Written by Honcho | May 12, 2015 3:52:29 PM
If you’ve landed on this blog post, then chances are you’re looking for some awesome insights into improving your company’s ability to track time. Below is an insight into our journey with Wrike so far, while highlighting some insights into our favourite features we use in Wrike.
Past
Our Director’s Brief As many projects start out at iThinkMedia, our managing director,
Chris Ailey, tasked us with looking into how to track agency time more efficiently. The aim was to find a way of tracking billable and non-billable time to help us achieve the following goals:
- Improve agency time efficiency
- Increase visibility of where time is spent
- Improve communication between departments & team members
- Track documents per task and meeting notes
Research & Findings We spent about a month researching various task management software solutions ranging from SEO-specific task management tools to agency tools including Podio, Asana, Smartsheet & Teamwork. A lot of these solutions just didn’t fit our requirements or were still in development. After signing up to lots of demos and reviewing them in great detail, my attention was drawn to
Wrike. It was decision time!
Standout Wrike features:
- Flexible to tailor to your needs e.g. folder structure setup
- Multiple views available e.g. Gantt chart, task and timesheet views
- Easy to setup and start tracking time
- Wrike provides online support, training and conference calls
- Flexible invoice dates
- Easy to share documents & communicate with your team
Setting up and implementing Wrike into iThinkMedia has been positive so far with some challenges along the way. We have our own account manager to support with questions and training which has been amazing so far, plus there are plenty of online resources to refresh your memory.
Present
At the moment we’ve managed to improve our time tracking visibility for client billable time and some non-billable time. We organise our time better each month, allowing us to identify and free up around 10-20% of our weekly working hours. This has enabled to us to focus more on our own agency marketing activities and in-house training.
Top features we use in Wrike I wanted to share some cool features that we use on a weekly basis and will hopefully shed some light on how useful Wrike can be.
Dashboards – Allow you to see multiple views on one screen which is great if you have multiple clients or are working with various teams on a project.
Custom Fields – Allow you to track customised data tailored to your needs. This helps us track client billable time per task by entering in ‘estimated’ & ‘actual’ hours.
Timeline (Gantt Chart) – This is a great view that allows us to plan out our long term projects and access individual task details without leaving the actual timeline view itself.
Comments per task – This feature is really helps to encourage communication between colleagues on each task and also reduces the amount of emails between everyone. This feature also enables our team to share their files between each other while working on a particular task.
Wrike has an awesome
help section that provides information on how to use all features including those detailed above.
Future
Developing Wrike further within our team is the key focus and there are a few areas that we‘re working on, such as improving the folder structure for logging time and further internal training for staff members. We’re now looking to roll Wrike out to other teams within our business to become more time efficient and to give our director and managers even more visibility on where agency time is being spent.
Considerations Even though we’ve made progress with using Wrike, I wanted to set some expectations about implementing time management software or methods into your own business. Here are a few key points that we recommend you consider:
- Agree a standard way of working. It doesn’t always matter what the solution may be e.g. software or spreadsheet, as a manager or director it’s imperative to educate your teams on a standard way of working and support them until it is ingrained within their daily working lives.
- Quality of training will also help colleagues that are less averse to change.
- Scalability – Your company may be using Excel spreadsheets to track time which is fine to some extent. However, considering how manageable this will be if your company grows in a year or two. Software such as Wrike can help with the scalability of company growth.
If you already use other tools that you’re happy with why not share with us.