[From Wrike] Getting the Most of Wrike's Work Templates 👩‍💻

Hi everyone! 🤗

Some of you have already started using Work Templates which are currently available in Wrike Labs. For those of you who haven’t tried this new functionality yet, Work Templates are customizable work items in Wrike that can help you set up specific types of work that support your own, your team’s, or your organization’s work scenarios.

Today, we'd like to walk you through the main advantages of this brand new functionality as well as show you how to create a work template step-by-step in case you haven’t tried them yet. 

We also recommend watching this video from 02:00 to see Work Templates in action.

Let’s dive in!

Work Templates vs. Blueprints

First, you may be wondering what distinguishes Work Templates from Blueprints. 

As you may know, Blueprints help you manage your project, folder, and task templates and plan your work while keeping it separated from ongoing work. We consider Work Templates the next generation of the blueprint functionality which allows more customization of your repetitive work.

1. Customization Options

Blueprints help teams get started from work you’ve already templatized. Work Templates can be thought of as the 2.0 version of this capability. These next-generation templates include tailored work items and custom look and logic established via configuring required fields, workflows, and automations. Work Templates make layout, format, and behavior all customizable compared to Blueprints. Continue reading to see examples of these customizations!

📌 Please note: we currently have a beta opening for Work Item Automation that works specifically for Work Templates. Please check out this post for details on how to take part.

2. Availability

While Blueprints can only be created on the account level, Work Templates can also be created on the space level. This means that space admins can create those templates and tailor them to the needs of a particular space and team members who work in that space. 

It’s also possible to set up the work creation menu so that when creating new work in the account or in a particular space, members will be able to see those templates immediately and start creating templatized work.

3. Work Item Suggestions

You can set up your business process so that your users can see at a glance which items they need to create and understand easily what to create within those items. This will help follow the established processes more easily, especially for the new users. Read more about this suggestion menu below. 

📌 Please note: there are currently limitations to Work Templates, for example, there’s currently no support for Work Templates in Request forms. Our Product team understands how important it is to provide this support so that you can make the most out of these templates, and they are already working on providing this functionality 👍

How to Create Work Templates

We would like to show you how to create task-based and project-based work templates for managing your team’s OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). It's a goal-setting methodology that can help teams set measurable targets and have better visibility into the company, department, and/or team’s goals. In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, please check out this post and discussion from our Use Case Marathon and Wrike Discover course dedicated to OKRs.

Let’s take a look at how a team manager who is also the team space’s admin can create a structured OKR process that will ensure that their colleagues don’t get distracted by unclear views and unrelated custom fields, and new team members can immediately see what they need to do when creating new work.

📌Please note: make sure you’ve enabled Work Templates from Wrike Labs to start creating templates.

As you may know, an OKR is an objective that can be reached by completing key results that support this objective. 

Go to the Space where you are the admin and need to create work templates. To access the work templates builder and library, click on the space settings icon.

After that, click on “Work Templates”:

The icons will help you distinguish between work templates based on tasks or projects. 

We can start by creating a task-based template for key results. In this customizable view, you can add the template name and a short description of the template on the left, and set up the template and its contents (description field, workflow, system fields, and custom fields, attachments, subtasks, or sub-items based on work templates).  

It is important to note that you can set up a unique set of system and custom fields specific to your own or your team’s needs.

In this panel, it’s possible to set up a workflow specific to the OKR process, add an assignee or a job role, set dates and location. What’s very useful about Work Templates is that you can also choose to hide any of those fields if needed.

To set up which fields are going to be visible on the template, click on the “Customize” button. You can also add existing account or space-level custom fields here, or create new ones right from this view. 

Now that we’ve created a task-based work template, we can set up a project-based template as well. 

The difference here is that a project-based work template will have an additional view where you can add tasks, subprojects, folders, or items from other work templates, and set up default and custom work views.

We recommend using project-based templates to manage a group of tasks that are part of a larger goal.

You can set up which items will be suggested for the users to create inside the items created from this work template.

In our case, we want to suggest Key Results to be created inside Objectives. There’s a setting that will help you do it easily. Click on “Add task” and then “Menu setup”.

You can also add a sub-item right into this item so that, like in this example, each Objective has a Key Result already created within it.

You’ll be able to set up options here:

The same menu setup will also help when you create actual work from the templates in the space. Let’s see how it’s done.

You can set up the suggestion menu so that whenever a user needs to create new work in the space, they will immediately see the suggested templatized work items in that menu. 

And this is how the newly created project will look like. You’ll notice that the comments stream appears there when we are creating real work. The view can be auto-populated from the template as well as detailed description field and work-specific custom fields. 

Filtering

You can use the “Template used” filter to be able to filter out the items created from work templates. This filtering option is available in List, Board, Table, and Gantt Chart Views as well as in custom views.

It’s also possible to report specifically on items created from the work templates using the same filter in Wrike Reports:

In summary

Work Templates are the next generation of customizable work items in Wrike. They: 

• Will help you set up the types of work that you need in your account and in the most suitable spaces
• Include tailored work items and custom look and logic established via configuring required fields, workflows, and automations
• Make layout, format, and behavior more customizable when compared to Blueprints functionality
• Can be navigated to easily with work item suggestions. These suggestions help users see the established processes, so they will know what needs to be created in a certain space
• Can be created on the space level

We’ve discussed templatized OKRs today, and there’s a great variety of the types of work like user stories, campaigns, requests, and much more that you can create using Work Templates. 

We hope that this guide can help you get started with this brand-new functionality. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below 👇

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover