistent and you have a high-level overview of everything in the pipeline.
With Wrike Dashboards, you can:
- Keep everything within reach: Set up a one-stop shop for what’s happening today and tomorrow, and what should’ve happened yesterday. Quickly address projects falling behind.
- Choose what you want to see: Use widgets to identify the statuses that are important to you. Quickly identify issues: Tear down roadblocks and keep things moving forward in a project view.
- Prioritize prioritization: Redirect any shifts in prioritization or focus so everyone is working on the most impactful projects first.
- Manage accountability: If you have team members or projects you’re worried about, bucket them into their own Dashboard.
“When I found Wrike, it was a no brainer,” says Liles. “We chose it because it fit with our model of working with 150 people on a daily basis and 650 people globally. I have 15 dashboards that I share with teams. We make sure we do a monthly training on new processes we implement in Wrike because we need 100% alignment across departments.”
Measure Performance & Manage Resources With Reporting
At Advice Local, Liles and team make efficiency their top priority. In fact, Liles attributes their success to the time and money they’ve saved with Wrike.
"Wrike saves us money simply because it’s so reliable,” says Liles.
Wrike’s Reporting helps you get a handle on your team’s workload and forecast resources by gathering the information you need from your tasks and projects. Report data is available in real time, meaning every time you refresh your data, it’s automatically reflected in the report.
“Wrike gives us visibility with Reporting,” says Liles. “I have about 60 reports I run on a daily basis. When that report is run, that means it’s fresh. I’m able to give visibility and fresh data directly to my executives.”
Reporting views can be tailored to show you exactly what you want to see. Here are a few different reporting use cases:
- All active tasks: Perfect for when you want to see all ongoing work
- Overdue tasks: Instantly see what’s overdue and move things around if needed
- Weekly project status reports: Do away with status-update meetings once and for all, thanks to total visibility over your team’s weekly workload
- Projects due this month: See what’s in the pipeline for the month so you can plan and manage resources effectively
- Unassigned tasks: Make sure no forgotten tasks fall through the cracks
- Time spent: See which projects are taking up the most time and plan accordingly
You control the data. Easily share the report across other teams or limit access to your team only.
If you’re looking for automatic reporting, subscriptions allow you to send weekly or monthly reports directly to your inbox.
With Wrike Reporting, you can:
- Stay ahead of roadblocks: See everything that’s overdue and who’s overloaded with work
- Measure success: At a glance, know how many projects your team completed on time and how many fell behind
- Forecast resources: Based on knowledge about which tasks take up the most time, you can effectively distribute workload
“The scalability of Wrike is awesome,” says Liles. “You can’t be scared of configuration. You have to start somewhere; sometimes you have to build the house and tear it down in order to build a better one. No matter what, we never remained stagnant.”
Make Visibility a Reality
If you’re a Wrike user or just looking into collaborative work management, understand that visibility is the key to improving efficiency and sustainability. Investing in a collaboration tool with dashboards and reporting capabilities not only saves time and money, but also reduces employees’ stress and frustration. Make visibility in project management a reality by:
- Setting up a central hub for all ongoing work and keeping processes clear and consistent Setting expectations and proving the value of your team
- Prioritizing, identifying, and bucketing the progress you want to see
- Keeping everyone accountable for their own work
- Stopping roadblocks before they happen
- Managing resources and workload so no one is overloaded
- Measuring performance across your team so you’re constantly improving
Looking to try out Dashboards & Reporting? Start your 2-week free trial of Wrike today.
