Every day we get e-mails from our subscribers who like Wrike a lot and are curious about the upcoming new features. We appreciate your feedback and want to reveal some details of our roadmap to assure you that we work hard to make Wrike even better.
We practice the Agile Software Development process; thus we adapt our plan to your feedback and prioritize work to deliver productivity features that are in greater demand. So here is what you should expect in the near future.
Priorities Currently, you can prioritize your tasks by putting them in the appropriate folders named “high,” “critical,” “normal,” etc. We plan to add the "Priority" field for each task soon. So it will be very convenient to categorize tasks by their importance within a concrete project, advertising plan or issues pack. What’s more, the priorities will be inherited after those defined for your e-mails about the tasks. No matter which e-mail client you use, Outlook, Gmail, BlackBerry or something else, your tasks will be marked with the appropriate priority level in Wrike. Update: priorities have been released.
Tasks dependencies We know that many Wrike users utilize simplistic task management approaches similar to David Allen’s getting things done. However, the number of people using Wrike to manage product development and other complex projects is constantly growing. That is why we are now developing a tasks dependencies feature for projects that require a strict order for task execution. This upgrade is coming in a couple of months. Just think of Wrike’s Gantt charts – they will save you even more time! When you update your plans on a timeline, interrelated tasks will be also rescheduled. There are some architectural challenges that we want to solve elegantly.
Custom statuses Right now you can imitate any custom field in Wrike, including priorities, with folders. This approach has a huge advantage – it gives you unlimited flexibility. You create several folders that correspond with your statuses. For example you can name these folders “in research,” “not clear,” “postponed” and “unapproved” (see the picture below).
When any idea comes up, you put it in the folder “in research,” discuss it with colleagues and give it the appropriate status when the decision is made. Or alternatively, if it’s approved, you can put it into the “design” or “develop” folder and assign it to your team members. It’s very convenient, as you can apply a particular categorization for each of your projects if you manage several different customer projects.
However, we know that some users are more comfortable with managing statuses as task attributes. Our customers’ satisfaction is paramount for us; that’s why we recently included custom statuses in our software roadmapping. We’ll design the feature so that you will be able to define statuses for every folder if necessary. It will lighten up your folder hierarchy. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Soon you’ll be able to try it out.
Your feedback on these parts of the system is very welcome. We always aim to enhance Wrike’s functionality, so please let us know what you would like to see in Wrike by commenting on this post.
