Item: Wrike
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Wrike

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am a graphic designer in our company's in-house agency. Projects are created by request forms where our project manager sorts and distributes tasks amongst our designers / and other production functions within our company.

For a given task 2e have a number of functions that need to be performed, which can be between 2 to 15 people (subtasks).

For us, Wrike helps us store, sort and enable complex work-flows for a number of different types of tasks, from setting up new product info that is placed in our PIM database (to be sold on our web shop), and any marketing projects needed of these products to end consumers. Web, ads and printed materials. Marketing of said products.

Wrike helps us structure these processes. My purpose is one of designer creating digital and printed marketing material.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Stores briefs for projects
Structures and holds info off ALL necessary roles and information for any given project.
Provides fairly good proof-reading function for others to comment on, in the one place.
Good function of commenting within a task, communicating to others in the project.
Good to be able to easily see the other roles of the project, making it easy to comment on subtasks to only the necessary people involved.

Cons

We have actually started to use Teams Planner, when a key coordinator fell sick. We didn't know how to get into where job requests were stored, and thus no-one know if people in the organisation where waiting on work, that we couldn't even see. Upper management saw this as a big minus, and created another work-flow with Teams Planner to give us a broad overview of work on-the-go. We don't know if Wrike can give us this simple overview. Can it?
If so, we need instruction on this, in order to win over management to Wrike, which I think they may want to get away from eventually.
It would help if there was a simple-user profile for those who only need to view a task (to proof-read and comment) once in a while. It is too expensive for these people to have a licence, for the very few times they may need access: as seldom once every two months.
This is a reason our company is looking to go over to Teams Planner (or reducing Wrike considerably), where everyone is already on Teams.
Setting own reminders within a task. This would be a great aid for me.

Return on Investment

The main impact is that we can keep track of a multitude of projects that are in different stages, and keep them all moving forward.
We increase our completion rate... on time. Hence not wasting time on projects that miss deadlines, and as a result have to be scrapped because of this.
A wide amount of people in the organisation can request what they need, and get it in a timely manner. Rather than last minute random requests from people who aren't sure about how to go about getting help from us. I.e. even the quiet people get our help, not just the louder voices.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCollab and Microsoft Teams

ActiveCollab - the version from around 2013 was great. My current employer tested a newer version of ActiveCollab but it didn't give us the functions the old AC had. In the end we opted for Wrike.

Teams Planner (Microsoft) - we started to use this 6 months ago to get an overview of our 'closest' tickets/tasks. Mainly because a key person suddenly left the team and we weren't able to get certain overviews or into the task-request area (due to our lack of knowledge of Wrike probably), so management got us using Teams Planner so the whole organisation had access to our projects as we already had licences for everyone for Teams. The way we use teams Planner, doesn't give us nearly the amount of flexibility as Wrike does, in my opinion.

Key Insights

Do you think Wrike delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Wrike's feature set?

Yes

Did Wrike live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Wrike go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Wrike again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator CC, Microsoft Teams

Likelihood to Recommend

As a graphic designer working on between 10-20 projects at a time, Wrike gives great structure and flexibility for the execution and collaboration of projects.

Briefing of projects can be as short or complex as needed and allows for dependencies of subtasks to be added; when one stage of a project is completed, the next in line is automatically notified that his/her part is to be started. This falls a bit short though, as to my knowledge, there is no automatic function for these subtasks to be started early if the stage of the project allows for it: the whole subtask has to be set as completed for the notification to be activated to the next person. Otherwise, the project owner notifies manually instead.

There is a relatively long starting stretch before you get the hang of things. The UX is a bit technical-looking, making it hard to get started organically using intuition or feel, but I found that once you get your bearings, it provides a platform for your communication with others to be as complete as you need.

As an add-on, you can purchase a plug-in that allows marking up of notes within attachments. This feature is great as many people can check the same document and make notations. Very flexible.

Wrike may seem complex, but it allows for almost total control of projects between multiple people. I can't comment on the actual planning and re-planning of multiple projects over time: changing deadlines and re-assigning people, as it's not part of my daily work.

Simply put, Wrike suits our company's complex structure of projects that stretch between departments and personnel. It's my to-do list that has (almost) all I need in a briefing/project planning tool.

Wrike Feature Ratings

Comments

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Comprehensive, flexible and does it all (almost) ;)