[Open Discussion] What Are Your Most Commonly Used Templates?
For me, creating Templates for repeatable work is a huge time-saver. Especially detailed projects which, although are repeatable, may take a lot of time to recreate each time.
For marketing teams, event or campaign goals might change from project to project but the type of work that needs to be completed is often the same. Using Templates can provide you with the initial setup you need, without recreating the wheel every time a new Project begins.
Check out Anna’s advise when creating a Template for marketing events. This simple customized Template can really give you a head start on an event.
So what do you think? As a marketing team, what Templates are you using?
Share any tips you have, or perhaps you have a question about this for other marketing teams.
Comment below. 🙂
Our templates are very basic, launched from our dynamic request form. They still take some tweaking, with timelines that are not super fine tuned. We work on various different kinds of activations, and accounting for all of those would require us building out 100+ different templates.
Very little of our work is repeatable, with every job having a great amount of scope/scale variance, but we use the templates to immediately capture jobs in generalized buckets.
Hey Ken, that's an interesting approach, and I agree, Request Forms are great for repeatable work but they also are great for keeping incoming work organized and ordered within your account.
Do you purposefully leave the tweaking of timelines until the request comes in and do you use External Request Forms too?
At the moment, everything is done post request. I have built in timelines and dependencies to the templates, but they often need adjustment. I want to move things to a place where the template timelines can become more reliable, but without creating a template for each job type.
Until I can find a work-around solution, or Wrike makes it possible to add tasks one at a time to a templated job based on request form answers, I am going to have to tweak.
Thanks for sharing Ken.
I'm wondering if you can explain adding tasks to a templated job based on request forms a little more? We recently released the ability to set a Request Form to create a Task from a template.
I think this might help, let me know 👍
Hey Stephen,
What I meant was that i wish I could essentially "build" a project out based on templated tasks. For example: if my requestor chooses that their request needs a legal review, the task will be added to the project and the timeline will adjust. Then if they decide that they are going to handle production work, they can select that option and Wrike would not include that task.
So currently I only have 3 options which replace the job template with 1/16 possible project templates, but if Wrike could allow the users to create templated tasks (or groups of tasks) that would be added into the project, in addition to what is there, not to replace, then that would mean i could tailor my requests down to the activation type and what specific elements are needed.
Not sure if that clarifies a bit more.
I'm flattered that you mentioned my approach to templates! 😌 It made my day to see that! I also see that I never replied to a question over there, so double thanks!
We also recently implemented a blog post template.
The milestone "Blog Post" is duplicated with the name of the post. When you set the due date for that task, all of the other tasks fall in line! The trick is making the last task a finish to finish dependency on the main milestone task.
Thanks for sharing your approach in the first place Anna - I'm sure plenty of people here are getting a lot of value from it. I also shared it with our Customer Sucess teams and everybody was super impressed 🙌
@Ken, that does clarify and it's still a pretty solid way of doing this even with the limitation you've mentioned. I'm going to feature this post so perhaps someone else in a marketing position might be using a similar approach and can add some advice 👍
Just seeing this post.
We have several Blueprints we use ALL the time. Just to name a few:
Let's just say, that if I have to duplicate a project, or task more than once, I make a Blueprint!
Did I mention that all of these Blueprints are triggered by a Request Form? Just a few clicks, and away we go!
@Marj, that's so great, thank so much for sharing this!!
Did you use to work with templates before Blueprints were introduced? I'm asking because it's interesting to know what are the pros and cons for you in this rather new functionality.
I personally find Blueprints very useful for projects, for example, working with the Product team.
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
@Lisa, Yes, I used Templates before they were Blueprints. I have found that Blueprints are all 'pros' compared to Templates. My poor assistant, when i used Templates, and would assign her to tasks in the template, she would get inundated with notifications, plus when i would change a date on it, she would get even more!
With Blueprints, i can create the project, assign, add dates, move them around, see them in Gantt view, and get them all set up, without anyone getting notifications.
😍
Thanks, @Marj 🙂 Same here, the fact that there are no notifications until you really need them helps a lot in my day-to-day 😎
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