5 Wrike features to help you streamline your design production flow
The Creative Team in Wrike fuels the entire organization and is often overwhelmed with requests, most of them are urgent — need today or even yesterday. Those requests don’t originate just in marketing. Requests originate with many teams as our design team fuels the brand identity for the entire organization. And we use Wrike for our requests!
There are 5 most interesting Wrike features that could help you streamline your design production flow.
Fast and convenient task setting
Where does the work on the design task begin? From the creative brief of course! We centralized and standardized creative briefs using dynamic request forms that reconfigure based on the input. This helps our team gather all the information we need without overwhelming the requester.
Okay, but how does the task come to the right team and the right person. Is someone following this? We automated the creation of new projects or tasks from requests and can route the requests to the right team or assignee. Our team can get started right away with the right people notified and equipped with all of the essential project details.
Checking progress and team capacity in one place
To track the progress of tasks and team capacity, we use Wrike feature Dashboards. We’d been using it for around three years, and it was going well. However, we moved the furniture around a bit, and now each team (graphic, motion, and interaction) has its own version of the Dashboard, and now it can do even more for our teams.
For the manager, it’s essential to see the team’s capacity and allocate tasks to the right people. For the designer, it’s important to focus on the right task today and avoid unnecessary information. That’s why designers have their personal dashboard only with their tasks, and managers have a dashboard with main team overview widgets. We’re so happy that this feature allows us to create customizable widgets.
Do fewer routines and more design
Each step of the design production flow has its own issues, obstacles, and specifics. And all of them can be a reason for a failure in design production. That could happen due to the designer or stakeholder or any other dependency. But it all usually happens because of the human factor. To avoid that, we decided to set some automation scripts to help us (humans) keep on track and reduce tedious work.
We have three groups of automation scripts: guide, reminder, and sorters. Each group is responsible for its part in the production flow. Overall, these scripts help designers avoid manual work (with automation), contact stakeholders (with automation), and give progress updates (automation does that as well).
Unified weekly reporting
At the end of every week, each designer fills in a weekly report to show the progress of the top three most important tasks of the week. It helps us all to see the progress of work, and it increases cross-team collaboration and visibility because everyone sees what other teams are doing.
We don’t compile these reports every time manually. It would be too dull and a waste of time. We use Blueprints for that and create tasks with reporting for the month ahead. Also, we configured another automation script, so designers receive a reminder every Friday in their Wrike inbox with a link to the report and a reminder to fill in their sections.
Make future improvements based on quality analytics
We analyze the team’s state using the pulse check surveys, and, of course, we look at the analytics of completed tasks through the Wrike Analyze feature. We see which departments and which type of design assets are developed most often, where tasks are often not completed on time, how often a task is delayed in a certain status and not completed, etc. This allows us to see the pain points in the processes and what can be improved.
Wrike Analyze is a very powerful and customizable feature. I have worked with that feature for almost one year and am still learning about more opportunities we can harness within the tool. Highly recommend!
Is there a place for creativity?
I believe that well-established and attuned processes lead to a happy and healthy team that in turn, has more time and resources for creativity — for example, the last project with the whole team related to refreshing our branding. As the project had organized documentation, projects, and tasks in Wrike, design managers had clear and transparent tools for checking progress. Therefore, designers did not have to think about processes; they just got to be creative and work on the tasks.
Thanks for reading! See you in the next stories.
