Vegas Buzz Teleconference and Interview with Andrew Filev, Founder Wrike.com

April 15, 2008

Andrew Filev, shared insights in a teleconference today regarding the Wrike online project manager.

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Here's a replay of the seminar, in case you missed it.
http://www.instantteleseminar.com/?preview=3&previewbar=1&eventid=2580762

You can also download it to your iPod or Blackberry. *******************************************************************************************



1. What makes Wrike different?

Wrike is an integrated, online project management solution that helps you manage projects, teams and businesses. By turning email overload into well-organized plans on the Web, Wrike makes your organization more efficient, transparent and agile. Wrike is collaborative, Web-based, easy-to-use and inexpensive, so you can roll it out company-wide.

Let me outline three key areas where Wrike is unique.

First, it makes you very efficient, thanks to Wrike’s market leading Intelligent Email Engine that works seamlessly with your emails.

Second, Wrike gives you a complete and up-to-date picture out of many projects, plans and emails using Wrike's unique Flexible Structures.

Last but not least Wrike fits your budget with powerful features, packaged as an easy-to-use, inexpensive Software as a Service. The price starts at 4 dollars a month.

2. Who can benefit most from using Wrike?

Wrike helps executives, project managers and regular employees to work more efficiently. Let me briefly outline Wrike benefits for these three groups of people.

For executives, Wrike bridges the gap between the strategic plans and everyday jobs of employees. Wrike's unique features build a complete picture of business from separate parts, such as projects, employees' to-do lists and departments’ quarterly plans. The picture is updated in real time by managers and employees as they email each other and collaborate. So executives get a unique control of operations and a clear visibility of their businesses.

For project managers, Wrike does a lot of routine work. It reminds employees about overdue tasks and composes individual schedules for them. Neat Gantt Charts are automatically built from emails by Wrike's Intelligent Email Engine.

When it comes to planning and managing, Wrike's Flexible Structures is the best solution. Wrike is the only product that I know that enables project managers to apply several work-breakdown structures to the same project and easily merge different views into a bigger picture. Managers can share those views with different teams, build project schedules from the bottom up and easily evolve the plan over time.

For team members, Wrike turns everyday emails into Web-based collaboration to increase productive. Wrike's Intelligent Email Engine creates online shared space from emails that people send to each other. Together, teams can share and discuss files, organize information the way they like. Wrike reminds people about overdue tasks and notifies them about changes in the workspace. It is very easy to use Wrike because the Intelligent Email Engine works with any email software, including BlackBerry, Web-based email and all email clients.

3. Most Important Features to use?

There are many features in the product. Three of them are particularly helpful and distinctive.

The first feature is Wrike’s Intelligent Email Engine. People love it. It enables you to create tasks anywhere, anytime, without logging into the system.

You only need to CC your next email with a task to wrike@wrike.com, and Wrike will help you to keep track of it. When the task is updated, Wrike will send you an instant email notification about the progress. When the task is overdue, Wrike will automatically remind about it to a person responsible for completing the task.

Wrike perfectly works with any email client, including Outlook, BlackBerry, Gmail and any other desktop, Web-based and mobile email software.

Wrike’s Intelligent Email Engine™ builds you a timeline from tasks that you email. Once you send an email with wrike@wrike.com in the CC field, the task is added to the project plan and appears on a timeline in Wrike. Here we came to the second the second feature that people like about Wrike, the timeline or Gantt chart.

The timeline is one of the main instruments of a project manager. It allows you to plan projects more effectively and gives a better view of the project status. Wrike’s timeline does even more. It nicely merges separate project parts into a bigger picture. Depending on your needs, you can browse a timeline for one employee or for your whole organization. You can drill down into the details or get an overview for a series of projects.

Wrike saves you time on planning and rescheduling your projects. Thanks to the drag-and-drop feature, you can reschedule tasks right on a timeline. Wrike automatically communicates changes in the project plan to your team, doing one more routine job for you.

We briefly touched Wrike's flexibility and its ability to merge plans. That is a third main part of our secret sauce. In Wrike, the daily to-do lists of your employees merge into project plans. Project plans are in turn merged into a bigger picture, so you can better align the pieces.

The whole structure becomes more transparent and can be traced from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. You can instantly get up-to-date information about your business, anywhere, anytime. Wrike can easily merge sub-projects, different views and your employees’ to-do lists into a bigger picture.

If your projects change over time, you can easily adapt your plans in Wrike. This enables your team to become more agile and better meet project requirements.

So, three very distinctive features of Wrike are email integration, timeline and flexibility. We also have the regular bells and whistles of online collaboration applications.

4. Features coming?

There are a lot of interesting features in our plans. We release about five minor features every two weeks. One of the most important and challenging features that we are working on right now is developing so called task dependencies that include a scheduling engine, nice looking visual representation for the Gantt chart and compatibility with our Flexible Structures.

5. Most popular features

Email integration is a winner. We constantly hear a lot of good words about it from our users.

6. Why was Wrike developed?

I have been managing businesses for more than 8 years now, and I know how inefficient traditional project management tools, like e-mail or Microsoft project are. Most of the businesses now have three major gaps that could be easily filled up with the right tool.

First, there is a gap between strategic plans and daily agenda of the employees. In many businesses strategic plans, quarterly plans, project plans, and daily to-do lists of team members are separated. All of these plans should be a part of one master plan. There should be a tool able to easily merge plans into a bigger picture. With the help of this tool daily to-do lists should emerge into project plans. Projects should lead to achieving strategic goals. So this tool should utilize the principle of emergent structures. Emerging structures allow combining top-down and bottom-up planning to bridge the gap in the middle. The whole structure is then transparent and can be traced from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. This is a real time visibility into a company that lets corporate executives lead their business in the right direction.

Second, there is a gap between e-mail and project management software that made project management software inefficient. E-mail is the most widely-used software tool in project management, and at the same time traditional project management tools, like Microsoft Project, ignore this fact. This leaves a gap between everyday project management tool (e-mail) and project planning software (Microsoft Project, Excel). This results in putting a heavy burden onto managers.

They need to gather information from e-mails, merge it into a bigger picture, manually update plans, communicate updated version to team members and report the progress to the top manager. This seriously decreases productivity on all levels in the organization, including top managers' productivity. It is hard to get a picture of where the business stands if you simply rely on thousands of e-mails spread across hundreds of mailboxes. E-mail buries a lot of valuable information. There should be a tool that will help to turn the e-mail mess into organized projects increasing productivity and bringing control of business.

The third gap is between project management tools and web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 collaboration tools, like wikis, are much more powerful than traditional project management software, because they leverage collective intelligence and emerging structures. At the same time they lack some pieces that are crucial in order to use them as effective management tools. There was a huge potential in bringing best practices of Web 2.0 into project management software and business management software. Instead of being a complex, expensive and stiff tool designed for trained project managers, the new tool should be simple, agile and inexpensive and should be used by the whole company from top managers to employees. It will greatly increase productivity of the whole team, and will make managers' job easier.

So when I started Wrike, the idea was to invent a project management application that would help businesses to deal with all the three problems.

7. Andrew Filev Background

Through my career I built a successful company with more than a hundred engineers, received Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award, co-authored a book and filed a patent. I always loved developing innovative software and did this in various roles, both engineering and management.

Right now, I spend all my energy into making Wrike the most successful project management software.

Take the Wrike Tour! CLICK HERE

Questions asked by participants:

I have an eBay business and occasionally a few outside people help me with it. Can I use Wrike?

What is the largest team Wrike can handle?

I work at home. Can I use Wrike?

How safe is my data with Wrike?

These questions and more were answered during the teleconference.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

Take the Wrike Tour! CLICK HERE

(C) 2008 Vegas Buzz News Network