[Weekly Conversations] Being a Wrike Champion 🏅

Currently, when we add people to our account we send them an information email with links to helpful documents by the Wrike team. Other times I have small group meetings discussing the set up of our account and how to navigate. We are currently review with our Wrike CSM the topic of Wrike Champions and building out a plan, so more to come on this topic.

We've really developed our onboarding process to include a variety of training and support for Wrike.  From topic based trainings that are held regularly, to a myriad of FAQs, to a Teams Channel to access support needs, we cover the full spectrum!  We also include references to Wrike Discover courses that are helpful, in-class training polls to gather feedback, and managing training needs when each user is brought on-board.  We recently rolled out our internal training program, designed to give users specific role-based training (using request forms and blueprints), to ensure each person is set up for success and understand our processes for using Wrike!

The main problem is the acceptance of a new tool. And the main problem with this are mostly very small issues such as long loading times. It is very often really a simple thing why people reject new things.

So if you are changing from another tool and Wrike needs more clicks, even if it is only one, users will say it is a stupid tool.

If the loading of a task takes 2seconds it is too long, because the offline tool they used before needed less than 1 second to open tasks.

These are two things I am facing at the moment, I have really now arguments against and it simply costs a lot of time for discussion and redues acceptance of Wrike very much. So my part is to discuss and to bring argumenst why Wrike improves our work.

The biggest challenge I face is in convincing teams to move their existing request forms out of Jotform and into Wrike. Wrike does not support any sort of text formatting in the Wrike Request forms (even though Wrike has a WYSIWYG text editor on tasks, projects, folders, etc) and this is a deal breaker for a lot of our teams who receive requests for work that include formatted text (i.e. showing a strikethrough or highlighted sentence that needs to be replaced with something else) - asking a user to save that single sentence change into a Word doc, then upload the Word doc to a request form is just too many steps (not to mention that the receiving teams don't want to have to open a Word doc in edit mode just to copy and paste the text change requested). I bring up this feature request every time I have the opportunity to do so, and so I'll raise it again here.

Thank you for talking about your processes and challenges in detail here, 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

Although on boarding process in not in Wrike, we created a dedicated space for all the basic Wrike training. There is also a custom how to instructions available, using actual projects. Change is always a challenge even before in my previous job. We give existing users a "trial period" in a sandbox space and then get their feedback afterwards. Feedbacks like, what are the challenges they encountered, what they like/don't like about the platform, that way, they will feel that they are being heard and the acceptance to change won't be that difficult.

We don't have too many issues with getting people to use wrike and continuing to. We provide training if they are a new employee and provide documentation/guides (that we created as it's too specific to use wrike created ones) that assist them past that. It helps we have management support, it's required for our procedures to use it, and for audit purposes too.

We have limited departments in Wrike and it would definitely be useful to others but adoption of that has been extremely hard. I was the same at first but it was inevitable as I was overseeing over 50 projects with Excel spreadsheets. It's hard to take the time to setup when you are stretched so thin. During onboarding of new users, each manager is responsible for the training however I update them and created a training space (thanks to Wrike Templates). It allows them to have a place to play around as well as links for videos and other resources.

We don't have a formal onboarding process however new users typically set up a brief training session with me to go over our particular set up and best practices. They are also sent a series of links with trainings from Wrike. I plan to set up a more formal and structured process to maintain consistency and to utilize time more efficiently. 

We have some problems with adoption but that is improving as we move more processes into Wrike. Our teams have full transparency in our Wrike instance to see what is going on in other areas and to more easily collaborate across teams. We have created a set of best practices to ensure that thinks flow well. 

I direct our users to the discover videos for additional trainings and always keep lines of communication open for questions from team members. 

We are only a small team - so it's easier for me to connect with people about Wrike use. 

Sounds like a bit of a "soft" approach  - but I find just being enthusiastic and demonstrating constant Wrike use helps with our team. 

So when people have a question - (hopefully) I can demonstrate that the information is in Wrike - either by a comment or an email forward - and isn't it so much easier when all the status updates are in the one place....

Those are amazing insights, thank you for commenting in this thread, 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

As a contract Project Manager for SIE, the Wrike Admin team here does a fantastic job training users on the tool. What I find in my day to day work is that people have no issue adopting Wrike but do not always use best practices. As an example, if someone continues not to @mention me in Wrike for action items, I will send them a message on Teams asking them to @mention me next time so I receive notification and can provide a faster response. I also mention that if they have any questions or need help in Wrike, let me know and I will try my best to help. This not only helps others in Wrike but builds customer relationships.

Ron Licata This is a very important point - using best practices! Thank you for mentioning this 🙌

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 had Wrike for a few years already but didn't have a dedicated owner for a while. I'm working on standing up the Governance practice for our team - which includes Rules of Wrike, FAQ, Standard Operations, Documentation, Training, Feedback loop, etc.

I started to work on a few key projects to restructure our instance/the way we work. I recently created a basic training (more to come based on user roles) in Wrike to onboard new users with a request form + blueprint, to start. I encourage users to contact me if they need help/guidance, but let them execute for them to learn. Amongst the items that we have on the roadmap, we need to build a team of champions and run regular office hours to share knowledge and help us grow.

Thank you for sharing Roxane Carrier! Please let us know in the Community if you have any questions or best practices to discuss in relation to governing your account 🤗

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

Our previous account owner for Wrike has since left our company, so our main goal right now is to stand up a team instead of having one point person for Wrike that shoulders all the work for audits, governance meetings, and our SME meetings. That way we can all help each other. Right now our challenge is how to keep governance and SME going, or if we should disband our SME meetings if they aren't useful for most of us anymore. 

Other than that, we have Wrike forms for new users to be added that is helping our new account owner keep track of it all. We have also been able to use our new user training we set up (set up before the use case template was released)!

It definitely helps with change management to have multiple Wrike Experts in an account, thank you for sharing your experiences Devree Czupinski🙋🏻‍♀️