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Step 2: Setting Up Your Workspace

Setting Up Your Profile

A personalized and up-to-date profile adds a personal touch to online collaboration.
Customize these 3 things to update the look and feel of your workspace:

  1. Customize your profile: Upload your avatar, enter your job title, company name, and other information. Up-to-date profile information is vital for online team collaboration.
  2. Choose Workspace Theme. Black or white, leopard or safari – make Wrike fit your preferences. The chosen theme will be applied to your personal workspace only.
  3. Check out notification settings. By default, all email and product notifications are turned on. You can edit them so you only receive emails for the changes you want to track. If you’re new to Wrike, we recommend you leave the default settings. After a couple of weeks, you can get back to fine-tuning notifications.

Basic Account Administration

Update the account setting that will affect all your team’s workspaces:

  1. Upload your company logo for branded workspace and email notification.
  2. Add your country's public holidays to the team’s default Work Schedule.

Organizing Your Work With Spaces And Folders

Set up Spaces

Spaces are hubs that store all work items related to one topic. By default, your account has a public Team Space that can be accessed by all members of your account and your Personal space where you can keep your private work.

To get started, use one of these rules of thumb for setting up your space structure. You can always change it later to fit your team processes better:

  1. Small teams can manage all their projects inside Team Space.
  2. If you have several teams, set up a space for each of them (for example: marketing, design, HR, IT).
  3. If your work is organized by client, then set up a space for each client.
  4. If you have dozens of clients, group them by region, size, or importance and create a space for each of these groups.

Spaces.png

Setting up folder structure

Folders help you categorize your tasks and projects in Spaces, such as by region, type of work, sprint, etc. Also, folders can be used as tags to categorize your tasks or projects for quick access, since a task can be placed in several folders at once. You can color-code folder names so your tags stand out visually.

Tags.png

Wrike Tip: We strongly recommend adding the following folders to your account:

  • Archive folder: Use this folder to store completed or outdated work items. Learn more
  • Knowledge Base folder: Fill this folder with tasks containing rules of using Wrike and answers to most frequent questions your team may have. Learn more
  • Templates folder: Add folder and project templates here. Create a subfolder to store individual task templates. If you are on a Business and above subscription, we recommend to enable Blueprints in Labs. Blueprints is a new section (sub-tree) within Wrike that lets you build out projects and tasks without interrupting ongoing work.

Launching New Projects

Whether you’re launching a new product, writing an ebook or preparing a conference, you’re managing a project. Use projects to manage a group of tasks that are part of a larger goal and have a due date. Here’s a step-by-step guide on launching a new project from scratch:

  1. Create a project by clicking the “+” button. Fill out the project title, due dates, and project owner and choose the default view for your tasks (List, Board, Table, or Gantt Chart).
  2. Populate it with tasks. Think of tasks as action items that should be completed in order to achieve a project goal.
  3. Assign tasks to users. Ideally, tasks should be small enough to be assigned to one person. If not, think of breaking tasks into subtasks and assign each of them.
  4. Schedule the tasks one by one or by using mass editing.
  5. Switch to the Gantt Chart to visualize your schedule. Make sure that you’ve set up correct durations for each task and reschedule tasks if needed.
  6. Set up dependencies. Dependencies help you understand how tasks are interconnected. When you reschedule a task with dependencies, all dependent tasks are automatically rescheduled. When the task is completed, the assignee of the dependent task receives a notification that they may start working on their task.
  7. Convert key tasks into milestones. Milestones reference points to mark a major event or a branching decision point in a project. When you reschedule dependent tasks on the Gantt chart, milestones aren’t rescheduled automatically.
  8. If you’re running repetitive projects, you can save it as a template and then duplicate it for future projects.

There are several ways to monitor project progress:

  1. Understand project priorities with Project Dashboard.
  2. Use built-in project progress tracker that automatically calculates your project’s progress based on selected metrics and updates it in real time. (Available for Business and above subscriptions.)
  3. Build a report based on project statuses to quickly check progress across all projects in your team or company. (Available for Business and above subscriptions.)

After you finish working on the project, mark it completed and move to the dedicated “Archive” folder.

More Resources

Wrike Discover Courses:

Onboarding Webinars:

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