[From Wrike] How We Use Wrike to Create eLearning and Manage Asset Development
You may be familiar with Wrike Discover - Wrike’s award-winning e-learning platform that provides interactive training for Wrike’s clients. We develop learning plans, courses, certification programs, and much more. In this post, I wanted to share insights into how our team uses Wrike to deliver great learning content. More specifically, I will talk about how we create courses and hopefully, you can grab some tips from here when working on your repeatable projects.
Currently, Wrike Discover has an extensive catalog of courses and our course development process is very streamlined. It was not always like this. When our team started working on creating courses, we very quickly realized that it is a repetitive process. Our courses go through the same phases and each phase requires specific steps to be completed so we can move on to the next one. So, creating a blueprint was only natural. For us, each course is a project that starts with activating a blueprint.
Here’s what we do:
Our courses go through several phases that we call Design, Develop and Implement. In our “Discover Course” blueprint, we created high-level tasks that represent each of those phases.
Each phase or parent task also contains subtasks that show exactly what needs to be done within that phase. This means the blueprint contains all the information we need to keep track of when developing a course.
For us it makes sense to keep certain tasks unassigned, however, you can assign team members to your blueprint tasks if you know that they will always be the ones working on those tasks.
A blueprint is also where you set task durations and dependencies when necessary so that you don’t have to do it over and over again for your repeatable projects. Once you schedule your project, all the durations and dependencies set in your blueprint will roll up to the new due date.
Once we launch a blueprint and start an actual project dedicated to course development, we can easily track all the work using different Wrike views depending on what we need at any given moment.
I open my new project from the “In Development” subfolder of our “Courses” folder.
From this point on, I prefer to work from the Gantt Chart. I put my project manager hat on, and assign all the necessary tasks to our multimedia designers from the Table portion of the chart, and edit durations and dependencies using the Gantt chart’s timeline.
So the process has been started and the project is in progress.
Another feature that we rely on heavily is Approvals. For example, once the assigned multimedia designer finishes version 1 of the course, it is time for the managing stakeholders to review and approve the delivery. Here, it is time to use the Approval functionality in Wrike. The multimedia designer starts an approval process and assigns the task to the Instructional Designer (who is generally the project owner) for approval. I receive the notification in my Inbox and I review the course, provide feedback, and potential edit suggestions. Based on the task, additional approvals might be required before we go live with the course. In Wrike, you can add more than one approval to a task or phase.
This is obviously a very quick overview of the process and it does have more complexity and detail to it. I would be happy for us to continue the conversation so feel free to comment with either your questions to me or by showing how you deal with repeatable projects in your work.
Want to try out these functionalities? Check out these Discover courses:
Our team uses a blueprint request form to process sales orders and turn them into projects. We start by entering a request for a 'Project Request Form' then based on the information entered in that form, it determines the project that is created. We have our tasks pre-assigned to the person or group who will be completing each task.
Nice insights how Wrike as company works. Very similar as we use it for other kind of projects. Blueprint, automated prject, approvals.
This also is very similar to us - creating blueprints is key for us - because we can easily tie that into request forms - which give us the right size project every time! Then the PMs don't need to spend time creating things from scratch - AND we know the teams are getting what they need to execute the work!
We have a request form that utilizes the blueprints and creates the projects! Very similar!
We have a request form that will create tasks for training new users to our account. We also use Blueprints to create new projects.
Thanks so much for sharing, folks 🤗
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
Our team uses blueprint for projects, bug / product issues. And these blueprints are used in request forms to create new projects, or any kind inquiries (bug reports, request for drawings, engineering changes, etc.). This saves us a lot of time rather than creating repetitive (common) tasks.
Thank you for this simple but helpful insight into your work! I wonder if it would be better to set up a request form, to collect all necessary information for a new course and prefill the data of the tasks created from the blueprint.
I think the Blueprint is a really cool tool, but I need to get in the practice of using it!
Thanks everyone, and special thanks to Florian Kislich for the advice to use a request form 🙌
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
We use blueprints and request forms to create about 98% of our projects and tasks. It is extremely helpful for creating familiar projects and establishing processes within our teams. We are revising our blueprints for the larger New Product projects for 2024.
I think our Wrike-evolution since 2019 is interesting. Initially, we broke each project phase down to such a granular level, that our designers got lost in a heap of tasks. If tasks don't appear in the way our users expect to see them, it takes them out of the creative process and puts them into admin mode.
For quick turnaround tasks like marketing assets, we use checklists within tasks to capture the important minutiae (we have quite a few new team members and use freelancers often so need more direction) without losing momentum. We often break the tasks down by "hand-off" to another department rather than by type of work.
For longer-term projects like new products, we are currently creating a master blueprint with all phases for each type of product we create. Then at product launch, we can cut phases that don't apply instead of creating several blueprints covering each type of product.
Hopefully this time next year I can let you all know how it went. :)
Hi Kelly R, thank you for sharing your experience with Wrike and how you use it in different cases! Looking forward to hear more about your revised Blueprints next year👀