[From Wrike] Agile Project Management for Web Development in Wrike

Hi Community! 

I’m Alla. I work in the Marketing Operations department as a Website project manager. My day-to-day work is focused on gathering requests from stakeholders and bringing them to the development team. In this way, I help stakeholders across Wrike with the technical implementation of their ideas. In this post, I would like to discuss how our team uses Wrike to manage website development projects.

My job is divided into two parts: tasks I can manage by myself, and those for which I need the development team. 

I use Wrike to manage both types of task.

Team Space

Our development team works according to Scrum and includes developers, a designer, a QA engineer, and me as a Product Owner.

We organized a space for the team with useful links, our current sprint project, and folders for the product backlog, retrospective notes, sprint archives, etc. This way we have a single source of truth and everyone in the team has access to the information they need to do their work.

Backlog

For our backlog, we use a table view with custom fields. We constantly improve our processes and can easily adjust the fields we use according to our needs. For example, now we have the following fields: Prioritization (we currently try the MoSCoW approach) and Story Points estimations (we use Fibonacci numbers).

Sprints

We work in 2-weeks sprints and create a project for each sprint.

During the Sprint planning, we go through the backlog and change the locations of tasks that we want to take. 

In the description of the project, we set up dates and describe the Sprint goals. So it’s easy for any team member to find and check them during daily meetings.

Scrum daily meetings are also very easy and visible with Wrike. We open the Sprint project and filter the tasks by assignee when one or another teammate speaks. This means we can see the task statuses and dependencies in real time and do not forget anything important.

After each sprint, I archive the tasks in a unique folder named in the form of “Sprint N”. I do it in several clicks: go to the list view, filter completed tasks, and move them in bulk to the folder “Sprint N”. Then I add all other tasks to the folder.  

This way we can track when any task flows from sprint to sprint: the folder tag will appear in the task “location” field.

Custom Item Types for Tasks

Recently we started to use custom item types: in our space, we have a special task type for Story, Dev tasks, and QA tasks. 

It makes the most important custom fields more visible for teammates and hides all those that are not relevant. Due to cross-tagging in different spaces, a task can have dozens of custom fields that are not used.  

Classical task custom fields vs custom item type:

Dashboard for Personal Tasks

As a part of Marketing Operations, I have personal tasks that are only relevant to me and don’t include the development team. For tracking them I created a special dashboard.

I filtered tasks that are assigned to me and are stored in the folder “Mark.Ops Current Week”. Then I created widgets for each step in Marketing Operations Workflow.

I love that you can easily customize everything in Wrike. Even if your work is very specific or you frequently update team processes, you can make adjustments in Wrike in just a few clicks. If you have any thoughts or questions please share them in the comments below.