Dreaming of Perfect Project Management Tool - And Wrike Could Be It with the Right Features
The purpose of this post is to share my dreams of a perfect project management tool. I’ve been a community member for 1 ½ years (Black Belt), and a Wrike user for that same amount of time. I’ve downgraded Wrike to the free plan because I can’t justify paying for a tool that does not currently meet my needs. I’m very passionate about the potential for Wrike to make my work management and team collaboration a well-oiled machine. That’s why I hang around to post my ideas and to up vote others’ ideas.
Wrike is a great tool, and with the right fixes, enhancements, and integrations it could really target the market of teams that don’t want the “clunkiness” of other more robust tools. These robust tools, often of which most features go unused, are the go-to right now because Wrike is lacking the basic features needed to get the job done within project management practice standards.
I get a sense that there is more of a concentration on time tracking/billing for tasks than some of the features I will list below. The fact of the matter is that, in my current role, I (and likely a lot of others) don’t care too much about time tracking as most of my projects are in-house, and are not billed to a client.
So here it is…….My Dream List of Wrike Feature Enhancements/Fixes for the Perfect PM Tool…A Collection of Ideas Posted in the Wrike Community and Some New/Related Ideas…. Maybe, just maybe, my dream can come true….. 😊
1. Allow Subtasks to Update Start and End Dates of Parent Tasks (the highly sought after, and most voted item in the Product Feedback section of Community with 199 votes):
2. Allow "Planning"/"Template" Mode to Separate Active/On-Hold Projects from Projects Being Planned/Templates (111 votes):
3. Leads and Lags with Dependencies (59 votes):
a. https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000170609-Leads-and-Lags-with-Dependencies
4. Dependencies in Table View:
a. https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000153745-Dependencies-in-Table-View
5. Sort Comments by Newest at the top:
a. https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000141329-Sort-Comments-by-Newest-at-the-top
6. Automatic sorting by due date in Table View:
7. SharePoint Integration – it would be so convenient and streamlined if Wrike could integrate, per project, to a SharePoint site (or multiple sites) to link/point/connect to SharePoint lists, documents, apps, etc.
a. There is a post that shows something similar to what I am talking about, but SharePoint is not on the list of platforms that can be tapped. https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001595505-Add-document-links
8. Meeting Tickler – how cool would it be to load a team meeting schedule into a project, and then have an option to flag a task to be discussed at a future meeting (a date selector with upcoming meeting dates would come up). Then the flagged tasks would automatically be added to the meeting agenda. I imagine that you could potentially do something like this with custom fields and reports, but to have it built in would be a timesaver, in my environment anyway.
Please, Wrike, put your focus on the features that are needed to continue to propel you as a market leader!!
Megan - great ideas.
I'm fully aligned with most of your ideas - below my top 4 (prioritized)
3/ Lag
7/ Share point link integration (not just uploading from sharepoint)
1/ Subtasks to update parent task
8/ This sounds like a super cool feature (not sure if we would use it though)
/Niels
I agree Wrike has a lot of good features but needs a lot of polishing to improve the user experience.
I agree in the "grander" sense that Wrike has the potential to be the "One tool to rule them all" in Project Management but continues to fall short of realizing that potential.
I also agree with most of the specifics listed. I would like to add more visual representations of relationships between tasks and projects and a presentation component that would allow for easy, presentation-ready, output of a Project -- status, task drill-down, pretty, suitable for customers, the whole enchilada.
SharePoint integration is a must!
Really like point about collecting task around Wrike and adding to a meeting agenda. I currently use a work around I posted about here:
https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002961109--Linking-to-projects-tasks
Since in tasks, you can get a view of all subtasks by just typing in. What we do is let meeting attendees add subtasks, and they can do that via this field. It would be great though if Wrike expanded this functionality to allow an easier way to "grab" tasks across the platform and include in another tasks as subtasks, or in a folder/project.