Welcome to the Wrike Admins and Champions Hub! 🎉

I'll kick this off with a couple of questions (would love if it were a poll ;-):

1. Was Wrike use in your organization initiated by the senior/executive management team and pushed down through the branches of the organization, or was it initiated by an individual department and pushed out and up through your organization?
2. If the latter, what challenges did you and your team encounter when encouraging participation/adoption from other teams and up into senior/executive management?
3. How did you overcome those challenges?

Hi Trevor Tollefsbol let me follow up by completing your poll!
1. -> Wrike started off in our product engineering Team (R&D)
2. -> Challenges were adopting the engineers working way to feature multiple departments
3. -> By gaining support by C-Level Management and adjusting workflows to support all needs.

Curious to see how it went for other Wrike Admins!

Great questions... I can only answer the first and kind of the second.

Wrike was initiated by a single department which has been using the platform for four years now. Other parts of the organisation are showing interest and we now have an internal presentation/demonstration that we run to show how we are using it. Another department in our organisation took Wrike on last year and I expect more organic growth over time. 

For my company ...

1. Wrike started off in IT area for large project implementations

2 and 3. We have grown to other departments but not all have adopted so we haven't overcome the challenge regarding the company, but mainly because their are using specific software specialized in their area of work.

In response to significant security and data protection concerns associated with the previously utilized solution, a comprehensive bottom-up initiative was undertaken to identify and implement a more secure and robust Project Management Information System (PMIS). This initiative involved the following steps:

1. Formation of a Taskforce: Key departments were organized into a taskforce to oversee the evaluation process.
2. Comprehensive Evaluation: The taskforce conducted a thorough assessment of 22 alternative PMIS solutions to determine their alignment with organizational requirements.
3. Selection Process: The evaluation process culminated in the selection of the top three PMIS solutions, from which Wrike was ultimately chosen as the most suitable product.

Following the selection of Wrike, six distinct Project Management Offices (PMOs) commenced their implementation efforts within their respective domains. The Information Technology (IT) department led the initial launch, with subsequent departments following suit.

Challenges and Future Directions

The primary challenges encountered during this transition include:

• Organizational Maturity: Efforts are ongoing to mature the organization by establishing and standardizing best practices.
• Resource Management: Concurrently, there is a focused effort to implement effective resource management strategies.

1. Use started in one department. 
2. Senior management can be disconnected as they do not directly use the tool. However, by designing valuable reports and tools that provides a clear window into the work being done support comes easy.
3. Being consistent about use, providing valuable insights including number of tickets, tickets completed, items in process directly tied to growth goals, etc. Most importantly making Wrike visible - request forms, reporting, dashboards guiding meetings, etc. 

1. Use started in one department - Marketing and Communications; Most folks need this department and are excited to work with the creative team, so it was a natural way to engage other areas of the organization.

2. Other departments wanted in! It was through their experience of collaboration for design reviews that drew their curiosity. Once folks started asking "Can our department use this tool?" we held an open workshop to showcase the features and how we could all work more easily together. The workshop was attended by some of the main Wrike interested team members and quickly spread.

Challenges have been (waterfall style :)):

• Requestors wanting to follow along in Wrike on the tasks, however they were guest reviewers. So we added them as collaborators. 
• Once we got rolling, we started utilizing Wrike Request forms which are essentially creative briefs that are hooked to blueprints and start projects. It was helpful to have these drop into an "Incoming Requests" folder to get eyes on them before sending off to our designers.
• Challenge of request forms is that you lose the human communication a bit, but we found when we asked for short virtual calls to confirm their requests we were basically getting "ghosted". I believe it was because of an "we've always done it this way mentality". We need to keep improving internal processes on the Marketing team which could also assist with improving intake. Overall, request forms have been a huge improvement in accuracy and efficiency.
•  
• New users wanted more help, so we started bi-weekly 20-minute "Wrike Wrangler" breaks. These breaks quickly showcase something helpful about Wrike and address a common question, etc. This was a great solution for administration, as they could send folks to the virtual sessions when questions were asked in the field about Wrike.
•  We found that for the Marketing and Communications Team, inviting a Wrike expert to present a virtual workshop for our team was extremely helpful and encouraging.
• Now, we are working on better collaboration techniques between departments. We are struggling with folks requesting through the form and now wanting added to the project/tasks immediately however: they don't understand how the blueprint is set up, or how tasks are related to projects (yet), or how the workflow status' are meaningful to our process - And often they will review art prior to it being ready for them to review :) Kinks are still there and believe wrike has a solution, but we aren't caught up yet - I'd be happy to talk more if you would like to discuss

Love this question! 

1. It was initiated by IT, but with the anticipation that the "whole" department would use it. 

2. Challenges have been using Wrike to our best advantage and in the most efficient and effective way. Of course, marketing and communications uses it in the best way(yes, I'm biased). Others can follow along in tasks but their organization of folders, tasks, etc. is missing. Not even sure how I ended up here, but apparently I am the "Wrike Guru" in our office and I'm actually pretty proud of that! Some people take it a little too far and will only talk projects in Wrike, but we are working on that. We also have a few members in senior leadership who still do not use Wrike. 

3. Overcoming the challenges has been mostly sitting down and taking the time for training. I've made everyone aware of the amazing blogs Wrike has, and that has helped. Some people don't want to worry about it so they don't. We enforce it for my team, and that will continue because we are so high functioning and have to keep the workflow going; we couldn't do that without Wrike!

I enjoy reading though all of the comments here!  Thank you all who have posted so far.  I'll pitch in and answer my own question as well:

1. Wrike in our organization grew from a need within the design department.  When I joined GSI, my manager requested I research project management solutions that would help improve the efficiency of our small team (and move us out of date-revision Excel documents).  I put together a decision matrix and we settled on Wrike; plus we had a coworker who had positive experience from a previous organization that used Wrike.
2. Our biggest challenge for adoption of Wrike by senior management is 2-fold: a) adjusting to viewing project category (tasks) statuses from Excel columns to Wrike rows for reporting, and b) simplified viewing and organization of all items within Wrike.
3. a) We never really could get over the preferred way of viewing statuses in Wrike versus the way projects were always managed in Excel.  However, 6 years later came the advent of custom field automations which allowed me to setup "high-level" custom field status reporting, triggered in automations by the relevant tasks.  Now we can report in columns across the table with the high-level statuses and color coding that aligns with senior managements' expectations while maintaining the detailed statuses needed within the teams and individuals responsible for the work.  b) For the management team members that are not in Wrike on a daily basis, it has taken me actually bookmarking the tables in their browser that they need to see regularly because even the emailed reports were not being utilized.  And yet, the tables are truly only viewed by management during our reporting meetings because it is still a bit too complex for the casual viewers.

One of my observations from the responses here is that it seems all of your organizations have implemented Wrike from a single department and spread outward, just like ours.  It also seems that adoption at the senior management level is still a challenge.  I would love to hear more details as to why this is a challenge and any ideas others have for driving adoption at the senior and executive levels.  Maybe there is an improvement for user types that could be identified based on what the biggest challenges/complaints are form those team members.

New to Wrike - getting ready to implement and looking forward to having it up and running!

1) I was hired to put structure in the current Project Management processes and found they were using Excel primarily. I researched a number of options, invited someone from every department to the demos to ensure I was bringing along everyone who might be interested in using the tool. We selected Wrike and since I'm over both PM dept and Facilities, I realized I could use it for both areas. I further realized that those two areas were some of the highest expenses in the company and we had not been tracking how money was being spent. I am determined to set Wrike up holistically across the organization so everyone can benefit from its ability to automate repeatable work. So it was initiated by me over two departments and once I get them up and running, I will go to each department and ask them about their repeatable work efforts (employee onboarding/offboarding, audits, risk assessments, vendor onboarding/tracking, training/tracking training completion, compliance, operational processes, sales, customer service, etc.). Once I realized it could be used in so many different ways by any department, I've gotten others excited about it, too. I will show them how they can create a blueprint for each instance, assign it a new name using whatever works form them to track them, and they will automatically appear in the assigned person's work queue with due dates, etc. I plan to attach customer satisfaction surveys to some workflows so that we can track how our vendors are doing, how our customer service reps are doing and use that info to improve processes so we get high marks across the board. 

My initial challenges were that leadership doesn't think that software solves every problem and I agree. But we need process improvement here and this can be a game changer if implemented correctly. I also got pushback on the cost.

I overcame the challenge by explaining that it would not be just a project management system and highlighted my plans to have it be utilized by every department that wants it and what it can do for leadership's overall visibility into:

• what is being done in every department
• at what cost 
• with what benefit

they agreed it would be useful.