Wrike Admin Tips for General Cleanup & Optimization

User Review

• Annually for inactive users (we have SSO, so we ensure a secure account)

Archive of reports and projects

• Monthly, move Dashboards, Reports, and Projects to an Archive to reduce clutter for everyone

I have a Dashboard that tracks overdue tasks in all spaces and keep an eye on tasks that might be forgotten or missed. It's still quite a bit of work to get folks to go in and actually clear things out (I don't want to delete or complete tasks or projects that are open for a reason so I ask the owners to do this) but it's helped to refer to this Dashboard once a week.

Some great useful answers here!  Our main priority is auditing our users.  We have 380 users across various teams so we need to ensure we manage our licence numbers.  Every 3 months I touch base with team leaders to check all users are still valid. 

I audit our request forms at the end of the year to see which ones are still being used.  If they are used less than 10 times over the year I look into it further.

Archiving projects - some teams have automations to archive projects.

I need to be better at  auditing custom fields.  We don't have many spaces so this isn't an issue for us.

• What strategies do you use to regularly audit and clean up your Wrike account? /// On a monthly basis, I am keeping an eye on my to-do tasks, to clean the pending, not scheduled, left behind tasks
• What’s one Wrike tip or feature you recently discovered that helped you improve account organization? /// A lab feature to be honest, the one that lets one add a working day as national holiday w/t affecting all tasks (moving em a day after of their original duration)

Avoid unassigned tasks: Set up a dashboard for each department leader that shows unassigned tasks and make shure nothing gets lost.

I also recommend avoiding multiple assignees, as it is not clear who will update the task. (I'd love to be able to filter those tasks as well!)

This is a struggle for us, honestly. One of my favorite tips is that I like to use Chart View for a high level look to see what might be active within projects/folders. This is especially helpful as others will often shift a project into the closed folder, but forget to go back and make sure all the tasks were actually competed.

One of our goal items this year, is to work more with our team/department spaces to establish admins within their working group to be responsible for archiving and keeping things cleaned.

Florian Gascho, we also move regular users to collaborators prior to deactivating them. We don't like deleting them for at least a few months in case we need to run reports or reassign their tasks.

I have a bunch of cleanup tips that I hope others will find helpful! 🤓

• The Recycle Bin gets emptied quarterly by my team (IT) via a calendar reminder.
• We have a quarterly audit of our company documentation and one person per department is responsible for making sure all knowledge articles are up-to-date. I would consider myself the lead account admin, so this is my trigger to peek at the account-wide features to see if anything is no longer being utilized, mostly custom fields and workflows for us.
• We have a culture of continuous improvement, so that paired with a handful of wonderful Wrike Champions, team members are always bringing ideas to me! "Can we get rid of this now?", "Hey, there's a new feature that could improve/make redundant x, y, z.", "We should update this form." In general, this leads to better Space structures and dashboards in particular.
• I utilize automations for projects. When a new project is created it tags it to our company Projects space, moves it to a Backlogged Projects folder and tags me so 1) I'm aware and 2) I can make sure it gets cross-tagged to the right places. When it changes to an active status it moves to the Active Projects folder. When it's marked as Done it moves it to the Completed Projects folder and tags me so I double check that every task and subtask has been marked as done so we don't have "orphan" tasks floating around in the ether. 
• Full users are kept up-to-date by our onboarding and offboarding process. External collaborators are removed in one of the last steps of our project checklist. I double check the list on an annual basis just in case.
• Since we can't set certain custom fields as required, I have a process where at the end of every month I review everything Marketing completed, make sure everything is tagged appropriately so the right data points are collected, tag them all to a folder the work was completed in, then remove everything from the team's Board view. This keeps it tidy and loads the board faster!
• I have an bi-annual calendar reminder to create any folders needed for the rest of the year or next year. In December when it's slower, I start reviewing and cleaning up the current annual folders to make sure nothing fell through the cracks or move it to next year. I archive them in January.
• Completed tasks and projects are purged by my team after 3 years unless they're deemed important enough that we might need to reference them in the future.

The biggest challenge I'm facing is cleaning up a very old company folder structure from 2016, before Spaces existed and before I joined the company. So I have a task on my personal board with a to do list and a reoccurring calendar reminder with a link to the task for easy access. Every week I timebox 1 hour to chip away at cleaning up old open tasks and projects, deleting folders that aren't needed anymore, and moving floating tasks and folders into the appropriate Spaces.

Nikos Taskos  

• What’s one Wrike tip or feature you recently discovered that helped you improve account organization? /// A lab feature to be honest, the one that lets one add a working day as national holiday w/t affecting all tasks (moving em a day after of their original duration)

This is a thing?! I had no idea! This would definitely help our set up. Running off to find it now...

This is a great question! My answer is very similar to those who answered before: i.e. I do all of it manually on a quarterly schedule driven by reccuring tasks. What would be really excellent is if AI could identify some of these unused accounts, forms, fields, spaces, workflows, etc. for us.

I have scheduled reports that every week notify me to:
- check if there are activities marked as "cancelled" with timelogs inserted and I mark them as "Completed".

Every month:
- I check the consistency of holidays and unavailability of people

Every day:
- I check if there are tasks with reports distant more than 1 week from the planned
- I check the consistency between time spent and remaining budget of all orders

As needed:
- when a order (project) is concluded it is automatically moved to a "Concluded projects" space and people are notified for checks

We assign each project manager a weekly task to go into their users' dashboards which they handle and clean up any overdue/pending tasks. They will either follow up with the requestor or our team to see what the update is. 

I enjoy setting up recurring tasks that happen weekly, monthly, and/or yearly. Helps me to not forget anything and stay on time for projects.

This is something our organization is not good at...YET

We have recently revived our "Space Owners" or "Governance" team meetings and will begin to tackle these clean-up tasks. I love reading these ideas on where to get started though!

My admin job is a side job of a side job thus, only doing what is urgently required as ther eis no time for more

We're newer to Wrike and have been tailoring the automations and our reporting as we move in. I think setting up "Spring Cleaning" sessions is important, as we have a lot of leftover request forms, custom fields, automations, etc that don't work for us anymore. 

Thanks for great comments, I would also see how we can leverage this wealth of knowledge to incorporate in some type of guide that can be made available for Admins and not dig through community comments :) 

Anna Grigoryan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Anna Grigoryan Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Anna Grigoryan  yes please! 

I have a variety of dashboards set up to review tasks and projects and keep things up to date. I use an Active Projects folder structure that is broken down by sub-teams and regions. New projects are tagged here, as well as the folder they will be archived to. When Projects complete, automation removes from Active Projects and it's then in it's archive. Annual resets on the Archive set it up for the next year's new work. 

I'm not an account admin, but I see the need for someone closer to the daily work in Wrike needs to be one. Currently our request forms, users and CITs are a bit of a mess that someone (me!) should have the rights to clean up!

Hi everyone, thanks for sharing! I've come across some really valuable tips here 🙂  

Has anyone ever needed to roll back Wrike? I've always been concerned about not having control over our own backups and the ability to restore if needed. We carefully manage user access and permissions to reduce risks, but you never know!

• What strategies do you use to regularly audit and clean up your Wrike account?

Monitor the outstanding jobs and ones that are coming up.  Being reminded by emails has been handy but also just going in and see it myself has helped.  Simple and not complex but does the job.  

• How often do you review and archive unused spaces, request forms, or custom fields? What’s your process?

I have not worked in this space yet.  It has not been required in my role.  

• What challenges have you faced when trying to remove or consolidate unused features in Wrike? How did you overcome them?

Haven't come into this issue yet.  A very basic user of the product.  I may jump into more complex functionality but it is not required with the work I am doing.  Quite happy with the current functionality processes implemented. 

• Do you have a Wrike “spring cleaning” schedule? How do you ensure ongoing maintenance rather than one-time cleanups?

Nope - Just generally going through the tasks on the regular.  Normally if I miss a task someone will be asking where something is so I try not to get to that stage.  

• What’s one Wrike tip or feature you recently discovered that helped you improve account organization?

Haven't found any recently and mine are quite boring compared to what others probably have.  Mine would be just going to the Inbox or My to-do list to get a listing of tasks that outstanding, coming up to be finished or commented on by other people.  Standard functionality of the product.  

Maybe I should take advantage of a session with Wrike to use things I don't know about.  You don't know what you don't know and maybe there are things I could be doing better.  Must find the time to look into this but also - if it isn't broken don't fix it.  It does not need to be complicated if it can be done simply.  Don't use technology for technology's sake.  

I have created a post for our next topic around Custom Fields and CITs , let's get specific and share your wisdom on how you handle maintenance of Custom Fields and CITs 

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/31102627029143--Custom-Fields-Custom-Item-Types-CITs-How-Do-You-Keep-It-All-Clean

Anna Grigoryan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Anna Grigoryan Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I have built automations to move projects, subprojects and tasks into a respective archive folder for the year. The archive is in a different space titled 'Completed Work' which keeps things tidy in our 'Active Work' space. Once all tasks are marked as complete or cancelled, the project status changes and that triggers a move into the 'Completed Work' space and year folder. Every once in awhile a project gets re-opened and in that instance, I've found the best thing is for me to manually move it back to the appropriate place in the 'Active Work' space. It doesn't happen often, so that's good. 

My cleaning schedule is once a month - and I have a task in Wrike (and time blocked on my calendar) to do this. We currently only have three spaces t so it's mostly just cleaning up any projects or tasks that were not moved to completed status. 

I recently discovered the bulk select feature and I love it!!!

One question I have.... is anyone using project codes in Wrike? Unfortunately, I don't know that Wrike has the capability to customize project codes (i.e. for a specific department, engineering, a code would be ENG00001 and the next project would be ENG00002). Our team has brought this up on occasion and I do think it would help from an efficiency perspective when trying to find projects in Wrike, both active and archived. 

We organize our workload by requesting departments (about 20 or so). We split them between 3 liaisons for requests, but Patricia and I are the Wrike masters who clean up and enforce organization. We tackle the spaces together monthly to ensure things are tidy. We have also started quarterly training for regular users and collaborators to teach proper task handling.