Folder Structure examples

I've used Wrike since 2013.  I've always found the "flexible folder structure" to be THE most difficult aspect in the program (to set-up, to change later, to explain to new users, to be efficient, etc).  It can be a double-edge sword - simultaneously allowing for amazing flexibility, while potentially causing a confused jumble.  Am I alone on this?

Without violating any confidentiality concerns... Would anyone be willing to post screenshots of the structures they use, with a brief description to provide context? 

Also, would any of the fine folks at Wrike be able to provide high-level structures that are commonly recommended?

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Anastasia

Hi Sam, thanks for bringing up this topic! A clear Folder Structure is definitely an important aspect, you can find some of the suggested ones described in this article.

Additionally, I wanted to share the structure we use ourselves in Wrike:

  • Company - used to store company wide information. 
  • Departments - used to organize and manage work by department. Additional Subfolders may be added by team members or department managers.
  • Offices - Folders for each location where we have an office, containing any info which is location specific.
  • Personal - a place for private or personal Folders. It can also be used for Folders you want to share with just a few people and there is no good place to put them in the main company Folder Structure. Selective Sharing allows us to limit access to our personal Subfolders in this section, while keeping the top level Folder visible.

I would love to hear about the structures other companies use too!

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Hi Sam - we are relatively new to Wrike (2-3 months in) and this is our biggest challenge as well. It is a gift and a curse and we haven't quite figured out the right balance between added functionality / too much clutter just yet - any suggestions from the community would be greatly appreciated!

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@Anastasia - The templates provided in your link are a great help. 

Using a department-based organization, who has access to the highest level overview of all folder?  Managers?  Department heads?  Everyone?  And if not everyone, are individual team members only shared with their respective department folder?  **Assuming inherited sharing is not turned off, as that feature changes this answer**

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Anastasia

@Sam, visibility depends on the level of transparency a company wants to achieve, as well as collaboration between departments. If you choose to share the top level folders with everyone, sometimes it still makes sense to limit visibility for certain users. A good way to manage this would be to share top level Folders with the "My Team" group - only Regular Users are a part of it. When you add a new employee to the system, they can be granted an External User license at first, and whenever they become a Regular User, they'll automatically see more data. Same goes for Collaborators  - since they are not a part of "My Team", they will see only those locations which were explicitly shared with them.

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I would agree with this, the concept was a bit hard to understand at first.

After further review and testing, it seems that the folder structure is critical, depending in generating the right reports.

The biggest challenge I am having is getting people to accurately tag everything in the 20 folders tasks should be tagged in.

We have grouped things up by the following, hope this helps someone.

1) By Project Manager

2) By Departments

3)By Project Type

4) By Clients

5)By Complexity within a department

 

Best of luck!

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We definitely struggled with this issue as well in the beginning. I would say it is important to think about how you will need to filter things to find information down the road.  I lead our marketing and sales dept. We use Wrike to manage communication projects to various audiences using various platforms for many different projects/events/campaigns. 

I created 3 main folders under a Communications Dept. folder.  Audience, Platform and Project. 

The Audience folder includes subfolders for each audience that we direct communication to. 

The Platform folder has subfolders for each platform we use to push out these communications pieces. (email, print publications, mailings, social media, internal doc, etc.) 

The Project folder includes subfolders for each campaign/event/project. 

Each task created has to has to be added to a subfolder from each of the 3 main folders. 

Example: Task that is assigned to Email Blast folder, Candidates folder, October Exam folder.
This way I can look to see what communication piece we have put out to a specific audience (Candidates) and determine if we can piggy back messages to that audience in an existing campaign or does an new one need to be created.  Or by looking at a specific project(October Exam) I can determine what communication pieces we are putting out for that project regardless of platform and audience.  Same with Platform, I can look to see what communication pieces we are putting out via an email blast regardless of audience or project to determine server load. 

This makes planning for the new year much easier.  I can just duplicate folders for campaigns we do every year and don't miss anything.

Hope this helps!

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Hi Mindy - We are just getting on board with Wrike and your suggested setup sounds very similar to what I would like to do as it would be great to look at the info in these different ways. Question though - so if you set up a task to create an email blast in the project folder, how are you getting it to show up in the other appropriate folder (audience)? If you're available to chat offline as well, please let me know!

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Hello All,

I appreciate all the time and effort folks have put into this thread, as it has provided our Project Management team with some great ideas for working out a solid folder structure.

 

While it may seem a bit old-fashioned, I've found that driving the folder structure to support the project review process has worked best. In other words, if you are using a weekly meeting, you and your team should be able to easily and intuitively find the projects that you're looking for. That is both a practical guideline and a litmus test for if our structure is too confusing. In our case, that structure boils down to:

1. Department 

2. Project Leader

3. Customer

I hope this is helpful to those just starting to explore this topic. Good luck!

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I settled on Wrike for the very power of this feature to assign tasks to multiple folders and even to assign tasks to other tasks.

It may help new users to think of folders as "Tags" as well as a way to organize information.  For example, a task might reside in both the Priority>AAA folder and also be assigned the Priority>Today folder and the Domain>Personal.  In this way the same task is "tagged" as AAA important and on the schedule for today for Personal business.

You can then focus on your data based on what is important at the moment.  Are you done with all of today's tasks?  Then click on the Priority>AAA folder and see if it's time to move some of them to the Priority>Today folder.  Maybe it's time to move some from the Priority>BBB folder to the Priority>AAA folder, etc.

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