Wrike Automation Engine

Great features...but a few tweaks would be very helpful.

Hey guys, thanks so much for your feedback! 🙂

As this functionality has just been released, the team is very eager to hear what you think and they are keeping a very close eye. 

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 Lisa,

Sorry for confusion on my end, I was commenting to you on another thread as well.

This is amazing! I do have one comment about this which prevents us from using it over our webhook. I have a suggestion for the logic on Wrike's end.

Current Scenario:

Scenario: Apply to tasks-->if all predecessor statuses are Completed or Cancelled, change task status to In Progress.

• Project 1 is kicked off. Because task 3 test is optional, it is cancelled unless an assignee requests it. In this case, task 3 is never requested and thus intended to always be a cancelled task.
• 1 test is marked complete and 2 test bumps to In progress
• 2 test is marked complete and 3 test bumps to In progress, but it was supposed to remain cancelled.

I want the engine to recognize the exception that 3 test should have been skipped and left cancelled rather than bumped to In Progress so that 4 test can be updated to In progress when test 2 was marked complete. I've tested it out and the logic gets wonky with multiple dependencies and bumps both test 3 and test 4 to In Progress.

Solution Scenario:

My initial thoughts for a solution is: an element of "exception", "unless", or "only when" logic. 

Apply when task is "New"-->if all predecessor statuses are "Completed" or "Cancelled", change task status to "In Progress".
This means that unless the task is currently marked as a specific status, the task will be ignored and it won't apply the predecessor rule logic.

Lindsey Walters I've already passed on your feedback here from a different thread, thanks a lot for posting 🙌

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

I agree with Lindsey above. The main feature I find lacking is that you can't add exceptions. For example, I built an automation that marks following tasks as new when all preceding tasks are complete. This is due to a separate issue within Wrike, which is that users were being notified about tasks that they could not yet complete due to dependencies not being enforced. So, all tasks in our system start with a status of "Dependencies not met" (which we created) and then get moved to "New" status by the bot when their dependencies are completed. However, if users do not correctly mark their predecessors as done, but then mark the following tasks as done, when I go through to do project clean-up, the bot changes tasks that are marked complete back to new. Which is very confusing to the users. 

An ability to add an exception such as change status to new UNLESS it's completed or cancelled would solve this problem for us. 

Here's a link to the discussion around the dependencies issue: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000274229--Status-Backburner-More-control-with-dependencies-

Thank you for sharing your feedback and use-case, Kathleen Paluso! Our Product team is keeping a very close eye 🙂

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 be Great if you could add more than 1 if to an automation rule.  We have processes where there is more than one potential task owner depending on who is the brand owner and would like to be able to add a different task owner depending on that answer.  "IF" all dependency are complete and "IF" Brand MGT Custom field = X then assign assign task to person X.  2nd rule "IF" all dependency are complete and "IF" Brand MGT Custom field = Y then assign assign task to person Y 

+1 to loving the Automation Engine and to adding the ability to manage recurring follow up (second item in Lindsey Walters's original comment).

We've set up a number of rules that act as reminders for team members to review/approve files and update task details. Different team members use Wrike to varying degrees so these reminders are particularly helpful for folks who aren't working out of Wrike all day and for new folks who are still learning Wrike--two groups critical to keeping our work moving.

Since this feature isn't in place, we've been using the work-around of adding additional rules for subsequent notifications at desired intervals (e.g. if the first rule is set up to comment 2 days after a task status hasn't changes and we want another reminder 5 days after the first reminder, we set up a second rule to comment 7 days after the task status hasn't changed). This isn't ideal because it is cumbersome to set up and counts against the max number of rules we can have but it saves us the need for manual follow up. However, a few things that would make this, and creating other rules, easier:

1.The ability to create a new rule by duplicating a current rule (like we can with tasks). This would save a ton of time in setup as I would only need to manually adjust the number of days in the trigger rather than setting up an entirely new rule from scratch.

2. The ability to apply a rule to all spaces on an account. Since a number of the rules I create apply to all tasks across the account, being able to indicate this without individually adding every space in our account would be immensely helpful.

Thanks for introducing the Automation Engine and for considering these improvements!

(This is a recap of email conversations with Wrike Support)
Wrike Automation Engine is an excellent function, which I use all the time, but it seems like the initial implementation was rolled out and nothing has happened since. The "Have an idea for a new trigger? Let us know!" suggestion box must have received hundreds of ideas already, and I've been waiting for those to produce new triggers, at least. Would be great to have the ability to create custom triggers combining the filters currently available in dashboards & reports setup with automation operators, e.g.

• trigger: “Task assigned to [job role]” & “hasn’t changed in [n] days” → action: remind project owners of tasks that keep hanging with only a job role from blueprint
• trigger: “Task lacks assignee” & “hasn’t changed in [n] days” → action: remind project owners of unassigned tasks that keep hanging
• trigger: “Task isn’t scheduled” & “hasn’t changed in [n] days” → action: remind project owners of unscheduled tasks that keep hanging
• trigger: “[custom field] is empty” & “hasn’t changed in [n] days” → action: remind project owners of required (but empty) custom fields that keep hanging

This would be valuable, since we create all our projects from a number of blueprints, and we see too often that required assignments/schedules/custom fields are forgotten, admins have to police these details and remind project owners case by case. Several of these use cases are so ripe for automation, but the current setup doesn’t allow for these kinds of triggers.

Here's the cobbled together mockup I created:

Tuomo Suominen these 4 Automations are exactly what we need, especially to help adoption with new users on the account.  Brilliant!

A couple of things.

Can we add Approvals as a trigger? It's listed as a condition, why not a trigger?

Can we add Work schedule changes into automation? Wrike has the ability to collect dates, I'd love to be able to manipulate a calendar based on dates Wrike already collects. So for example, if someone submits a Vacation / PTO request, and it gets approved (new trigger) can we get the automation to then set their work schedule as "Vacation / PTO" so we don't have to do it manually?

Welcome to Wrike's Community, Conrad Aleshire 👋 Thank you for posting your suggestions here, our team is keeping a close eye here 👍

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 Hey there! Isn't there a centralized location where we can make automation suggestions? Or is this it? Just trying to make sure my ideas are in the right place!

Hi Anna Wallace 👋 There's no specific place, you can as always support the suggestions that have been posted or post a new one 👍

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

I have some. 😀

• Trigger a comment when there are tasks in the same folder that meet certain criteria. For example, all of our marketing emails are housed in a single email folder. We have custom fields for the product type and goal. It would be great for us to know if multiple tasks with the same values fall within the same week, so we can look into those and avoid audience overlap. (If Product Type and Goal of task A matches Product Type and Goal of task B and are within 5 business days of each other, trigger a comment.)
• Trigger a comment if task description isn't completed. Or if the task isn't updated in a certain amount of time.
• Trigger a comment if a status keeps moving but no comments are left.

These are very interesting suggestions Anna Wallace, thank you for posting them! 🙌

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