[Weekly Conversations] How are You Using Custom Item Types? ๐
Hi everyone ๐
Many of you have probably started using custom item types already. We would love to discuss some examples of how this exciting Wrike capability is helping with your everyday work.
As you may know, custom item types allow you to create work that matches your business processes in the Wrike workspace using your own terminology.
Letโs take a look at an example!ย
If you:
- Work in the professional services business
- Need to tailor tasks and projects to your processes
You may have the following challenge:
Aside from regular projects and tasks, you also have various types of work you need to create in Wrike - contracts, service types, client cards, etc.ย
Solution:ย
Instead of using generic tasks for service types and client cards, and regular projects for client contracts, you can create custom item types such as a Contract project type, a Service task type, and a Client card task type:
As the example above demonstrates, you can display only the necessary fields on a card, so all your information is easy to find. You can hide or show different sections like file attachments depending on a particular custom item type. In addition, you can now add a default description that will appear every time you use that custom item type in the space or account.ย
How are you using custom types? Please share your use cases and examples below ๐
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
Thanks for sharing as we are just starting to investigate Custom Item Types. Looking forward to here how other organizations are utilizing this functionality.
We have started experimenting a bit with the custom item types. The two that we have started trying are a Meeting Notes type and the other is a project type for contracts. Each of these have been pre-populated with items in the description as well as the custom fields needed. We plan to begin utilizing a variety of custom item types for specific types of service we deliver including webinars, seminars, workshops, and publications. These are for our teams to be able to more easily identify work strands and filter as needed.
We have decided not to use custom item types up to now. The advantage seems to small, but reports from other users about problem swith blueprints and similar made us careful. So we will wait some time.ย
We are planning to start using Custom Item Types with a custom workflow for SAP development task to help our IT. I have however a question - is it possible to create a Custom Item Type directly from an email with Wrike Outlook add on?ย
It would be extremely helpful.ย
Thanks for your comments, folks, really interesting!
Jolanta Konopelska The team is currently working on this enhancement ๐ฅณ
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 just discovering use cases as well for CITs, we've started testing a proof of concept with CITs for SkillSet or Work Experience Cards - to fold into resource management steps!ย ย
We are trying to implement this in our project structure in Wrike, by defining custom types such as "Deliverables", "Milestones", "Work Packages", "Objectives" and even custom "Program" and "Project" types, since it is handy that you can specify the sub-types each custom type has. Instead of working with specific folders, e.g. "Training", "Comm", ... We can define custom types for this and just filter for these tasks in reports or dashboards.
Just for the custom "Milestone" tasks, we're thinking of avoiding that for now, since you can already create milestones and filter on them. Especially since it is not possible to filter for milestones and a custom Item Type "Milestone" at the same time.
Considering the bugs and missing features, especially with the custom task types, we're not switching completely to them yet and are just preparing Blueprints in advance and testing out reporting benefits. Later on, specific project types for quick filtering on those, could be a use-case I can imagine as well.
TBH, I am still doing some testing on how custom types can benefit our process. Definitely not going to use it it doesn't bring any value to the current processes.
I'm still struggling with CITs as well.ย
I am testing using a CIT as a quick overview placed in a project, but I haven't succeeded yet.
What I want it to do is more like a standard database form. I want to select some fields I watch regularly, then pull the information from a folder of tasks and be able to flip through the specific fields for each of those tasks - like a summary card of where each task is.
I can do it with a dashboard, but I have to go into each task and look for the info. A little card index would be much nicer.
Haven't started using them yet, but interested to see how others are!
Thank you for your feedback here, everyone! ๐
By the way, all Community Ninjas, or Black- and Green-belted members, are very welcome to check out our private Wrike Ninjas Only forum, there's an interesting session on custom item types coming up, so check out more detail in the latest post in that forum if you haven't yet ๐
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 too am not yet fully using custom item types. Lisa not sure if I have access to the Ninjas Only forum, but would love to contribute there.
I see you've found it now Jesse Tenorio ๐
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 have created a couple of Custom Item Types that our Data Science team now uses to track two things.ย
Both are working great with the new board view! These made it possible to move these two workflows from Teams over to Wrike!
Hi Lisa We're using a Custom Item Type for risk. It has custom fields for probability, impact, risk category and risk response. For each project we use a table view to create a risk register of all the items of this type, with a calculated field for severity.
I've just started to look at custom item types - but already ran into a problem, that they can't be recurring! Any plans to add this?
Thanks for sharing, everyone! ๐
Dawn Kirby This enhancement is planned ๐
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 set up a ticketing system using Custom Item Types, however I noticed that Tasks created from CITs look different - the standard checkbox you see to complete a task is no longer there. You need to manually click the status dropdown to complete a task.ย I hope the check box is brought back in future renditions of CIT tasks.ย ย
Thanks a lot for this feedback Rob Gorczyca!ย
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
Is it possible to set a default custom item type for the entire account? With the new work item view, the approvals are the first thing you see when opening a default task. I'd like to adjust that for our users. I'd like the default task type to be a simple one, with approvals hidden.
Hi Karen Reijneveld, it's possible to set up custom item types suggestions, this article explains how to do it. Does this help?ย
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, I've see that page, but it describes how to do it for a space (or project or folder), not for the entire account.Or am I wrong?
It should be possible from my understanding Karen Reijneveld, I've asked our Support team to help you with that ๐ย
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 again Karen Reijneveld, apologies for the late reply here!ย
We have researched this and you're right, it's not possible to set the menu for the entire account, only for spaces. Sorry for any confusion here. I'd suggest creating a post in our Product Feedback forum as a separate suggestion if you'd like to have this ability.
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 I created a post in the product feedback forum. (at least, I think I did, but can't find it now..)
Thank you Karen Reijneveld, here's the link to your post: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/12889738418199-Set-the-new-item-type-menu-for-the-entire-accountย
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