How an engineering firm runs 12 projects in parallel without missing a deadline

The problem before Wrike: everything in email and project files

An engineering firm we work with kept its deadlines on an Excel sheet, its files on the internal server and its contacts with external consultants over email. The sheet was updated by the manager, but not always in real time. The result: the owner had no real visibility over the status of the 12 active projects and had to make phone calls to find out where each one stood, almost 2 hours a week.

In that period the firm had missed two deadlines because of poor coordination between dependent activities, and the external consultants stayed outside the workflow, receiving only email updates.

How we structured Wrike for this firm

• A duplicable template for each new project, with the standard phases: preliminary, definitive, executive, works supervision.
• A portfolio dashboard for the owner, with the status of every project at a single glance.
• Limited access for external consultants, directly in Wrike.
• Explicit dependencies between tasks, automatically calculating the impact of a delay on later activities.

The results after 4 months

• The owner's weekly time on project control: from 2 hours to under 20 minutes.
• Zero missed deadlines in the 4 months after implementation.
• External consultants stopped emailing to ask for updates.
• Opening a new project: from 2 hours to under 10 minutes.