Approvals in Wrike - Your Feedback Needed!

Would love to see an "Approved with Changes" button!

Signed up and invited some colleagues who are pros at Approvals!

Signed up!

We use the Approvals tool for all stakeholder reviews. Our stakeholders do not use Wrike besides reviewing artwork and so the challenge we face mostly is them missing their reviews because the email notification is not clear and can include additional actions that happened in the task before / after the review was started. The email notification for guest reviewers is actually really great and clear (though it does not show the review deadline!). Lastly, to setup email notifications for reviews you need to check "The Date, Assignee or Status is changed" for both "for tasks assigned to me or created by me" and "for other tasks I follow", which doesnt mention the word reviews so not intuitive, but also means that now stakeholders are getting way too many emails about changes to the task that they dont care about. 

To summarize:

1. Make review email notifications for regular users look the same as for guest users
2. Add clear due date to guest users review notification email
3. Create a specific option under Email Notification settings to receive email notifications when reviews are assigned to you (potentially can also add option when those reviews have decisions from other users and to get notifications with other users comments as this can foster collaboration on feedback)

Example screenshots:

Regular user review email notification - very confusing for stakeholders

External User Review email notification - very clear (only wish due date was clear so we didnt need to include in comments)

Im happy to jump on a call to explain this further if needed

Thanks!

Oliver

• Maybe resolve comments when one approves a file
• Graphically create a better way of illustrating those comments have been approved, rather than the cross out
• This seems like a hot mess, see bellow
• 
• Approved with changes button seems like a fantastic idea, could be: APPROVED, APPROVED WITH CHANGES, and REVISE AND RESUBMIT
• I think in general the process feels a bit confusing and should be streamlined so more people use it, could be very powerful

Signed up. Would love to have approvals available as an option in blueprint tasks. Also, would love to have a variable for assigning approver, to be updated from the actual project.

We have two major issues with the current approvals implementation:

1. We need approvals created from blueprints. We create all our projects (several hundred projects annually) from a dozen of product type specific blueprints. As far as I know, there’s currently no way to create a task with approval from a blueprint.
2. The current implementation of approvers tied to workflow steps is unusable for us. Having to list every single possible approver in each approval doesn’t work at all in our case. For us, the project’s approver is the business manager responsible for that particular area, and we have 14 business area managers. We can’t possibly have all these managers listed as approvers in all approvals in every project, considering that we have several hundred projects annually. That would result in an unacceptable approval notification mess, as only one of fourteen is the intended recipient.

Instead of approvals tied to workflows, we would like to have approvals from blueprint tasks and in those tasks, an ”approver variable”.

Once a project is created based on a blueprint, the ”approver variable” would be replaced by an actual user/users. We already have  the responsible business area manager in each project as a Person custom field, so we could use that to replace the blueprint’s ”approver variable”

Huge thanks for your detailed feedback and interest, everyone 💚

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

Would love to have an option to set an actionable time limit on approvals, to enforce deadlines.  For example, if approval is due Mon 5pm, it would be great if there was a function that closed the approval at that time and disabled any outstanding approver's ability to comment or reject/approve.   

Some additional functions that could support this new action 

• If the outstanding approver would like the opportunity to reject/approve after the deadline, they can request an extension that the project manager would need to approve
• This doesn't need to be default, the default could still be an un-enforceable deadline like Wrike currently has.  This could be an optional feature that the project manager could select if they wish to add on restrictions to the approval. 

Would also love the ability to tag "groups" as approvers rather than having to input each person individually. 

Thank you!

Lindsay fancy seeing you here! :) I second that - stakeholders are always struggling with understanding the due date and its hard for project managers to keep them honest as we are always reactive when someone chimes in late vs being able to close the review.

Great comments and suggestions in this topic, several of the ideias would fit well on our routines too.

Adding my contribution, related to approvals + workflows.

1 - Being able to set the workflow approval to proceed to the next step when only one assignee makes a file approval. Currently it requires that all the users assigned approve or reject the file(s) to continue to the next step. Most of the times we only need that one of the users give his approval. The way it works today we have to keep checking the tasks to see if it's "stuck" at an approval.

2 - Option on each step of a workflow to "remove current assignees" before adding new ones. This not only makes clear who is the user responsible for the task in that moment, but also makes the task not appear in the "My Tasks/My To-dos" list of the previous user assigned to it. Today we have to do this manually every time.

Thanks.

Oliver- great seeing you here!  I second your comments re: clarifying approval email notifications - our stakeholders also often miss approvals in their inbox due to the notification's lack of clarity & next steps/deadlines.   

Thank you for posting your feedback here, I read and gather all your comments here for future research.  And thanks to everyone who scheduled additional time to discuss Approvals with me!

Slava Kogan Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager En savoir plus sur les fonctionalités et les meilleures pratiques grace à nos Webinaires online

Slava Kogan Wrike Team member En savoir plus sur les fonctionalités et les meilleures pratiques grace à nos Webinaires online

We use approvals quite a bit in Wrike and have sometimes found people don't select file approval (so this causes confusion) as people approve the task not the file. 

If you have multiple subtasks with approvals on its sometimes difficult to see at a top level what has been circulated for approval.

I've also had feedback pre defined approval 'groups' would be useful rather than finding the person each time :)

I second approval groups! We have really big groups of stakeholders and so the team rather just tag the group in a comment and ask them to review files vs using the tool

Thanks so much for your feedback Robin Pepper, Oliver Palan 🙌

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

We have stakeholders who don't always see that there are multiple files to approve. They approve the first file and think they are done. Having the "next" arrow flash green or white or something after the user clicks the decision button would be an embarrassingly helpful add. Even a "You reviewed 1 of X files. Do you want to exit?" dialog box before exiting the approvals view would help. 
(That suggested copy for the dialog box was surprisingly hard to write without sounding snarky!)

Kelly R Thanks a lot for you for your feedback! 🙌 

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

It would be really handy if there was a way to sort tasks by the approval due date in Dashboard Widgets. My creative director and other stakeholders are very confused when they are looking at the long list of tasks in their Pending Review Widget. They see the due date for the tasks there which is never the same as the approval due date :(

Thanks so much for your feedback Anna Urazova 🤗

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

We would LOVE to see the number of rounds an approval went through by custom item type with the ability to splice & dice that data in Wrike Analyze by user/requester, etc. 

Also, it would be great if we could separate the time required & duration for an approval from the task itself since the approvals & revisions consume the majority of time allotted for that specific task. 

Can we change the language from "rejection" to something a little less "offensive"? Several of our teammates don't reject approvals & instead keep things in review but ask for changes in the comments because the language is too harsh. Maybe instead: "Request Changes"? 

+1 in support of less offensive language. I like the suggested "Request Changes" option.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, folks! 

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

So sad to have missed this! Any opportunity to get the 4-1-1 on approval changes?? 

Thank you for your interest Emily Lillya! The team is currently in planning, but we'll keep you updated on any changes here on the Community 👍

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

Hi! I am very interested in this. Is the Wrike team currently in production with anything that would need beta testing, or is any feedback still needed on this? I've worked in a lot of different systems and echo some of the sentiments in this thread along with other community members who have posted previously. We are also working on a workaround for some complex approval flows with Wrike Integrate, but we would love to see more native functionality. Please let me know if I can help in any way! Thanks! 

I - just like Michelle -- am also very interested in "Approved with changes." This is a crucial element for anyone using Wrike for approvals of creative works. The boss doesn't need to see something again if she asked asked for one minor change. 

Hi folks, thanks a lot for your continued feedback on the Approvals feature here! We really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and use cases with us 🙌

We continue sending your feedback to the dedicated Product team. At the moment, we don't have updates to share, but we will let you know when we have any news in the future. Thanks again for your input here! 

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

Hi!

I was wondering if there is a way to require an approver to leave a comment if they reject the approval?

Thanks!