Daniel's Take on Wrike's Content Team Deployment - Part 1 & 2

Can't wait to follow along as you 'eat your own dog food' 🤣

I hope you'll be candid about the hurdles you encounter using Wrike so we can all commiserate and try to learn and improve the software, together.

Our big hurdle in implementing so far: how to tie all the work efforts we do (down to each task) up to its strategic reason for existing?

Every effort should be done because it ties to an objective of the organization, right? How do we make sure all we do ties to a Strategic Objective/Goal AND report about it in a simple, clear way that rolls up to those, for management to get a sense of how it's going? We read up on OKRs, based on some of Wrike's info, but can't quite decide if an Objective is best setup as a Tag, a Folder, etc.given our goal of tracking so many tasks and projects by so many teams, but still roll them up in a meaningful on a Management dashboard.

Hi Jamie! 

That is exactly my goal for this series, to share my honest thoughts and feelings as I go through a real deployment. I'm excited, but to be candid, there is a fair amount of nervousness in the mix as well. Being surrounded by so many product experts can be a little intimidating, and the app itself is so much more robust than what I've used in the past. Definitely check back for my next update!

Regarding the hurdle you mention, I think this is a common one. I'll do my best to express how we're able to do this as we learn from our deployment team. I have a feeling we have many of the same needs as you, so hopefully, you can learn along with us! 

Thank you for reading my post and for your thoughtful comment!

-Danny

Hi, about to start a new company and a new project, using Wrike and introducing some new colleagues to the platform. I just know the document management issue will be raised immediately - any news on that?

Thanks, Mark

Hi Mark! Our team just recently released the option to search for files, but other than that I don't have any specifics on next steps for document management. Was there something in particular your team was looking for?

Hey @ Daniel -- Good luck!  The deployment process was longer than anticipated when we did it, but the upfront effort was well worth the rewards. The pre-setup of things including our own 'Rules of Wrike' and all the templates and request forms we needed was crucial to successful deployment.

One of the most hotly anticipated feature improvements that the community is chomping at the bit for is Task Description markdown (code support). https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000157409-Code-formatting-in-task-descriptions-and-comments?flash_digest=943e764230a93fb73d3dbe90bf5cb6c14a90ce58&page=5

I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but the entire set of followers and upvoters on that particular link is hoping you'll find this improvement as necessary for your Wrike Content Team's use as we do. Whatever you can do to push it forward would be much appreciated! 🙏

I would strongly disagree with the statement "One of the most hotly anticipated feature improvements that the community is chomping at the bit for is Task Description".

If you read the chain on "Due date-time" you will see that almost everyone wants to be able to enter a start time and a end time or a task/event. Duration means nothing to someone who has to tell a group of 50 people where they need to be at a specific time. Look at the Timeline for a day and tell me what you see. I see nothing that helps me.

i love Wrike for its ease of use, and we have lived with this missing feature, but not without great pain and extra work. To the point that we are looking at other packages. I dont want to have to recreate everything, but without time entry i have no choice.

I once again strongly recommend that you implement this asap.

Update #2:

Hi Gang! 👋

So much has happened since my last post on our deployment:

🏢 We officially moved into our new HQ in downtown San Jose

🕺Our content team expanded once again (Welcome Rich and Michael to the team!)

🐶 My four pound pup successfully recovered from liver surgery

And much, much more.

All of these changes cost us a little momentum, but things have calmed down and we’re finally back on track. This week, we dove into our existing projects and dashboards to make sense of our content publishing calendar. Our team has a ton of ambitious projects planned for Q2, and the exercise highlighted to me why the content marketing team needs this deployment in the first place.

Before we get our processes optimized during the deployment, I thought I’d give an example of just how complex our workflow for something as basic as a blog article can be. It can involve the input and collaboration of multiple teams across two continents! Here’s what it looks like now:

✍️ Crafting an Outline

Articles on the Wrike blog start out with an outline. In addition to the structure of the piece and main ideas, we include links to our research, title options, headers, image ideas, and potential CTAs.

During this phase of writing, we also need to identify our key stakeholders and schedule interviews with our sources.

📝 Rough Drafts

Our draft stage is when we get down to business and started fleshing out the piece. At this point we may ping some of our CSM (Customer Success Managers) to get their input if we mention any of our customers’ experiences or quotes in the article. This is also when we’ll submit a creative request to our design team in Saint Petersburg for any photos, graphics or charts we plan to include. The images they create can really help our ideas sing, so we spend a lot of time communicating with them what we’re trying to convey and reviewing their sketches.

Another important step during this phase is SEO optimization. It’s critical for our content to be informative and insightful, and it also needs to be formatted it in a way that will be easy to find by search engines.

📰 Prepping for Publish

As we complete new drafts, we’ll submit them to our managing editor who will do a line edit, followed by a top edit by our Director of Content, Kim.

When everything is good to go, we’ll add the post to our blog backend and make some final formatting tweaks. At this point, we’ll ping our design team one more time so they can ensure everything looks fantastic when we hit ‘publish.’

📣 Amplification

Once the article hits out blog, our work is not over. Now a whole series of new amplification tasks begin. We’ll reach out to influencers, post on social media, answer questions on forums, and anything else we can do to drive traffic to the piece. With numbers in hand, we meet back as a team to talk about what worked and what didn’t.

The Process of Building A Better Process

As you can see, a lot of work goes into our blog - and the blog is only one part of what we do as a content team. In addition to blog articles, we write ebooks, emails, in-app copy, articles for third-party sites, infographics, scripts for videos and more. It’s absolutely critical that we define and improve our workflows to ensure a strong content pipeline for Q2 to reach our goals.

Stay tuned for my next update to see how we implement and optimize this and other processes across the team with our deployment consultant Patrick!

Cheers,
Danny

@Daniel, I'm curious about the nuts and bolts of your process. For example, you write rough drafts and sometimes ask colleagues for input, then you submit creative drafts and, finally, submit a draft to your managing editor. Along the way, the design team creates images for you to review. How is all of this document sharing happening? Are you emailing docs or posting them in Wrike? If the latter, where do you post them? In the Project Description? A "Files" task? In a specific "next step" task for the person/people you want to do the review?

We follow a similar workflow to your team, and document sharing is a struggle for us. That's why we're closing following and commenting on this document management thread.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

@Daniel, I'd love to hear another update from you on how you're using Wrike for your content workflow, and how you've adapted your processes during the implementation.