Wrike Project Management: Duties, Accountability, and Corporate Harmony
It’s easy to forget that projects, by their very nature, are fleeting things.1 They’re meant to have a start, some form of progression, and an end. We tend to forget that last part, far too often.
The truth is that some of the most impactful, world-shaking projects in recent history have been accomplished in under a year. For example, one of 2021’s most important projects was the mRNA sequencing of COVID-19 2. That undertaking and the subsequent vaccine development took around 9 months, shattering the mumps vaccine record by over three years.
Projects at that scale, and with that level of critical importance, are short by necessity. Projects that we undertake ourselves, or on behalf of our companies, should be as short as possible to minimize expense and focus talent pools in the places where they can have the highest long term impact.
The best way to forecast the path that a project takes and to achieve a desired end, on time and on budget, is by utilizing sane project management. The Wrike project management platform is a powerful tool that will allow you to accomplish your goals, from initial strategic planning all the way to final corporate implementation3.
Project Management Duties That Wrike Can Help With
A project manager walks the line between leadership and project planning in order to manage risk, allocate the project budget, and define what success means at any given stage of development4. Certain aspects of these project management duties, such as team leadership and gaining stakeholder trust, fall outside the scope of what a software suite can help you with.
But the good news is, there are plenty of project management duties that Wrike can help you to organize and implement!
The first thing that the Wrike project management platform helps you to do is to define your company’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)5. Without fleshed out OKRs, a project is doomed in the final analysis, since nobody took the time to define what ‘success’ for the project meant, or how it was supposed to help the company achieve its strategic goals. This is how you end up with endless feature creep and shifting goalposts. Stick to the OKRs!
The next project management duty that Wrike can help with is streamlining new requests, stakeholder input, and goal clarifications. Request and input forms can be designed in a PMO-focused manner6, so that they’re easy to prioritize. These forms will also help you assign enough project time and budget to properly address the issues that they detail.
One of Wrike’s strengths lies in the creation of task automation. Think of it as the IFTTT of project management. When certain events occur or conditions are met, tasks can automatically be launched or processes approved. It’s an incredible time saver in the efficient PM’s arsenal.
Finally, the Wrike project management suite can help you to keep a firm grip on your resource management tasks. It can be difficult to visualize who is doing what, and how quickly tasks are actually being accomplished, particularly for projects with large scopes. Unfortunately, one of the most important project management duties is reporting the project’s current status to stakeholders. Wrike’s analytics and editable dashboards are life savers when it comes to seeing the big picture and progress over time.
That covers some of the more troublesome project management duties. Now let’s take a moment to address corporate harmony; particularly harmony between project managers and Agile programmers!
Wrike to Jira Integration
If you’re working with Agile software teams that already use Atlassian’s Jira platform to do task and project management, you might have a hard time prying them away from their current platform. That’s because Jira has a ton of programmer-specific customizations that would take a lot of time and effort to duplicate on Wrike7.
As it turns out, there might be a better solution available (at least when compared to the pain that you cause by dragging a team of programmers away from their beloved Jira). The built in Wrike to Jira Integration functionality will allow everyone to use the project management tools that they need without causing any ugly conflicts.
It really is just a matter of following a set of step by step instructions, creating a sync account to perform all of the automation, and then synching up the administrative accounts on both platforms. The phrase ‘it just works’ gets thrown around ironically quite a bit. But in this case, it really does just work.
If for some reason you prefer to manage your Wrike to Jira integration from the other platform, the Jira Marketplace offers a Wrike + Jira two way sync add-on. However, the last update for it was in mid 2020, and there have been no reviews for it between then and early 2023 8, so caveat emptor.
There’s your dose of corporate harmony for the day. Let’s wrap up by talking about how Wrike project management helps with accountability.
Wrike Coordinates Cross Functional Teams
With more and more people working remotely, project management is no longer as ‘hands on’ as it once might have been. But project managers are still responsible for making sure that people are working on their assigned tasks, no matter where they are physically. What’s the best way to record day to day progression for accountability purposes, and in turn stand accountable for the progress and habits of the project team as a whole?
Wrike can be used as both a progress tracker and a time tracker for remote and cross functional teams9. It helps to see Wrike as not only a project management tool, but as a collaboration tool10. Time spent individually on each task is tracked, as well as total time across all team members. If someone hits a roadblock, or otherwise has a sudden drop in productivity, alerts can be set up so that the PM can check in with the team member and make sure that everything is alright.
Bad metrics don’t always mean there’s an accountability issue. Sometimes it’s just a matter of not using the tool properly. Other times, the team member’s contributions impact multiple projects simultaneously and only a fraction of their work is reflected as progress in one particular project.
Ultimately, Wrike can provide the appropriate project metrics and a complete breakdown of individual and team efforts. These reporting features will help you to remain accountable to team leaders, stakeholders, and yourself.
Final Thoughts
Wrike project management is an incredibly useful tool, whether you’re a novice PM or an old hand. It’s likely that for your first project using Wrike, you’ll start by only implementing the core features that you need. But Wrike’s incredible depth will allow you to come back later to tweak, adapt, and customize things until the software becomes an extension of your own personal project management theory. That’s when you’ll start to see the suite’s full potential in action.
Notes
- https://www.pmi.org/about/learn-about-pmi/what-is-project-management ↩
- https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2021 ↩
- https://www.wrike.com/project-management-office/ ↩
- https://www.apm.org.uk/jobs-and-careers/career-path/what-does-a-project-manager-do/ ↩
- https://asana.com/resources/okr-meaning ↩
- https://www.wrike.com/project-management-office/project-portfolio-management-for-pmo/ ↩
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/jira-vs-wrike/ ↩
- https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217297/wrike-jira-two-way-sync?tab=reviews&hosting=cloud ↩
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47nw3o_EmjQ&list=PLCHpClIacsAm8WNe8szeB9eXZYYwaonsl&index=1 ↩
- https://geekflare.com/wrike-work-management/ ↩
