Wrike analyze is the gold standard for data visualization and allows for meaningful insights.
This useful add-on provides advanced analytics functionality and allows you to build interactive,
highly customizable dashboards tailored to your needs and goals.
You can present data from your account in formats such as tables, pie charts,
column charts and many more.
The ability to add multiple widgets on a single analytics board gives you the opportunity
to create a top level monitoring panel and to get insights from the data.
You’ll find it easy to analyze the efficiency of your work processes
or to get project status updates.
Possible use cases for Wrike Analyze include creating executive dashboards with project
statuses and portfolios,
monitoring historical performance,
viewing your team’s utilizations,
monitoring custom data, and more.
In order to create a new analytical board or access the ones that you have created earlier,
you need to go to the Reports section.
You can either use one of the templates provided or create a new analytics board from scratch.
In the list of reports, icons representing the analytics board are different from the
ones representing reports, so you’ll find it easy to distinguish the two.
Wrike Analyze offers several templates that cover common scenarios and allow you to build
an analytical board with just a few clicks.
Let’s say that as the marketing manager, Jessica needs to have high-level visibility
into all the marketing projects her team’s working on.
She selects “Project portfolio overview” template, chooses the whole Marketing space
as the source, and clicks “create”.
As you can see, the analytics board is divided into 3 main sections.
At the top, there’s the board name.
It’s important to give boards self-explanatory names,
so Jessica calls this one “Marketing projects”.
To the right is the date and time, telling us when its contents were last updated.
Then there is the edit button.
This allows you to edit the widgets, and change their size and position.
By clicking the “share” button, you can share the board with other users in the account.
Finally, there’s a menu button at the top right-hand corner.
From this menu, you’re able to export a board as either a PDF document or PNG image,
or delete the board.
The middle section is the main one.
It shows all the widgets that are part of this template.
Finally, the right-hand side section shows us all the filters that have been enabled
for the whole analytics board.
Widgets can have their own filters, but by default they inherit all the filters that
are enabled for the dashboard.
Let’s have a look at the widgets that are included in Jessica’s “Marketing projects”
analytics board.
At the top we have four indicator-type widgets.
The one on the left shows the total number of projects in the Marketing space.
The one to the right shows the number of projects that have not been marked as completed.
The next one shows us how many projects that have missed their due date.
And the last one showcases the overall percentage of task completion in all the projects.
Moving below.
On the left-hand side we can see a pie chart type widget that shows the percentage of the
projects in each status.
All the widgets on a single board are interconnected.
So when Jessica selects “active”, other widgets adjust accordingly.
Moving to the next widget, “Projects by Owner”.
This is a column chart widget.
It shows all the projects from the selected source, in our case the "Marketing" space.
These projects are grouped by the project owner.
Each color indicates a project status so you can get a birds-eye view of project progress.
Finally, there’s “Projects List”, which is a pivot-type widget.
It shows some high-level information on all the projects residing in a selected location.
Because Jessica’s team is working on a large number of projects simultaneously, information
in the widget is divided into several pages and she can switch between them.
As you can see, the project portfolio overview template is a quick way to get high-level
visibility into your projects.
Jessica is preparing for a planning meeting with the members of an executive team.
In order to plan more efficiently, she wants to visualize how time was distributed between
different categories of work in the previous quarter.
This time she’s not going to use a template but instead, build a new analytical board
from scratch.
She clicks “Custom analytics board” and once again selects Marketing space
as the source.
Jessica’s new board is empty and it’s time to populate it with widgets.
But first, let’s review the steps required to add a widget to a dashboard.
Firstly, we need to create the measures by selecting an attribute, or several of them,
that’ll serve the base for our widget.
In the second stage, we need to add all the necessary filters to narrow down our results
and make the information that’s going to be presented in the widget very specific.
Then we need to choose the necessary format of our widget.
Wrike Analyze offers a variety of options here.
Finally, we need to place our widget on the dashboard and resize it, if needed.
Now when we know the theory, it is time to start building our widget.
Jessica needs to see how time was spent every week during the last quarter, and how it was
distributed between the categories.
So the key measure for our widget would be the time that was spent.
Jessica clicks the “select data” button and chooses “Timelog time spent (minutes)”.
Then she clicks “advanced configuration” at the bottom left-hand corner and starts
setting up the widget.
Jessica wants to see the data presented in the column chart view, so she chooses the
corresponding option here from this menu.
Due to the fact that Jessica needs to see the time spent by category, she needs to add
the corresponding attribute - “timelog category” - here in the “break by” section.
Now every category is represented with a separate column, and it’s time to divide all the
time entries by week.
Jessica adds the “Years in Timelog Creation date” attribute and changes years to weeks
by clicking this button here.
She would also like to see the captions under the columns to be presented in a certain format,
so she clicks this small calendar button and changes it.
Our total time spent is now measured in minutes.
But it would be better to see it in hours.
So Jessica opens the formula here in the “values” section and divides the time spent by 60
to get hours, not minutes.
Now she needs to apply a filter to narrow down the results presented in the chart,
because she only needs to see the time spent in Q4.
She switches to the “filters” tab, here on the right-hand side
and adds a filter on Timelog creation date.
She switches from years to quarters and selects only Q4.
Just a couple of finishing touches left.
Jessica switches to “design” tab and changes the column type to “Stacked”.
Finally, she gives this widget a self-explanatory title.
All done.
The widget looks amazing.
Data is presented in an easy-to-comprehend visualized way, which makes it easy to make
decisions for the next quarter.
As you can see, once you understand the principle behind the process of creating a widget,
you can build analytics boards on your own.
Just follow the four steps we described and you’ll harness the power of Wrike Analyze.