Wrike introduces new Work Management Platform

The need for workplace connectivity and greater alignment across teams has increased significantly over the past few years as teams, departments, and organisations adapt to unprecedented workplace changes, economic uncertainty and, most recently, historically low levels of productivity. Today, at Collaborate, Wrike executives announced a newly designed platform, including a streamlined user experience, artificial intelligence capabilities, and powerful new features. With an average performance increase of up to 45%, the new platform is already proven to provide organisations with the fastest way to productivity, giving them the freedom to focus on their most impactful work. 

Wrike also introduced Team Plan, a new, cost-effective plan that includes intuitive, modern design and the most essential features that teams need to start working effectively right away. These updates could not have come at a better time, as businesses of all sizes seek tools that enable efficiency and a faster pace of work to positively impact their bottom line. 

“IDC predicts that the market for team collaboration applications will grow at a 5-year CAGR of 19%,” according to Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research VP of Collaboration and Communities. "Collaboration is something people do together, but the right technologies help it inform and scale across an enterprise. In a world where work is more flexible and we are blending workspace and workplace, connecting actual work to core systems becomes an imperative to grow as a digital company."

Introducing Wrike Lightspeed

Wrike Lightspeed makes it easy for organisations to get started with work management and stay in a single platform as they grow, giving employees the fastest way to productivity. The new interface has been redesigned from the ground up to stand out with the three critical values: intuitiveness, versatility, and scalability. Intuitiveness allows the user to manage work effortlessly and make the time spent in Wrike productive and enjoyable, whether working as a team or individually. Versatility gives the power to manage diverse types of work with configurations specific to each team or department. And all of this work can be managed at scale no matter how complex work becomes as more teams and departments get onboard across the entire organisation.

“Companies of all sizes are experiencing a downturn in productivity accelerated by a more rapid pace of work, unexpected pivots in business strategy, lack of resources, and employee burnout,” says Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO, Wrike. “Wrike Lightspeed is designed to tackle the most pressing business challenges and increase productivity through key collaboration, prioritisation, and automation features. Our Dark Matter of Work research found that 86% of organisations are planning to invest in solutions with AI and workflow automation capabilities to create a single source of truth for work and increase efficiency. Our new platform delivers this today, helping our customers do the best work of their lives in a time where efficiency is paramount. Wrike Lightspeed is not only our biggest launch in two years, but the first one as a newly independent company.”

An intuitive experience 

Wrike Lightspeed delivers a new, user-friendly interface – with a modern look and feel, new views with improved performance, an intuitive set up, and a decluttered workspace – enabling the shortest learning curve for teams of any size. The ergonomic user interface of Wrike Lightspeed allows teams to focus on their work, not being distracted by unnecessary features, while also allowing organisations to introduce more powerful functionality as they’re ready to scale. With the following improvements to the core views, users can expect an average performance increase of up to 45% (based on internal performance testing):

• Personal Work Experience is our new product homepage where users can configure various widgets to see incoming inbox messages, manage their tasks, and stay on top of their own productivity.

• Updated Board View presents projects in a Kanban-style board with easy column setup, subtask preview, workflow modification, and one-click assignments.

• Updated Table View blends the ease of use of spreadsheets with the power of hierarchical work breakdown.

• Updated Gantt View takes one of the most popular project management views and delivers a simpler user experience to display projects in timeline view with dependencies and milestones and show the impact of rescheduling on the overall project.

• New Calendar View provides a weekly, monthly, and quarterly view of projects, and allows teams to manage roadmaps.

• New Analytics View pulls data all together in a birds-eye view, allowing stakeholders to see a summary of any project or workflow.

“The different views are super helpful,” says Nicki Batelli, Vice President, Social and Digital Strategy, Game Shows at Sony Pictures Television. “We use the Gantt chart to understand all of our overlapping projects and timelines. It’s really valuable to understand the full scope of work happening against a calendar view.”

Versatility for all teams

Wrike puts companies back in control and enables teams to configure work their way in the context of one, unified platform. Beyond individual teams being able to configure all aspects of a workflow in their Space, Wrike provides a universal way to view work across the company and report on it top down.

Building upon the track record of continuous innovation, Wrike shipped the industry-first Custom Item Types, a unique platform capability that enables teams to speak the language of their work in Wrike, giving them ultimate flexibility in how they build, manage, and run their workflows.

Custom Item Types works together with foundational Wrike Lightspeed platform capabilities like Work Graph, Dynamic Request Forms, and Blueprints, and is supported across the whole platform both in team-specific Spaces, and account-wide to establish standards across an organisation. Custom Item Types strengthens existing use cases and significantly expands the amount of new use cases Wrike can support. 

“Custom Item Types has given us the added flexibility to pinpoint items without additional workarounds, and we've been better able to target automations, use specific statuses for items, and use them in dashboards, filters, tables, and reports,” says Allie Zoranski, Copy Manager, Neiman Marcus Group. “We also love that we can customise the item to only show features or specific custom fields that are pertinent to that item type. Custom Item Types are like having a built in custom field that doesn't need to be as manually managed."

To further the platform’s versatility, Wrike announced Customisable User Types today, offering more flexibility around user permissions. Customisable User Types gives account admins more control and discretion to provision user access in Enterprise-level organisations looking for infinite scalability. 

Scale all the way

Wrike is the only work management platform that allows infinite scale utilising automation, integrations, work intelligence, and security. Today, Wrike introduced Space Workflows, a new feature that empowers teams to configure and control their own compartmentalised workflows, enabling even more granular Space administration, down to each process and status personalisation. 

Space Workflows separate organisational and departmental work processes clearly, fostering effective end-to-end process management for those familiar with the day-to-day activities of specific teams. For instance, departmental operations teams, like Marketing Ops and DevOps, now have the power to run their team’s workflows at the Space level, while IT has control over processes that are established across the company using Wrike account settings.

“Wrike provides a flexible system infrastructure that is easily configured to meet our business needs,” says Damian Robles, Head of Solutions, Business Excellence, Region Americas, Siemens Smart Infrastructure. “While there are differences in the use cases across our organisation, we are all working on projects and are able to standardise globally on key functions, as well as exchange best practices in our implementation around the world.”

Wrike also delivers power at scale through:

• A robust Work Graph data model, which enables flexible hierarchies and advanced reporting needed to effectively manage complex project portfolios, programs, and workflows while providing top-down visibility.

• Extensive automation capabilities, from work intake, to project creation, assignment and work distribution, collaboration, and reporting. 

• A new feature, External Requester Collaboration, which is based on request forms and enables seamless collaboration between Wrike users and external stakeholders that do not have a Wrike account. For example, an outside marketing agency can submit a request and track its status in email without having to log into Wrike. Similarly, service teams can now seamlessly collaborate on tasks with external requesters not requiring them to learn a new tool.

• Data integration engine pulls data from third-party applications, including document repositories and DAM solutions, publishes Wrike data to BI and Analytics tools, and connects workflows with specific line-of-business applications.  

• Work Intelligence powered by Wrike’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. The latest addition, AI Subitem creation, allows users to quickly convert unstructured meeting notes, documents, tables, or checklists into actionable tasks.

• Unmatched security. Wrike’s Locked Spaces, in combination with SSO, Space-level administration, and Customisable User Types, deliver unmatched security even for customers working with the most sensitive data. 

“We’ve spent the last few years honing in on three critical elements that drive the vision of Wrike and future of work – intuitiveness, versatility, and scalability,” says Alexey Korotich, VP of Product, Wrike. “Our teams have been working hard to anticipate current and future market challenges so that we can fulfill our vision to deliver the most powerful work management platform. Wrike Lightspeed gives customers everything they need to work at the speed of light, providing the fastest way to productivity.”