[New to Wrike] Blueprints in Labs
We are super excited to announce a big experimental release - Blueprints are now available in Wrike Labs!
Now you can manage current and non-executable work more effectively by drawing a solid line between ongoing Tasks, Folders and Projects and on-hold items using Blueprints.
How it was before
On-hold Projects and Tasks were planned along with the ongoing work, but usually without assignments. At launch Tasks were assigned triggering mass-notifications and flooding Inboxes.
What you can do using Blueprints
- Separate work to manage planned content in a dedicated Folder tree
- Pre-create content without sending notifications
- Assign Tasks and Projects without sharing and notifications
- Create actual work from Blueprints with notifications (launching work in bulk sends smart mass-notifications)
- Control availability of pre-created work via sharing and permissions
- Plan future work without risking immediate execution
How to
To quickly get started with Blueprints:
- An account admin should enable the feature from Wrike Labs account-wide.
- Once this is done, you can create your first Project, Folder, or Task Blueprint from scratch. Later you’ll be able to use it as a template for your future Projects or Tasks.
- Alternatively, you can save an existing Folder, Project, or Task as a Blueprint.
- Locate Blueprints in your Folder tree
- Create a Project in Blueprints
- Map out Tasks and Subfolders
- Assign users to Items (notifications are not sent)
- Give Tasks any status (notifications are not sent and you can also add dependencies)
- Make any other changes to assigned Tasks (notifications are not sent)
- Duplicate Projects from Blueprints to launch work (smart notifications are sent)
And one more thing ...
Request Forms and Blueprints
You can set up a Request Form to create a Task or Project from a Blueprint. If you do, every time someone uses the form to submit a Request, a Task or Project is created from the chosen Blueprint.
Again, we are very happy with the launch of this long-anticipated feature. We hope you are as well. Please comment and share your best practices with Blueprints. We'll appreciate any questions and opinions 🙏 They will be extremely useful to our Product team at this stage.
Thank you and happy blueprinting 🙂
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
Thank you for this feature! This is already really helping our team build templates with assignments without causing inbox clutter and random notifications for the assignees.
One helpful tip for anyone that is modifying existing request forms to work with the new Blueprints folder. Under When User Submits Form in the Request Form publishing area, you may have "Duplicate Task" or "Duplicate Project" as your setting for existing forms. If you do, you will not be able to find templates saved in the Blueprints folder when using the search unless the dropdown is changed to "Create Task from Blueprint" or "Create Project from Blueprint." Since the Blueprints feature appears to live in a separate folder tree, the search feature will not detect those templates unless this dropdown is changed. This caused a little initial confusion for our team when they were modifying our current request forms to work with the new template location, so I wanted to drop a note in case others encounter the same issue.
Hi Dan, that's a great insight, thanks so much for sharing!
Hi,
Is there a way that you can have the other account admin see the blueprints that you are building?
Thanks!
Hi Devon Marie, they won't see it unless it's shared with them. Is the problem that admins are duplicating the same Blueprints? This could be great feedback to the team.
Hi Stephen, we use a lot of Request forms (32 to be exact) and we plan to basically triple this by breaking these requests into more granular/specific requests. We'd love the feature to group request forms into categories and have a drop down feature and/or routing to another page based on the category. This would help employees greatly in finding the correct form to fill out.
Hi Edward, totally get where you're coming from. I don't have any news on this possible enhancement yet, but it really helps if you could upvote this request for the same idea.
Welcome to Community 🙌
This feature has been such a great help in keeping our templates separate from our workspace. One suggestion for a feature would be the ability to add folder tags to Blueprints (tasks, projects, etc) that exist in our workspace. This way we are able to fully create the template.
@Jennifer Hey, thanks for sharing your feedback here, we'll pass it to our 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
Hi greate news
Hi - Blueprints are a great idea.
One thing we highly recommend is for the Blueprint's project statuses to remain as set in the Blueprint. This is important because certain Request Form submissions we'd like to have come in with a Red or Yellow status, but they come in as Green regardless of what it is set as in the Blueprint.
For example, if someone enters a Request Form that has a bug, it doesn't make sense for the project status to be Green. The project should come in as Red so it draws everyone's attention that there is something wrong.
Thanks! - Mike
Hey @Mike, great feedback, thanks for this, I'll pass it to the 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
We are all new to Wrike and are excited about it, - and there is a lot to learn. When we set up a new Blueprint, we want to assign people to the various tasks so that everything is ready to go on air. However, we don't want task notifications to be sent to all assignees regardless of whether their task starts in 2 days og 3 weeks. - We would like them to be sent as the project goes along. - How can we avoid that? - Berit
Hi Berit, welcome to Wrike and Community. Notifications from Blueprints are not sent to anyone until the project is launched so you can create the Blueprint and not ping anyone. When it launches, they usually need to know they are part of a new Project, regardless if their task starts in a few weeks so an Inbox notification is there simply as an FYI; this project is now live. This is so they're just aware, really I wouldn't recommend using Inbox as your main 'todo' area.
Instead, I would recommend that everyone creates their personal Dashboard so they have a better overview of what they're assigned to for this week, next week and beyond. Dan, an Account Manager here at Wrike, wrote a really good Best Practice piece about he explains to his clients how to do this right - feel free to ask any questions there too.
Also, feel free to take a look at our relatively new Forum for onboarding your team for some tips on how to get started and of course feel free to ask questions there, we have some experts roaming these forums who can help with any questions you have 🙂
We are in the beginning stages of using Wrike and are trying to determine the best workflows for our projects. I like the blueprint functionality, but we use tags extensively and tags aren't saved when the blueprint is moved into a project. Is there any way to save tags in a blueprint?
Stephanie
Hi Stephanie, welcome to Wrike and Community!
No, adding tags are not available at that point. Tags can be added between Blueprint items but not items outside the Blueprint environment.
If you can share a little bit about what workflow this Blueprint will run through and some more details of what you're looking to achieve, I'll be happy to see if we can work on a workaround solution - and I'm sure others here on Community may have some ideas.
The first workaround that comes to mind is using a Request form instead of a Blueprint. This way you can use conditions like adding existing parent Folders depending on what information is submitted in the form.
I also want to mention that we're currently rolling out Wrike Discover, our interactive learning platform. It's free and contains 9 courses you can share with your team to ensure they're getting to grips with the basics of using Wrike at these early stages. As always, your team is welcome to participate here with the community to ask questions and check for solutions from others 🙂
@Stephan, @Lisa Hello!
Our company has the same need as Jennifer Olvera and Stephanie Cargill mention above: tagging from Blueprints to other projects. This is the #1 reason we aren't using Blueprints yet.
Our use case is as follows:
Each project has a set of "template" tasks which is eventually assigned to all teams involved (Production, Technical, Procurement, HSE, Client Services, Access...the list goes on!)
A project manager will manage the main project, but the template tasks are delegated/assigned to each team.
The teams manage their workload based on these tasks assigned to them --> the tasks from each project are tagged into the team's folder and are assigned a team-specific workflow. If the tasks aren't tagged into their team's folder, there is no visibility for them!
For non-template tasks, we already use request forms that tag new requests into the relevant team's folder (based on which form is used).
Please let me know if you would like screenshots or clarification for the Product team.
Thank you!
Hey Soraya Jung, thanks a lot for providing a use case here, I've passed it to our Product team 👍
There are no plans to update Blueprints currently, so I'll be gathering all the feedback regarding them for future review, so thanks again for bringing this up!
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