What do you do when everybody is using “the wrong tools”? Are you going to convince everyone to do it “your way”? Or are you going to tap into the existing information stream and improve the existing stream?
As the words in “Paradise By The Dashboard Lights“:
“What is it gonna be, boy?”
Andrew Filev, the CEO of Wrike.com, decided to tap into the existing information flows of projects. In the first part of my conversation with Andrew, he explained how in today’s projects you cannot enforce a rigid regime from the top-down, and you cannot let people just do as they please. If you do it purely bottom-up, you can have chaos because there is no alignment. You have to stimulate both to get emerging structures.
Wrike, his Project Management Software, lets managers perform a little steering from the top and enables team members to collaborate freely. To accomplish this, Wrike depends heavily on its integration with e-mail, the No. 1 communication stream in projects.
Bas: “Why does Wrike have strong e-mail integration?”
Andrew: “In my opinion, there is a big gap between traditional project management software and e-mail. E-mail is the most widely used software for project management right now. Most of the projects are not managed in Microsoft Project; most of the projects right now are managed in e-mail and Microsoft Excel. It is a huge inefficiency when the project manager has to copy information from one tool to another, back and forth. When he sends an e-mail, or when he receives an email, he has to update the plan. When he updates the plan, he has to communicate that back to the members of the team and upper management. He has to send e-mails again and again.
That’s a lot of e-mails!
As you know, the number of e-mails that you send and receive can become a problem in some cases. We approached this issue not as a problem, but rather as an opportunity to make people more productive and to cut unnecessary costs.
Right from the start, we envisioned that our Project Management tool should be as much integrated with e-mail as possible. With this in mind, we came up with the idea of how people can create tasks via e-mail. This idea was developed into Wrike’s Intelligent E-mail EngineTM. This feature is now a patent pending.”
Bas: “How does this work?”
Andrew: “There are different aspects of e-mail integration in Wrike.
One
If you send an e-mail to somebody, let’s say your assistant or your team member, with a task in that e-mail, you put Wrike.com in the CC field.
Wrike will catch that e-mail.
It will parse it.
It will create a task.
It will share this task between you and the recipients.
And it will assign this task to the employee to whom you sent this e-mail.
If you put a due date in the subject line, Wrike will keep track of it. So if the person misses the deadline, the system will send a reminder to him or her automatically. You won’t have to do a thing; the software does the small routine jobs for you.
Two
If you tag the e-mail (that is, put the name of the project in the subject line), Wrike will put the task into the right part of your plan or to-do list. This saves you a lot of time. Wrike also catches the task discussions; you just need to keep wrike@wrike.com among the recipients. They are stored in the task description.
If you want to plug a new person into this — let’s say you want to pass this task to Quality Assurance — they will see a full trail of discussions behind the task. That’s an interesting part of the e-mail integration.
Three
You will receive notifications when something is changed.
There are different settings, so you can choose to receive immediate notifications about each change or a daily digest, including all the project updates. For example, if somebody reschedules his task, you’ll get an update.
If you feel that this jeopardizes some deadline, you can always follow up on that.
Last, but not least
We designed our software so that it requires no installation.
You can easily run it from BlackBerry devices.
You can run it from Gmail.
You can run it from Outlook.
You don’t need to install or download anything.
Intelligent E-mail EngineTM is a big commitment from us, and we want to make it as good as possible. Right now, we are working on a native Outlook integration and hope to introduce some more advanced features for people who are using this popular Microsoft tool very soon. We are spending a lot of time tuning things up and making our Intelligent E-mail EngineTM better and better.”
I wonder how you patent something that has been around for a long time and is pretty common. Even Basecamp finally does tasks from emails. Plus about everybody else.
Check this link: http://crowdfavorite.com/tasks-pro/features/
“Create tasks from e-mails” section. TasksPro has been around almost a decade before Wrike. Firstly as downlodable, now also a SaaS.
It's ridiculous what people try to patent these days to look original.
Alex,
I do understand what you’re talking about, however you need to check out Wrike’s email integration first to see why it is patent-pending. It is absolutely different from what you see in other systems and therefore unique. Thousands of our users agree that it’s a killer feature. To see it in action you need to simply start a free trial: http://www.wrike.com/gotoregistration.htm