"Master" Templates for Projects

My company, BloomCU, designs websites for credit unions. We use Wrike to manage all our website projects. We're constantly working to improve our design and development processes, which means we constantly make changes to our workflows in Wrike.

Whenever we need to make a change to our process in Wrike that affects all clients, it's painful. We have to edit our Website Creation Template and all our clients' projects one by one. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to make sure process changes are set up correctly for every client.

I want to create "master" project templates the same way you can create master slides in PowerPoint. In PowerPoint, updating a master slide updates all other slides that use the master template.

Here's how it would work:

- If I make a change to a Master Template, all projects using the master template would also be changed

- If I make a change to a single project that is not a master template, that change affects only that single project

- Might need a way to toggle a project's connection to the Master Template (i.e., be able to break away a single project from the Master Template)

If Wrike added a master template feature, Wrike would rule the project management world and I would give you all my money.:wink:
 
 
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Anastasia

Derik, that's definitely an exciting idea, thanks for sharing! I can see how this would make sense when multiple similar Projects have already been launched. I'd love to learn a bit more about how many Projects you typically have going at the same time, and how many of those would fall under a template like that. Looking forward to hearing from you!

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Hi Anastasia! We currently have seven credit union website projects that would use a Master Template and it's soon to be eight.

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Anastasia

Derik, thanks for the clarification! I think your idea here would definitely make sense for those who continue polishing processes. Our Product Team always monitors feedback here, and I'll make sure to point this post out. Thank you again for sharing!

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Sure thing. I'm happy to talk with your product team if they want more clarification.

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This is something we would find a substantial value in as well.  We currently manage 70+ active projects at a time and have found it very cumbersome to make changes once a project has already been created.  We also think it would be beneficial to have required fields pre-established for each new project vs. them being based on the folder they're stored in.  Having standardization in Wrike is not made simple for the users. 

 

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Stephanie - love your name ;) - and thanks for adding input here. In terms of required fields, do you think Request forms might help with gathering some information? You can set up a form for so that a new Project (or Project template) is launched when someone submits the form. You would then be able to have required questions on the form. The only thing is that answers from required questions won't automatically map to Custom Fields (but I'm not sure if you're using those). Let me know if you think that might work though!

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Also want to say this would be a huge improvement, not just for projects but master tasks too. Eg. say you're creating Standard Operating Procedures with a series of tasks, and then bundling several of those into a Project. That Project is then replicated for 50 clients. If you improve one of those SOPs then you have to manually update each task series in every Project.  

Every business is built on processes that are basically a series of tasks. Every business should continually be improving its processes, through automation, outsourcing, hiring, etc. So it's a pretty natural building block for every Wrike user.

Maybe not project management exactly but it's how I use it. And it feels like a pretty common scenario.

Sholto Macpherson DigitalFirst.com

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Anastasia

Hey, Sholto! That's actually a great example, I can only imagine how tedious it is to update 50 tasks manually. Thanks for sharing your experience with our team here!

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Hi - where did we get to on master templates? Would be really helpful.

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I would definitely use a Master Template.
I would be so handy if you have a checklist applied to each project then you can add to it and edit just the one without doing it for the other 65 too.

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I agree that a Master Template would be extremely useful.  We have 30+ projects running concurrently, each at a different stage and when we need to update the template we have to find the corresponding task for each project and update it as well.  

For example, we use the checkboxes in task descriptions very heavily.  When we need to change, add or remove a checkbox in the template, it would save us a lot of time to be able to push that change to all of the corresponding active tasks. 

Similarly, we sometimes need to add a new task to the template that should be scheduled based on a milestone in the template.  It would save us a lot of time to be able to push that new task to the other templates and have it be scheduled automatically based on the corresponding milestone in that project.

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This would be extremely useful to us as well. Has this been implemented in any way since May?

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@Anna Hey, thanks for you use case here, it'll be extremely valuable for our Product team in the future 🙂
@All For now this feature request is not on the roadmap right now, but it's something that is of interest to our Product Team, so please keep voting and adding your comments. I'll make sure to refer other users to this thread to upvote it. 
 

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

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This would be extremely helpful. We have over 1000 products that go through the same process. We are constantly changing out process and updating it to reflect the needs of our products. 

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