Wrike

Wrike has completely changed how to coordinate work. We're not a huge organization (around 40 people), but we're spread out geographically, and Wrike gives us a shared single source of truth for what's being done, who owns it, and what needs to be done next. The Biggest win is how well it supports asynchronous work. People can make progress on a project or task, leave context, tag the right teammates, and keep our work moving along without constant check-in meetings or endless emails. The result is clearer handoffs, fewer dropped balls, and a level of communication and coordination we honestly did not think we would ever achieve.

wrike is relatively easy to use and set up. it helps manage all aspects of project management and has customizable dashboards that are very helpful.

1) The low-tech basics are really good, using it with email is seamless as each task or project has a unique email address, and the ability to copy and paste entire worksheets back and forth from Excel has meant we've been able to coax even the most die-hard Excel planners to give it a go. There are a lot of easy to learn, small but effective time saving features. 2) It's very responsive and reliable, even when you're making changes to thousands of tasks at once it will handle it with barely any delay. 3) Wrike Integrate is a brilliant automation feature-set, although some-what technical to learn, you can essentially automate anything. You will want people dedicated to learning and using it though. 4) The support and account management teams are an absolute breath of fresh air, always helpful, really want to understand the business and you just feel that if you need something and they can do it they will. 5) The blueprint capability combined with their request forms lets our teams engage multiple teams at once on complex pieces of work which can save a huge amount of time.

1. Internet dependent. If you're offline, you're stuck. There's no real offline mode or way to download a cached set of projects/tasks to work on them and sync changes back when online again. 2. Learning curve is steep. Onboarding has greatly improved since we first stared, but Wrike is anything but instant for brand-new users. People need dedicated time to learn how your organization uses the tool. It helps to have a dedicated individual within your organization to support training, onboarding, and adoption. 3. Task/project sprawl. Wrike is powerful, which also means it can grow messy and fast. Without solid governance, you will end up with uncontrolled sprawl. Having a Wrike Owner or Wrike Controller makes a huge difference in keeping things organized. Wrike could assist with such a role by having better controller tools that allow for bulk management on a system-wide scale.

the user interface is not appealing at all. It's very clunky, but I would say it's a step up from an Excel spreadsheet as far as looks go.

1) Whilst the customisability is great for us, I can absolutely see how it wouldn't be for those who just want something out-of-the-box and we do sometimes find we would want to just use a pre-built integration rather than to build one through Wrike Integrate or the API. 2) Whilst there's been a lot of recent improvements in account administration features there can still be gaps in tools to help admins manage the system, and without careful planning things like access management, views or folder structures can quickly become a mess. 3) Wrike Dashboards are really good at helping the operational teams deliver against the plan but we often find Reports and Wrike Analyse feature-poor and a bit clunky to use. 4) Wrike defaults to an 8-hour day and tends to track things hour-by-hour, this means it can be complex to use it for scenarios where planning multiple sequential events per hour, or when planning scenarios where you may be covering two operational shifts over a 16 hour day, for example.