Live Session: Finding the Right Folder Structure w/ Justin Liles

Hi!

Our Customer Spotlight session with Justin Liles, Chief Product Officer, Advice Local was a success! We will upload a recording to the session within 24 to 36 hours but in the meantime we had a few questions that we did not get to.

@Justin - Could you take a look at the questions below from our audience and answer them. 🙂 

1. How do you archive/complete projects and keep them available for future access and reporting?
2. Which folder structures have you gone through that have given you problems? Which folder structures should we avoid?
3.  What are some of the best practices around using the parent/child folder structure and reporting? I find that I have to remember to add new folders to the report, are there any ways to automate this or share the responsibility across the team?

Thanks,

Kamini

Kamini Patel Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Learn about Wrike’s killer features and best practices with our Online Training Webinars

Kamini Patel Wrike Team member Learn about Wrike’s killer features and best practices with our Online Training Webinars

Q=How do you archive/complete projects and keep them available for future access and reporting?

Answer=We created a folder called "archive/canceled/completed" into a Parent folder so we could still run analytics/reporting on the archive/completed

Q=Which folder structures have you gone through that have given you problems? Which folder structures should we avoid?

Answer=Folders that don't have enough "depth" have given us problems for scale. I always think of Parent/child relationships when creating the right folder structure. 

Q=What are some of the best practices around using the parent/child folder structure and reporting? I find that I have to remember to add new folders to the report, are there any ways to automate this or share the responsibility across the team?

Answer=My best practice would be the segments and the department mixed with some custom fields in your folder structure. You can setup campaigns as templates so you can easily automate and produce with a couple of clicks. For the reporting, I have numerous reports setup from the parent folder level, child folder level, and or segment level folder.  

I would be more than happy to do a 1to1 and give you my ideas on how I would setup the folder structure within your business for anyone that has questions. 

@Justin. We are new to Wrike and going through deployment. We are a digital marketing agency and need to be able to view project work on both the department level as a whole and by each client. Do you recommend setting up departments as tags and tagging them within the client folders for their respective services? 

Hi Brandie, there are many approaches to this. For me, having a Clients folder and a Departments Folder and cross-tagging when needed is a good approach. This will allow you to keep all your work in both areas, but also totally separate. So if you're looking at a project for a client, you can quickly see what department is working on it by the folder tag.

It also comes in useful when you want to run reports. If you're running a team report, you can choose to see items in your Department folder. If you'd like to pull a report on the work you're doing for your client, you can filter by your Client folder. Same goes for Dashboards, Calendars etc. you can decide in what context you want to see the work; client or department.

This is also useful if you want a client to Collaborate on a task. You don't need to give them access to your Departments (internal) items, you can just provide access to the client folder, and they'll only see tasks related to them. The article I've linked above has some information on what Collaborators can see when you invite them to your account.

What do you think? Have you gone with an approach already? Looking forward to hearing more about your structure! 🙂

@stephen - thank you, that was so helpful! I did set up my structure for both clients and departments. Now that 'Spaces' are available, I set up a 'space' for departments rather than folders and still cross tag the client projects.

Hey Brandie, 

Glad to see Stephen answered your question.

I can give you a screenshare if you like to show you our folder structure. I believe I'm allowed to share my email address here. 

It's jliles@adviceinteractive.com.  

Hi Justin, totally up to you - just remember that this is a public forum so it's visible to the wider world 🙂

Also, I'm wondering if you agree with me in terms of client and department structure? What approach do you take? 

Stephen your approach is scalable. I dig it 😎

We use Wrike for: 

1. Product concept building
2. Managed services (SEO, Website building,Paid Media, etc.) 
3. Manual fulfillment on local listings

Our setup is like this:

1. Highest level segments: Product, Active digital clients, 
2. Product>>>all products have their own project rolled under
3. Active digital projects >>> CLient folder by name>>>Segment of departments rolled under as projects

SInce we have Multi location clients, SMB's with 1 location, Vendors, and Resellers that have tons of brands under them, we created an entity relationship structure based on the segment. So in short, numerous folder structures depending on the type. All of those structures are tied into request forms to launch.

I think we have 3,500 folders in total in wrike

Wow, 3,500 folders made me pull this face 😲

But, you're totally right, regardless of how much work and structure you need, using folders to house items is the best way to keep structure, which can be later cross-tagged; makes work in-take more manageable and also, as you said, is scalable without having to rework the foundations of the structure.

Justin, it sounds like you know exactly what you're doing, really happy to see you around the community! Why not challenge yourself a little and see if you can answer some How To questions for others who are struggling a little - sounds like you could earn a Community badge in no time, and you never know you might even learn something new 🙂

One other thing, have you seen the upcoming release of Spaces? With 3.5k folders, it's certainly something you need to see 👀

Thank you Justin and Stephen for the guidance!  I did send you an email for a screenshare, Justin.  We have a similar business and it would be great to discuss your folder structure further and issues you worked through as you scaled to 3,500!! 

I would also love to hear your best practices for naming conventions. I don't love adding the client name before each task - wish it was more obvious which parent folder tasks belong to as you move throughout Wrike. Seems to be visible in some places and lost in others.