Sometimes the hardest part about change is knowing where to start. The good news is that help is always available, especially at Wrike.
Many people aren’t aware that Wrike has a stellar team of in-house consultants, whose role it is to help you use the world’s most powerful platform to uplevel teams, boost productivity, and drive real, tangible success. Using an adaptable framework, our professional services team will partner with you to align your business objectives and processes, provide visibility into your success metrics, and remove productivity roadblocks so you can do the best work of your life.
Wrike on Wrike: Optimizing our marketing
Even work management experts need a little help sometimes, and that includes our award-winning marketing teams here at Wrike. As our operations have grown to include 2.4m users, 140 countries, and more than 12 dedicated marketing teams, we needed to take a new look at how we could optimize the way we work. And of course, it being 2023, we were facing the same industry-wide challenges as our colleagues across the world, including:
- A need to deliver more with less
- A growing tech stack that needs to be fully integrated
- Creeping “Dark Matter of Work” that hampers visibility
- A desire to modernize and streamline our workflow with cutting-edge tools
These issues aren’t unique to our department, or even our industry; our PS team has seen them occur in retail conglomerates, sports teams, pharmaceutical companies, and even non-profit groups. Thankfully, they’re all fully fixable, with the right guidance.
We’re lucky that we already have the best work management platform in place — Wrike. But like any powerful piece of software, it offers a wide range of capabilities that need to be unlocked to solve new challenges as an organization scales. To get this in motion, the PS team analyzed our workflows and immediately identified particular places where we could improve our efficiency and productivity. They found that our biggest pain points were:
- A generic reporting style
- Roadblocks and bottlenecks
- Disconnected collaboration
- A complex intake process
They not only analyzed, identified, and ringfenced the most immediate challenges, but they delivered the solutions too, in the form of a detailed roadmap and hands-on help.
Fast, professional solutions
Wrike’s professional services team has a wide range of expertise in every department of modern enterprises, including marketing. They were able to come to us with a fast and effective solution that delivered value right out of the gate. Working together, the PS team and marketing department were able to accelerate the lessons learned during the discovery phase and set up a detailed framework that included multiple tracks to success:
- ‘Leveling up’ our marketing teams
- Analyzing and solving productivity challenges
- Designing a full production workflow process
- Building a supporting change management framework
- Establishing proven governance guardrails
These were exactly what we needed, and indeed what many other teams around the world are looking for right now. “The professional services team were amazing,” recalls Rory Schaff, Director of Corporate Marketing at Wrike. “They were extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic, which helps when you’re going through a significant change. It got my team and I excited about the changes, as well as the clear set of actions and next steps involved.”
Within each success track lay specific solutions, including:
- Robust cross-functional support to build internal and external integrations
- The creation of customized dashboards for targeted reporting
- Design and implementation of specific measures for tracking success metrics
- Increasing visibility into timelines and review cycles
- Establishment of a model for guardrails, governance, and ongoing improvement
- Simplification of intake through a centralized, looping request form
- The introduction of a full production workflow space to manage high-priority work
Maximizing Wrike Lightspeed
Key to implementing this plan of action was fully utilizing Wrike Lightspeed — the fastest path to productivity and the only work management solution built without tradeoffs. By working with the PS team, the Wrike marketing department was able to design a dedicated space, with detailed projects and folders for every part of our operations. Chief among the benefits of this transformative platform is its versatility, which enables teams to work as one, in their own way. That meant configuring the platform to reflect our unique business practices, asset needs, and language style. For example, we were able to build dedicated spaces for each field of operations, including graphic design, content marketing, events, corporate communications, and much more. We adapted projects, folders, and custom item types so they used our acronyms, our hierarchies, and our established inter-team connections.
We streamlined our intake, utilizing customizable request forms to create briefs that capture all the details we need from the get-go. We also crafted effective workflows that harnessed the power of automation to accelerate the stages and flag and fix bottlenecks where they occurred. We deployed advanced tools in Wrike’s arsenal, including cross-tagging, executive dashboards, and time-saving blueprints. Each team was introduced to a dedicated workspace that visualizes the tasks at hand by using a range of views, from tables and lists to Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
In this way, Wrike Lightspeed became a “mothership for marketing,” which centralized every task, project, and strategy in one easy-to-use place. The overhaul had an immediate impact on the efficiency of the marketing department, helping to unite disparate teams, enhance collaboration, and deliver great work on time and on budget.
“From the initial stages of consultation and planning to implementation and support, the professional services team consistently demonstrated a high level of expertise, professionalism, and understanding of our unique business needs,” reported our content team. “Their communication was clear and proactive, ensuring that we were always informed and comfortable with each stage of the process.
Ready when you are
Whatever field or industry you’re in, the professional services team is on hand to help at every stage of your organization’s development.
Getting started: If you’re part of a new team, department, or start-up, the PS team can kick-start your path to productivity, helping to set the right building blocks for success. These might include workspace design, change management, custom training, and data migrations.
Optimizing operations: These days, we all need to do more with less. The Wrike PS team is skilled at unleashing additional value by refining and improving workflows, usually through process optimization, workspace evolution, and integration services.
Preparing to scale: If you’ve got your sights set on success, Wrike PS has the people to help you get there. They can support you in leveraging insights, expertise, and market knowledge to grow, working by your side through custom engagements or a dedicated consulting retainer.
If you’d like to learn more about Wrike professional services, get in touch with our team by filling out a simple form here or reaching out to your account team. Wrike PS is ready to start a conversation about your pressing challenges and our unique solutions. We have the people you need to help you deliver better, more productive, and more efficient work — fast.
