I was asked to review the
Wrike Project Management tool -
http://wrike.com/Overall, I would say it's a GREAT INTERFACE - smooth, easy to use, etc. - but in regards to functionality, there seems to be some room to grow. The terminology also seems to be a bit off. Project are groups and within each group there are tasks. Some of the lacking functionality includes:
- sub tasks
- seeing/drilling down on the left hand pane to see tasks
- predecessor, successor connection between tasks
and most importantly customization. There is no way (from what I can see) to add additional fields, different statuses, new layouts, etc. By far the best feature is the time line view...how useful it is (or any time line view) is questionable, but it does look good. I think the one major short coming of the tool (and most tools) is that it's a tool and not an approach based on solid theory. Wouldn't it be nice to have a PM theory (Agile hopefully) implemented in a PM tool? I know there are some out there (
http://blog.technoetic.com/agile-pm-tools/ for a list), but none seem to be dominate (why? WHY or WHY do so many still use MS Project). The most popular PM tool still seems to be MS Excel.....what does that really say about PM maturity?
3 comments:
Meade, thank you very much for your time and feedback.
Regarding our approach to the tool, we developed Wrike for people who try to keep control of projects in a frequently changing environment. Wrike supports the emergent nature of plans. It allows managers to keep track of projects that require collaboration and would otherwise be planned over hundreds of e-mails.
Thus, Wrike is very agile and adapts to the project’s needs. You can manage a product launch, keep track of sales leads and log issues. Wrike lets you to create “groups” instead of “projects” so you can build as many hierarchies within the project as you want. And you don’t need to determine whether you created a project, subproject, task or sub-sub-task. You can create a group called “Marketing” and include in there 2 groups dedicated to the marketing of 2 different products. Then create a launch plan for one product and tactic marketing for other.
What is more, we are currently working on some of the features mentioned by you in the post. And every week we are pushing new, minor updates.
Great review. I've heard a lot of good things about Wrike and it seems to be a very complete solution for project management. While it is just a tool and doesn't solve all PM problems, I think that's just the nature of online project management tools. I think many people expect the tool to fix everything when it is still the project team that needs to take that extra step to really make a project work.
Alex
SantexQ
Online Project Management Tool
it seems me a complete solution for project management. Thanks.
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