Space Best Practices
Looking for best practices on how everyone organizes their spaces. I've read the help articles but I'm curious what everyone does in real-world practice.
- Do you have a space for each team/department?
- Do you share custom items, custom fields, workflows, automations and request forms across your spaces?
- How do you manage access to the spaces?
- If you have multiple spaces, what is your criteria for deciding a team or department needs its own space?
Some info about my situation: I work on a global internal communications with three teams supporting three global regions, each with their own dedicated space - the Americas, Europe and APAC-MENA. Typically the teams receive communication requests limited to their geographic region, but occasionally we receive requests that need to be communicated globally to all employees. So I'm not sure how to handle requests that span all geographic regions. What space do we use for those types of requests?
I'd love to hear all best practices, but I'm specifically interested in those that support global teams. Thanks in advance for sharing!
Hi Charlie Vincent!
I also work for a global entity in IT&S support, servicing AU, US and ITA. We also receive requests that can be either limited to their region or required for global comms. The way my team uses Wrike may provide some use-case scenarios to guide your thinking.
Do you have a space for each team/department? If you have multiple spaces, what is your criteria for deciding a team or department needs its own space?
Yes, our spaces align directly with departments, or distinct teams within departments. Our criteria for deciding if a team or department needs it's own space is basd on the types of projects/tasks we are expecting to work on in that space. This is driven by Request Forms, and the type of requests we are receiving into a space.
For example, we split the Business Analysis [BA] team into a BA and Data Analysis [DA] space. This is because the BA team manage requests relating to products such as ERP, order entry, sales budgeting software, etc. whereas DA manage technical issues with reporting platforms such as PBI and Jet Analytics.
Whereas, we only have one space for IDC because the types of enquiries coming into the space always fall within the same parameters.
Do you share custom items, custom fields, workflows, automations and request forms across your spaces?
Yes, but only within departments. For example, we ony have a "Product Management" space for the PM Team, so the features you have mentioned are unique to this space. However, the BA and DA spaces are managed by the same team, so the features you have mentioned are built across both spaces, so we can report on them via Analyze and Dashboards in Wrike as a single dataset. The exception is request forms, which we always customise per space.
How do you manage access to the spaces?
[User Type = Admin] is provided access to the space/s that pertain to their team, the space/s in which they are expected to contribute, and occasionally other spaces for education and training purposes.
[User Type = Regular User] is provided access to the space/s that pertain to their team, the space/s in which they are expected to contribute.
[User Type = Collaborator] is provided access to the space/s in which they are expected to contribute.
Hopefully this provides some valuable insight and let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you so much for the thoughtful and detailed response, Jess Cuddy!
It's so helpful to hear best practices from other teams to see how my team can more efficiently use Wrike. For request forms, do you have a request form for each space, or do you share them across some spaces?
Also, how do you use Wrike for global requests? For example, if someone had a BA request for AU, I assume they would use the BA request form. But if someone had a BA request for AU and US, would they use the same one?
Hi Charlie Vincent no probs, happy to help! More answers below:
Do you have a request form for each space, or do you share them across some spaces?
Because the nature of a Request Form is that it has to be saved to a single location, we use Request Forms per space. Our Request Forms are built for things like Project UAT, Data/Reporting Issues, New Design Requirements, etc. so there is always a clear distinction as to which space they need to be attached to. We may have 4-5 Request Forms linked to a space depending on the type of inquiries that team is receiving/working on at a given time.
However, we save them to the "entire account" so that we can pull account-wide custom fields into the form if required.
How do you use Wrike for global requests?
All global users use the same request forms. We use account-wide, multi-select Custom Fields: "Region" and "Company" to keep track of where the inquiry is coming from / who it impacts.
We have multiple companies in multiple locations (e.g. RA is in AU, US and ITA, Texstyle is AU and US only, etc).
Not every request we receive will impact all companies/regions, but often when something is flagged for one company/region, global alignment is required so we will use this to keep track of who is impacted.
This also allows us to report on metrics like time spent, task volume and overdue tasks per Region and/or Company on Analyze dashboards and New Charts/New Dashboards in Wrike.
Let me know if you have any further questions!