Digital transformation is in full swing as organizations continue to iterate on their work structure. Adopting new systems to meet remote work demands and maintain business continuity remain a necessity — albeit at a cost, like burnout contributing to The Great Resignation. Many teams thought that new tech tools would keep them productive and collaborative — which they have — but as it turns out, it was a band-aid solution to an evolving larger problem.
Work is getting lost in unstructured solutions, like instant messaging, video conferencing applications, and the more rigid solutions previously in place, creating a dark matter of work with no system of record. From this, workplace complexities have increased along with employee burnout. Consider the following survey results:
- A Citrix survey found that employees use more than 10 applications daily, and as a result, 98% of business leaders admit their employees experience frustration
- A Wrike survey found that lack of engagement, employee burnout, and productivity issues were the top three workforce risks this year
The new complexities of digital transformation are making it more difficult to do our best work.
Wrike’s newest product updates are designed to reduce these workplace complexities, improve the employee experience, and enable organizations to keep pace with today's digital transformations. Never before has a work management platform been able to offer such flexibility, simplicity, security, and connectedness to provide natural support of workflows at every level of the organization: individual, team, department, and company-wide. This unique orchestration of workflows and processes enables entire organizations to work as one collective body. It’s time to move forward together in Wrike.
Meet our 2021 Collaborate product updates
Work Models
Traditionally, Wrike users work out of tasks, projects, and folders, but in reality, work is more dynamic. Wrike is the only work management platform that has moved beyond projects, tasks, and spreadsheets to use the language of your work specific to the workflows that you have at hand. Wrike’s work structure can now natively support “user stories,” “campaigns,” “customers,” or any other custom entities you want to introduce. It can also support nested structure in those entities — for example, “user stories” can be part of “epics.” This allows users to perfectly model the work of any team or department in the company while allowing the whole organization to use one work management platform.
If you’re familiar with Blueprints and Wrike’s custom fields model, think of Work Models as next-generation templates that include tailored work items, with custom look and logic established by adding and configuring required fields, workflows, and automations. This new functionality makes layout, format, and behavior all customizable. Work Models give users a similar level of freedom, configurability, and flexibility to how teams work, regardless of their function, size, and scale.
Work Models help to easily create templatized work items that can be account-wide or limited to a specific Space. Space admins and key team members can define their business function-specific work, while Wrike admins and owners can build items that make sense to everyone and can be used by multiple teams. Real work item creation is one click-away — either users pick the relevant Work Model from the familiar “big green plus button” menu or add new records via the context creation menu in their space.
Goal management
It's harder than ever for employees to see how their work contributes to team and company objectives and for executives to know if their employees’ work is aligned with company goals.
With remote work becoming more mainstream, executive leadership and teams find it more challenging to stay inspired and motivated. Not having proven results and metrics makes it more challenging to connect strategy, plans, and work in the future. Communication issues only add to the problem, with many employees losing sight of their shared company goals. Our goal management solution intends to solve all that.
Goal management relies on the brand new Work Models concept introducing new types of work items like objectives, goals, key results, deliverables, and more. It embeds user-defined fields, automations, and schedules, and can be easily tailored to fit organizational or departmental needs. Moreover, it takes advantage of Wrike’s work hierarchy model and cross-tagging to track the activity’s progress and measure the connected goals attainment versus project-based or task-based work completion. Wrike’s Work Intelligence™ — powered by AI and machine learning — automatically measures risks associated with the objective's performance and keeps teams' work achievements on track.
Our new goal management solution connects metrics from daily work to a company’s strategic objectives, providing real-time visibility into current and future goals and enabling the entire organization to work as one toward a common vision. What’s more, goal management leverages automated reporting and smart reminders to accelerate goal attainment. Additionally, Wrike integrates with other goal-measuring solutions and automatically incorporates key data points and success metrics within Wrike. With clear, real-time, top-down, and bottom-up communication, organizations can rally their workforce around a shared vision and proven success.
Workflow Engine
Wrike has been investing in automation capabilities since our inception including request forms, Blueprints, approvals, automation engine bots, and more. These capabilities have proven to help teams within organizations like Walmart and Siemens scale their work and grow. Today, we’re elated to make automation even easier in Wrike!
Workflow Engine is the latest in Wrike’s no-code/low-code capabilities and is a visual builder that enables employees to quickly and easily establish customized workflows — no matter how complex — to keep work moving effortlessly across the organization. It’s a simplified process that can support complex scenarios at scale but is easy to operate and runs quietly in the background, freeing up employees to focus on what they do best.
With Workflow Engine, Wrike enables business users to define automation rules for Work Models of a specific type and distribute these rules as a part of a new work template. Wrike can automate actions based on templates and item types instead of tasks in a project space. By combining Workflow Engine with Work Models, you can use advanced triggers with specific workflows to scale this capability across your organization.
As an added benefit to Workflow Engine, your workflow doesn’t have to be contained in Wrike. Work can also start in your company’s employee portal and connect to Wrike via Workflow Engine. Furthermore, it’s not just simple “if this, then that” (IFTTT) with conditions and triggers, but rather an enhanced work routing mechanism that can have several levels of drill-down. Workflow Engine also helps to eliminate repetitive user manual data updates by connecting information flows between Wrike and third-party systems, like human resource records or IT systems, both ways. Once data is entered in one of the systems, Workflow Engine ensures it’s automatically replicated with Wrike and vice versa.
Wrike for Service Teams
Service-based teams such as brand marketing and human resources typically work cross-functionally and often need to address ad hoc employee requests, tactical projects, and sometimes mission-critical strategic initiatives. However, they often need to toggle between disparate tools that don’t connect, leading to a disjointed experience that is disruptive and inefficient. Meanwhile, requestors find it cumbersome to use traditional service request tools, which take them away from their daily workflow. Instead of using a dedicated tool to raise service requests, employees can now perform their daily activities and connect with service teams on a single platform, ensuring a continuous workflow so they can stay focused on work. Enter Wrike for Service Teams.
With Wrike for Service Teams, we’re making it easier to unlock the power of your people and demonstrate the versatility of the platform. Regardless of the team focus, be it travel requests or IT-related incidents and issues, Wrike connects service requesters and service fulfillers within one platform with a unified user experience and interface. Wrike for Service Teams allows employees and service teams to align on their work, including service requests, projects, and strategic initiatives, within a single system of record. In doing so, everyone gets a unified end-to-end workflow, providing 360-degree visibility and intelligence into all projects. No more frustration using multiple tools — just more employee satisfaction.
Wrike integration with ShareFile
Organizations are increasingly working with external collaborators, which can increase the perimeter of security threats. This poses a larger concern to regulated and traditional industries along with enterprise organizations that have advanced security needs. The Wrike platform already has exceptional enterprise-grade security on top of 400+ integrations to cloud and on-premises apps. Today, we’re excited to add another to our list: Citrix ShareFile.
The ShareFile integration is unique to Wrike and is part of our continued product development with Citrix, which will bring benefits that other work management solutions won't have access to.
With this new integration, Wrike streamlines content-based workflows like RFPs and M&As by putting them in a dynamic work structure. This functionality enables all reviews, proofs, approvals, versioning, publishing, and more into one intuitive interface — which means ShareFile users can maintain efficiency and alignment on documents, all within Wrike. In addition, bank-grade security and permission management give full visibility and control over how customers, consultants, partners, and other stakeholders access sensitive data. To top it off, enterprise users can increase their work efficiency with document workflows and an e-signature integration.
Space Level Delegation and User Types
Enterprise-grade manageability has always been integral to Wrike. In fact, very few other work management platforms offer as much configurability and security control as Wrike. We know customers value Wrike Spaces as a popular feature to delegate management of team-related content and workflows to space admins and business users themselves. As a result, over the last year, we’ve continued to make Spaces more robust by adding reports, dashboards, calendars, etc. Moreover, space admins can now add and manage custom fields, workflows, and brand new work templates in Spaces themselves, like they used to do with the request forms. Today, we’re making Wrike stronger with Space Level Delegation and Customizable User Types.
Space Level Delegation enables teams to democratize and organize their work without IT or Wrike admins and provides access to build and manage space tools to key team members. Customizable User Types allows Wrike admins and owners to duplicate or create new user types and easily customize permissions for more control and higher security. IT teams can benefit from application-wide action permissions and restrictions by setting up advanced controls with a few clicks. This ensures any external collaborators will follow the right security protocols and get the proper set of permissions based on their role. These capabilities improve the relationship between IT and business teams because IT can enable them to set up their Spaces and workflows while controlling different user types and permission sets.
These product features are especially important for organizations with strict security and governance standards, along with agencies, professional services, and business teams that involve a lot of external collaborators. Wrike is the only work management vendor with this level of security configurability. With this release, Wrike customers will have both account- and space-level advanced security controls.
Stay tuned for more
At Wrike, our collective goal is that we remain the most robust, versatile, and intelligent collaborative work management platform that simplifies any team’s ability to collaborate and accomplish more. We’re confident these product updates solidify that position. Work Models in particular is one of our largest releases in nearly a decade, of which you’ll see benefits in future announcements. Get ready because Wrike’s new capabilities are planned for next year!
In the meantime, visit the Collaborate 2021 site to watch session recordings and learn more.
The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and is subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.
