[Wrike Labs] Work Templates 💥
Update ❗
Hello Community! 👋
Today, we are very excited to share the latest Wrike Labs release - Work Templates 💥
Work Templates provide you with a work modeling capability that allows building new types of work in Wrike. They enable you to build new work items - campaigns, epics, stories, service requests, and more in addition to the existing items (subtasks, tasks, and projects).
Before we go further, please note that this is an experimental feature that’s released in Wrike Labs, and as a result, it may have bugs and is subject to change.
Work Templates - What are they?
This new feature allows you to create fully customizable templates based on regular projects and tasks. These templates can be tailored to the needs of your whole organization or specific departments and teams. You can pre-configure dates, assignees, locations, define workflows, select which custom field to show, and more to create domain-specific work templates like OKRs, user stories, bugs, requests, etc. Finished work templates can be used by account and space users in their future work.
Work Templates can be used as:
- Account-level work templates. These are available to all users in the account, except for external users and collaborators. Templates are stored in a library that account owners and admins can open from the homepage.
Tip! Create new templates on the account level if they are relevant for the whole organization and need to be accessible to most users for cross-functional work.
- Space-level work templates. These are available to all space members, except for external users and collaborators. They aren’t accessible outside of the space they were created in.
Tip! Space-level templates come in handy if you manage a team or department space, so you can create space-level work templates that fit the specific needs of your team.
Work Templates vs. Blueprints
We view Work Templates as the next generation of Blueprints. Both of these functionalities allow you to create reusable work items out of pre-defined templates based on your work experience and needs.
The main differentiators for Work Templates are:
- They are fully customizable task or project views with a new way of managing custom fields for work items
- They can be used on both space and account levels
- They are easy to manage for admins through the template gallery
- They can be created using other work templates (for example, an Epic template can include templatized Stories)
For more information on the difference between the two, please check out the Help Center article.
Tip! You can use Work Templates and Blueprints in your account at the same time.
How to Enable Work Templates
Account owners and admins can enable the Work Templates feature for the whole account from Wrike Labs. Just click Enable on the Work Templates card and refresh your workspace.
How to Create Work Templates
Account-level work Templates. Account owners and admins can create new account-level work templates by selecting the Work templates section on the right-hand panel on the Home page. Alternatively, select Work templates from the Launchpad.
Space-level work Templates. Space admins can create new space-level work templates by navigating to the relevant space and selecting the Work templates tab in the Space settings.
How to Edit Work Templates
Account owners and admins can manage existing account-level work templates. Space admins can manage existing space-level work templates in their space.
To edit a work template, navigate to the template gallery in the account or space settings that you manage, click on the relevant template, and start editing. You can edit the title, short description, attached work items, full description, system or custom fields, workflows, attachments, and more.
Tip! Updates to work templates are saved automatically
How to Create Work Items from Work Templates
All users and space members, except for external users and collaborators, can create work items out of account-level and space-level work templates.
You can create real work from templates by using the big➕ button at the top of your workspace or from context creation. This means that wherever you create regular tasks and projects, you can create work from templates there too. You can easily modify this work creation menu and leave/enable only work templates that matter most.
To sum it up, with Work Templates, you can now work natively with campaigns, customers, products, user stories, epics, service requests, and endless other work types that are part of your day-to-day workflows in addition to tasks, projects, and folders.
We are very eager for you to try out the Work Templates and let us know your feedback. Please let us know what you think in the comments below! 👇
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
This is a great development! Though, I think we will have to wait until they can be used with request forms.
Will there be a way to import existing blueprints or older, plain templates?
It looks very promising!!! The "Customize" showed nothing here and the Help Center don't really mention it, is this right?
I've always used Blueprints ... I will need to play with this feature! Thanks!
Sorry - I've read both this and the Work Templates in the help center and I still don't really see what the difference is...
Debbie Brownlie Feeling the same 🙃
Hi everyone, thanks a lot for sharing your feedback on the Work Templates release 🤗
Joshua Balentine As this is a Labs release, the team definitely has plans to improve the functionality. The ability to save blueprints as work templates as well as using the work templates in requests are on the team's plans 👍
Neyl Walecki This "Customize" button allows you to set up which system and custom fields should be visible on the projects and tasks created from the work template.
Shelly Erickson It would be great if you could share how it goes with the Community 😊 Also, let me know if you have any questions, of course!
Debbie Brownlie No worries! 😊 As I mentioned in this post, the team views Work Templates as the new generation of Blueprints, with the new approach to their management, customization, and the process of creating work out of them. For example, with the new Work Templates, it's possible to only show specific custom and even system Wrike fields in the templates.
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 don't have this turned on yet, but from the screenshots above, I do have a question. Will Work Templates always show up under the "+" menu? If we only want to kick off a blueprint (or work template in the future) from a request form, will there be a way to hide it so others can't accidentally create one without going through the request form?
I also agree that the ability to convert a blueprint to a work template will be helpful (and to kick them off from a request form).
Thanks!
Thank you for your question Devree Czupinski!
The ➕ menu shows the templates that are set up in the location you are in right now. If you don't need some of the templates to be shown there, an account or space admin can turn them off from the suggested templates list.
As I mentioned above, the ability to save blueprints as work templates as well as using the work templates in requests is something that the team has plans for 🤗
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
Sounds Interesting, and excited to see the full differences as we love Blueprints!
Thank you, Casey Olson! 🤗 Let me know if you have any questions about Work Templates 👍
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,
Do I understand correctly that I cannot create Project-based work templates that include any templatized tasks or other work templates in it? Looks like I can do this with tasks/sub tasks, but not projects?
Do you have the timeline in mind for API support? I'm really excited to use this feature for one of our planned integrations, but we can't use it without APIs.
Here's how I'm describing the difference between request forms and templates to my users:
Use them when...
Request forms
Work templates
Hi Julia Berzoy, thank you for reaching out!
You can add the usual tasks, projects, and folders as well as the items from the existing templates from the same space or the account-level ones to your project templates.
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 might be missing something, I don't see the way to include any tasks or other work templates into my project template. I can only customize its landing page:
The integration we are building is with an internal app, we want to ensure Wrike is our place to view all data in one location and build the reports. The other app has important metadata we need to track and the best way to carry it over is via custom fields. Unfortunately today you don't have an API to associate an existing account level custom field with the new space programmatically. Work templates allow us potentially to duplicate new tasks from the template and have those custom fields being configured at the task template level. However, without APIs it won't be feasible either. I'm looking forward to the early next year!
Thank you for sharing that Julia Berzoy!
I'll ask my colleagues to look into this for you 👍
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
Seems a nice new tool. I will for sure try it. Great to have more costumization, but one bad thing: again more work for space admins to set it up 😉
Appreciate the feedback Sven Passinger, I've shared it with the team 👍🏼
At least for now I used the Excel export and import function to bring some existing blueprints over to work projects.
Looking at work templates and the one thing that I am missing is the ability to set dates when you deploy the template. When you use blueprints there is a field to adjust the dates from when the template was created to when it is being used. With Work templates only see title and projects create from template have the original creation date. Am I missing a setting or is this not yet implemented? If we have to go and edit all of the dates template not too useful.
Hi Mike Burke, welcome to the Community! 👋
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your feedback here! I'll pass it on to the Product team 👍 I'll let you know if I have anything to share on your question.
If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum.
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,
My team has started reviewing and using work templates but have been unable to identify a setting that turns on the project progress tracking once a project is created from a work template. The below feature is what we are looking for. Thanks!
The issue Scott Norris mentioned, not being able to turn on project progress when projects are created from templates, is likely the exact same as with blueprints. Progress and health settings can be set in the blueprint, but once projects are created from that blueprint, project progress and health tracking are back to default ("Don't measure progress" and unchecked "Show project health"). We have automations in place to create tens or even hundreds of projects at once, but the progress and health settings have to be set manually project by project. Here's hoping that Wrike enables carrying progress and health settings from template/blueprint to project.
Hi Scott Norris, Tuomo Suominen, currently, it's not possible to turn on Project Progress on projects created from Work Templates. I've shared your feedback with our Product team 👍🏼
Hi all! We are happy to invite you to beta test Work Item Automation that works for the Work Templates, please find details 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
Hey again, everyone! 😊 If you're interested in a deeper dive into what Work Templates have to offer, please check out this post 👍
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,
Blueprints have the nice functionality of adding a "prefix" to the title of the tasks/subprojects of the blueprint. This is immensely useful when creating multiple tasks/projects from blueprints to distinguish those automatically generated tasks by title. For work tempaltes, it seems to me that you can only name the main project but not choose prefixes for subprojects/tasks within the project.
Will this title prefix functionality be introduced to work templates in the future? Or did I miss something and it's already available?
Thanks,
Ralph
Ralph Rothemund I must admit - i haven't had a chance to change over my blueprints to templates (I am yet to be convinced they are any better tbh) but this is a deal breaker for us.
We have multi level project plans for machine builds - and each new project has the same task titles, but with a job prefix. If work templates don't have this, then there is no point for us.
Hey folks, thanks a lot for this feedback, I've made the Product team aware of it 👍
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 all
Why did the loaded work template looks diffrent to the normal task?
Hi Lukas Flatz! Work Templates is new experimental functionality with new design and capabilities 😊 I'd recommend checking out this post for more info on how work templates work and if you could share any feedback on what you like or don't like about this newer configuration, please share it!
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 thanks for the link. Will all task look like these in future?
You're welcome Lukas Flatz 😊
As I mentioned above, this is experimental functionality, and the Product team continues the research and also analyzes the feedback that we get in relation to Work Templates. For now, this functionality is viewed as Blueprints 2.0 and for now, there are no plans that all tasks in Wrike will look like this too.
Could you please share any feedback on how you found the template tasks? Were they easy to use? Please share your thoughts 🙌
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