Modern work environments have grown increasingly complex. Teams are struggling to adapt to hybrid digital collaboration, juggle multiple disparate tools, and maintain cross-functional visibility into ongoing projects and their results.
Overcoming these difficulties relies upon successful digital transformation — one of today’s most urgent business challenges. Many organizations are understandably depending on the right work management solution to facilitate this transformation.
The complexities of transformation
However, most digital workspaces today provide users little more than a classic, outdated project management system with limited workflow customization capabilities. Workers spend countless hours adjusting previously successful work styles to match their work management tool’s archaic product logic, often with subpar results.
These limited means of work and a “one-method-fits-all” ideology fails to meet the unique and complex demands of modern digital collaboration. Furthermore, it hinders digital transformation by stifling the adoption of new workflow models. Standardized, inflexible terminologies and rigid work items cause users to struggle with onboarding new workspace setups and work styles. Eventually, adoption and adaptation go by the wayside, and onboarding employees becomes impossibly difficult.
For teams looking to tackle the future of collaborative work, they'll instead need a solution that can be uniquely molded to the way they work — not the other way around. It needs to be immediately relevant to how your teams operate, modular enough to enable agility for rapidly changing business environments, and intuitively scalable and measurable.
Introducing Wrike’s Custom Item Types
For each team to do their best work, they need the freedom to adapt their workspace for their own specific use cases and processes. Wrike's Custom Item Types does just that — enabling Wrike users to mirror team business processes and daily scenarios in their workspace with their own terminologies and behaviors. It allows users to add their own item types and configure the layout of each item's processes with the business logic and sets of fields unique to that item.
For instance, marketing teams can build up campaigns, assets, and creative briefs, while Agile teams can create user stories, epics, and releases. Meanwhile, all teams can track meetings and meeting notes in relevant “Notes” item types, as well as plan and organize retro meetings or sprint reviews through dedicated item types.
Custom Item Types also features a powerful work item automation, which enables power users and admins to automate routine work via easy-to-use, no-code workflows. Natural, streamlined business logic is shaped by the unique needs and challenges of each line of business — and it’s up to your work management solution to know it.
Work item automation enables Space-level automation unique to item types that support highly specific use-cases. It facilitates team-level and cross-functional scenarios with the flexibility and customizability needed to automate best practices directly into a system. Build your very own library of no-code automated work items, define workflows and item relations, and make adaptations on the fly as your processes evolve.
This unprecedented level of configurability removes the artificial layer of complexity that more rigid work management tools saddle their users with, letting teams focus instead on rapid workflow adaptation and adoption, cross-functional collaboration, and exceptional productivity that facilitates business growth and impact.
Custom Item Type capabilities
Available for all Wrike Customers on Business and higher Wrike plans from today, Custom Item Types arrive with a variety of features, such as:
- Custom Item Types Library
An account or space-level library with out-of-the-box and unique team-owned item types. Easy for the Space and Account admins to define and adapt - Configurable Item Views
Highly customizable sections and fields that can be hidden and added in-flight - Work Items Creation
Customizable context creation menu incorporating multiple views and tools that clarify only relevant items with parent-child item hierarchy - Item Type Indication
Item icon and type identification in item views, as well as visible titles in Table, Gantt, and Board views that facilitate work filtering in dashboards, reports, and other tools - Custom Type Editor with Item-level Automation
Intuitive tools that enable power users and admins alike to tailor Wrike for team members’ needs without advanced skills or coding knowledge
Custom Item Types also arrive with three pre-built use-case templates that users can immediately integrate and benefit from:
- Service Management
The Enterprise Service Management template, designed for both business and IT users, supplies all service and support teams with the ability to respond to the needs of their organization. Users can request the services of a team, create incidents to track impacts for a team to resolve, and leverage a knowledge base to track informational articles for consumption by others within the organization. - Strategic Planning
The Strategic Planning template, based on the objectives and key results (OKR) methodology, allows users to leverage a pre-built structure that helps them track goals across their organization and departments. Users can merge top-down and bottom-up goal management and planning by focusing on business results, outcomes, and relevant deliverables rather than just outputs. - Team Agile
This template supplies any team looking to become Agile with an easy starting point to set up Agile workflows, including an initial taxonomy to define Agile work items, pre-built automations to kickstart execution of Agile work, and readily available views, dashboards, and reports to help them measure their status and showcase results.
Check out these templates here on our templates page — and these are just the start. In the near future, we’ll be releasing new templates and updating existing ones with relevant custom fields and automation rules to ensure everyone has the opportunity to use Custom Item Types to their full potential.
Foundations for transformation
With modern work becoming increasingly complex and digital, each unique team requires the freedom to work their way in order to do their best work. Wrike’s Custom Item Types takes the complexity out of the process of digital transformation and workflow adoption by enabling each and every team to build the work environment of their dreams and speak the language of their teams.
Get started on your workplace transformation today and tackle the complexities of modern work by starting a free trial of Wrike with Custom Item Types.
