[Use Case Templates] Agile Teamwork 🎯

❗️Note: Please make sure you’ve checked out our announcement about the changes related to the Use Case Templates in Wrike. In short, the Wrike’s Use Case templates are now available in the Space creation dialogue instead of Wrike Assistant.

Hi everyone! 👋

The Wrike Template series continues, and today, we’d like to discuss our Agile Team Work template. 

Using Wrike’s Onboarding Templates

A quick reminder that account owners and admins on Business and Enterprise accounts and account owners on Professional accounts can access the Onboarding Templates gallery through Wrike Assistant.

Agile Team Work Template

This template provides your team with a base configuration and sample data to demonstrate one of the possible ways an agile development team could work in Wrike.

Template Structure

1. The How-To guide consists of 4 steps to get you started. Each step is represented by a task The Software Dev Team space and several sub-folders and projects to organize your work. Feel free to edit this structure any way you see fit.
2. A Request form called Submit a Product Bug to help external stakeholders report bugs.
3. A Calendar-based roadmap called Product Initiatives for high-level planning and reporting.
4. Product Management, Agile Workflow, and Meeting Action Items custom workflows that Account admins can edit via “Settings”.
5. Dashboards to monitor progress:

• Team Dashboard shows prioritized lists of tasks for different work types.
• Team Meetings Dashboard helps you monitor the progress of retrospective actions.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the template’s setup.

Step 1: Streamline Work Intake

First, you’ll need to define where your assignments come from:

• Internally: You can create stories directly in the pre-created Backlog folder. 
• From templates: The easiest way to optimize the launch of new work is to use a template. Check out the pre-created Templates folder for story and sprint templates. To launch new work, duplicate the template item into the Backlog folder for further prioritizing.
• Externally: Work can come from people outside your team, but it still has to fit a format, land in the right place, and be easily accessible for review or prioritization. Try out the sample request form called Submit a Product Bug - and watch it land in the Incoming Bugs folder and on the pre-made Team's dashboard.

📍Tip! Account admins can create other request forms for different purposes in the Settings section and even have them trigger templates. External links will come in handy to collect requests from non-Wrike users.

• Via integrations: It may be the case that you receive work intake from different sources (emails, messengers, meetings) or it’s challenging to ensure that all stakeholders use request forms. The solution will be to use Wrike integrations so it will be easier for you to collect all requests in the central hub for processing all work.

Step 2: Plan Your Teamwork

Timely and transparent planning is very important for teamwork. Now that you have all work intake channels organized, let’s move on to planning that work. Once again, Wrike offers you several tools depending on your goals, methodology, and planning methods.

Visualize Roadmap

For high-level planning and later reporting, use Calendars for yearly and quarterly views.

As an example, check out the pre-created Product Initiatives calendar that can be found in your Calendar tab. You can always dive into any item for details of a particular initiative and share this roadmap with stakeholders outside of Wrike.

Organize Backlog

All bugs and stories that haven’t been planned and included into any sprint live in the Backlog folder. As you and your team discuss the details of each item during sprint planning, fill out task descriptions to flesh out your plan. For example, add the user story or list external dependencies.

By default, this folder uses Table View so you can see all important task details on one screen including columns called custom fields.

This template comes with 3 custom fields for managing the work of IT teams:

• “Release” tracks when your team wants to deliver it.
• “Priority” marks the importance of the work items.
• “Story Points” can help your team note down the sizing of tasks.

You can edit or create new fields to fit your team’s needs.

Manage Sprints

As an agile team, your main goal is to have visibility over all stories and bugs that are assigned to your team. Managing work in sprints is the preferred way for many teams.

This template suggests a simple sprint management flow you can later iterate. There is a Current Sprint folder and Completed Sprints archive folder.

Current Sprint has a goal, dates and contains all stories planned for its duration. With Board view, your team can view and manage workload in a familiar Kanban-like mode.

When the current sprint is over, move it to the Completed Sprints folder and use a template to start a new Current Sprint. Whatever tasks are left unfinished can simply be tagged with the new current sprint.

Facilitate Team Meetings

Planning and Retrospective meetings are a great source of action items on preparing stories for development or improving team processes after reflecting. Such action items should be documented in a clear way as tasks and stored in a single place - a Team Meetings folder that is also pre-created in this template. As you start working on action items, change tasks statuses according to Meeting Action Items Workflow so you can clearly track the work progress and current task statuses on Team Meetings Dashboard. We recommend you share this dashboard with your team to keep everyone in the loop.

Step 3: Collaborate and Execute

Here’s a suggested daily routine for a developer in a team that uses Wrike:

1. Open personal Wrike dashboard and see a prioritized list of tasks currently ‘’assigned to me’’
2. Open the task with the highest priority and read instructions
3. Ask any clarifying questions in task comments via @mention
4. Start working on the task in my tool (GitHub or other Version Control systems)
5. Submit updates, they are visible in the task update section because my tool is integrated with Wrike
6. When done, open it in Wrike and change its status according to the next steps required (for example, “Ready to Deploy”, “Ready for QA” or “Completed)
7. Check the dashboard and work on the next task in the queue

📍Tip! If your team has UX specialists, chances are they have a designer app of their own. Check out Wrike Proof that helps with creative asset production and allows to:

• Integrate with Adobe Creative Cloud apps
• Integrate with Digital Asset Management apps
• Review, Collaborate and Approve images, videos, and other creative content

Step 4: Monitor and Report

Team Dashboards help you monitor work statuses to spot bottlenecks and ensure key tasks are on track. You can add new widgets to existing dashboards or create new ones for different purposes.

Provide Visibility to Key Stakeholders

Above we mentioned a product initiative calendar. It’s a good idea to share it with your key stakeholders to keep them up to date with your timelines and roadmap. If your stakeholders don’t have a Wrike license, just create a public link to your calendar and share it with them.

External links or snapshots are available for other tools as well. Gantt chart snapshots give a bird’s-eye view to visual project schedules with dependencies. Report snapshots are great for sharing multiple project statuses or team performance.  

📍Tip! If you need in-depth analytics on the work progress try Reports. 

We hope this step-by-step guide is useful to get you started with agile teamwork in Wrike.

If you don’t use Wrike as an agile solution but are interested in learning more about how to set it up, make sure to let us know below 👇

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover