[Status: (Now in Wrike Labs) Investigating 🕵️‍♀️] Planning Allow "Planning"/"Template" Mode to Separate Active/On-Hold Projects from Projects Being Planned/Templates

@all, I can see some of you have seen the Blueprint Labs feature already. This is an account-wide feature so Admins on Business subscriptions or higher can activate it in Labs.

@Lauren, thanks for raising this sharing process that's needed.

This development was a big one for the Product Team and was fuelled by the comments, use-cases, and votes on this thread so thanks to everyone for getting involved.

As with all Labs features, your feedback is very important, please feel free to post what you like, and what you'd like to see improved, here 👍

Will this eventually be available on the Professional level?  I am incredibly disappointed to see that I have to pay $150/month more to use a feature that should already be provided. 

Just found this today! Looking forward to trying it out :) 

HI there, need some help with this!

I also need to plan ahead for the next year's work, and will be looking to initially plan out around 50+ projects at once so that I can effectively map the main resource.

– Although Blueprints allows me to create projects, assign them and see them in Gantt invisibly to everyone else, when I want to activate them – share them – I then need to place them in the correct area within my folder tree (which is extensive). The share feature does not allow you to do that as far as I can see.

– I'd tried dragging the blueprint project out of blueprints into the folder tree, hoping that would 'activate' the project (ie. make it visible to the assignee) but that didn't work. (Although if it had worked, it still would not be great because if you have a huge folder tree, it's awkward to drag something all the way to the top, for example).

– Furthermore, I can't duplicate a blueprint planning project and map it to a folder outside of the Blueprints either!

Anyway, really not impressed with the Blueprints so far! I already had a 'Templates' folder in my setup anyway, from which I duped my projects. All blueprints seems to do is to make projects invisible and prevent notifications – all really good and really needed, but for the reasons given above, it isn't really doing it for me. I'm afraid… unless I'm missing something of course, which I may be! :-)

Kate, when you create a live project from a Blueprint, you specify the folder where the new project will go.  If you have your destination folder set up with appropriate sharing for that project in advance, the resulting project will pick that up when it is created.

Scott Henderson Arizona Community Foundation azfoundation.org

Hi Scott, thank you for your reply :-)

However, I'm still confused. Ok, so I created a project from a Blueprint and designated the folder in the main tree where it needed to go. In doing that I deselected all options (including notifications) except 'assignees'. The project was assigned to me fyi.

The project then appears in the folder list, but does not appear in my own 'My Work' list. The project has however inherited the sharing options from its parent folder. Since it does not, however, appear in my own 'My Work' list, does this mean that the project is still invisible?

What I need is to create dozens of projects at the same time, sitting in my folder tree, but for them to be invisible to all the assignees until I choose to make them 'live'.

I don't get that Blueprint enables that?

Kind regards, :-)

Kate, it sounds like you mostly have custom projects that you need to plan out instead of repeated projects that you have a template for. To me, the Blueprints feature seems much more geared towards project templates instead of custom project planning. Either way, I think that the Blueprints should not be a separate folder tree but a setting available on any folder or project. Doing it that way would easily allow templates to be shared with the entire team based on the existing team folder structure and would make planning and activating custom projects easier as well since it would be changing a setting on the folder instead of duplicating the project from the Blueprints to the normal tree.

Using the "Create from Blueprint" option next to "Duplicate" will duplicate the project into your normal folder structure.

Hi Joshua

Thank you for your reply :-)

Well, yes and no: some projects have 50 subprojects, each of which is unique but are comprised of a set of templated tasks. Because I have to plan this sort of core project out in advance by at least by 50% so that I can see where there are resource problems with other projects. It's a giant sudoko puzzle! Basically I don't want anything visible until the resource is agreed.

I agree within you in principle: for me, it would be far more helpful to have the blueprint option available as a folder/project option. IN the same way that you can switch off inherited sharing, you should be able to switch off visibility, so that the 'planned' project can be 'switched on' and made visible at an appropriate date.

Kind regards

100% agree- Im in the same boat. Every project starts with a template but becomes custom because we remove unnecessary tasks and assign resources for that project in the 'planning' phase. Trying to do this in blueprint basically means my customized blueprint is a new template that gets re-duplicated. Pointless really. It's easier for me to just right-click a folder in the tree and 'duplicate' at this point -- less steps.

What I haven't tested (and please weigh in) is if creating from a blueprint will keep parent folder connections to projects/folders that are outside of the blueprint. Right now if you 'duplicate' a folder it only keeps connections and dependencies for tasks and folder within the project, not externally (e.g. resource teams, clients, etc). Do you know if those can be set up and inherited with blueprints now?

Thanks!

Hi Noel! Absolutely agree. And also, I'm afraid I'm not sure either about the external connections…

Hi,

Used the blue print for planning, as it avoids notification it addresses a lot of planning concerns but one key issue I have is that workload reports are not possible on blueprints so I cannot validate my resource allocation which is a critical part of the planning.

So would it be possible to allow workload reports also on blueprint projects?

Thanks, Marc

Hey @Marc, sorry for the long reply. Currently, the Workload can't be built based on a Blueprint. I'd suggest creating a separate Product Feedback post for this suggestion. What do you think? 

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

Would definately welcome this suggestion. Would be invaluabe (and much needed in my case) for project planning.

Hi again everyone! Please create new Product Feedback posts for suggestions to the Blueprints functionality 🙂

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