The WRIKE Way to Share the Right Info with the Right People

What, share it? That’s right. For information to be of real value, it must be made available to people when they need it. Silo mentality is a recipe for extinction in today’s fast-moving business world. But even if information is power, that power has to be used correctly. Think ‘bionic’ or ‘laser-focused’, but think also about a system to share information according to your rules – a system that then works by itself for a project or process without you having to constantly intervene.

Wrike has made a special feature of organized sharing in its Wrike project management app. This is demonstrated in a Wrike YouTube webinar with Joy Lawless called “How to share the right information with the right people.” It covers:

• How to share tasks and folders


• How to stay up to date with work progress in shared folders


• How to share data with multiple people


• How to use custom tags for selective sharing


• How to use licenses and folder permissions to set user rights

Sharing Tasks and Folders

Collaboration and teamwork are fundamental building blocks in Wrike’s approach to project management. Sharing is made flexible so that users can customize their collaboration to achieve three important goals:

1. Optimize the use of team strengths


2. Balance the amount of information shared to enable good decisions without swamping team members out with data


3. Attribute responsibility and avoid any task being missed or ‘falling through the cracks.’

Wrike lets you share from a per-task or on a user profile basis up to a complete workspace. It also offers the unique feature of being able to share one task between several folders belonging to different users. The task is truly shared and does not exist as multiple static copies. As the task is progressed towards completion, the changes in status are automatically seen in each of the folders concerned.

Still Want a Little Privacy?

It’s also possible that there are things you don’t want to share. They might be:

• Private projects (like your vacation plans!)


• Actions that must simply remain confidential to you


• Tasks that you’re mulling over before publicizing or assigning them.

Wrike sets aside the top level (root level) of your own folder system for your personal privacy. If you want to share, i.e. let another user see information, then you must move it down from the root level and into a subfolder. You can then share that folder or just a task within that folder using menu commands, a right-click or by specifying an @’user name.’ But it’s important to remember that when a folder is shared, so are all the items and subfolders it contains.

Tracking Progress in Shared Folders

Your system for sharing and assigning responsibility to different people should not in itself create more work for you. In other words you want some kind of automatic update about how tasks are progressing instead of having to manually check each one on a round-robin basis. With Wrike:

• Control freaks can select with one click all tasks for updates


• Laissez-faire aficionados can choose to ignore the whole lot (except the tasks to which they personally are assigned.)


• Normal people and project managers can pick just those tasks they want to know about and automatically get those updates.

Sharing (and Un-sharing) Data with Multiple People

Wrike draws on its email roots to make things easy for users who want to share information with other people or groups of people. Groups can be created, modified and retired in the same way that you’d define specific distribution lists for messaging. With Wrike, these groups then benefit from the different levels of information sharing that are defined as described previously. These ‘mass actions’ increase the speed and efficiency of information sharing, collaboration, and task monitoring.

The time may come when you then need to ‘un-share’ information, for example if someone in the sharing group changes responsibilities or departments. In Wrike, this is as simple as editing the list of names in the group concerned. There are two exceptions:

• The creator of a task cannot be ‘un-shared’ from that task


• Neither can assignees (for as long as the task is assigned to them, at least.)

More Fun with Sharing and Tags

Wrike is also designed to facilitate giving people or departments customized views of a workspace. Folders and tasks can be tagged with the ID of the person or of the group. That way you can immediately show them what they need to know and save them the hassle of having to dig around for themselves. Make sure that task names contain enough information to be understandable on a stand-alone basis, or at least within the restricted context of the customized view.

Internal and External Users

Finally, Wrike’s facilities for sharing also make it easy to collaborate appropriately with colleagues who are employees of the business, and with external contractors or consultants.

• ‘Users’ can see contact information and share information forwards to others


• ‘Collaborators’ have access to information with a given project activity stream, but cannot share


• ‘External users’ do not see team member contact information or global posts in the activity stream.

Options extend to limiting actions for users at folder levels (an ‘enterprise version’ feature), such as allowing users to access information, but not to change it. This kind of fine tuning is important for managing sharing of archived documents that must remain unaltered.

Try It for Yourself!

If you haven’t yet tried Wrike, you can explore the power and flexibility of its functionality for customized information sharing by taking advantage of a free trial of the Wrike project management app. And if you already have Wrike installed, then see how much more you increase your team efficiency and effectiveness by tuning your information sharing appropriately.

The WRIKE Way to Share the Right Info with the Right People