Hello, everyone.
Let’s talk about blueprints, which are an easy way to speed up repetitive work in Wrike.
This is an experimental feature and needs to be activated by your account admin.
To use it, go to wrike.com/labs and check the box over here.
Now you’re good to go, so let’s see how this feature works and what it’s for.
Blueprints let you build out projects and tasks without interrupting ongoing work.
Once enabled, blueprints appear right in your folder tree here in a separate section.
That means now you can keep your ongoing work separate from non-actionable items.
So far, there are no items in this section, so let’s create our first blueprint together.
There are two ways of doing this.
You can either create a project, folder, or task blueprint from scratch,
or you can save an existing project, folder, or task as a blueprint.
Let’s create one from scratch.
But first, let’s quickly discuss how you might use them.
Say we have a team that delivers webinars on a weekly basis.
All the webinars include the same actionable items,
so in order to speed up the process of launching a new webinar project, we’ll create a blueprint.
We click the plus icon located next to the Blueprints title and choose the type of an item we want to create.
Let’s make it a project.
We’ll call it “New Webinar.”
At this stage, we can also specify our blueprint location.
But keep in mind, we can only include a blueprint item in another blueprint folder or project.
That means none of the folders or projects from the main folder tree
can be used as the parent location for a blueprint.
So far, we haven’t yet created any containers in our Blueprints section,
but we’ll come back to this step a bit later.
If we need to apply any specific workflow, we can also do it here.
Now let’s go to the settings.
The same person on our team is always responsible for delivering webinars,
so let’s add them as the owner of this project.
Then we set up start and finish date and choose the default view.
By the way, when you add the owner to a blueprint project and an assignee to a blueprint task,
this person doesn’t automatically get access to these items
and will not receive any notifications about them.
Down below, we’re prompted to decide whether this project will remain private for the time being
or shared with the whole team or specific users.
We click “Create now,” and we have our first blueprint project.
It looks the same as all the projects we previously created in Wrike, with one exception —
right here above the project’s info panel, there’s a notification indicating this project is a blueprint.
Now it’s time to populate this project with the specific tasks necessary for its completion.
We can quickly add a couple of them.
When working with templates,
we recommended changing the status of all the template tasks to “deferred”
so they didn’t show up in the “My work section” of the assignee
and they didn’t receive any notifications about them.
With blueprints, you don’t need to worry about this since the assignee won’t receive any notifications anyway.
Let’s assign all tasks to Joanna.
Now let’s go back to the “Blueprints” section in the left navigation panel
and create some folders to hold related blueprints.
The first one will be “Marketing.”
And let’s also create a folder for “Professional Services.”
Now we can easily drag our “New Webinar” blueprint to the necessary folder.
Let’s also try creating a blueprint out of an existing project or template.
We can go to one of them in the main folder tree.
All we need to do is to right-click it and choose “Save as Blueprint.”
In the pop-up, let’s give it a proper title, locate it, and select what attributes we want it to have.
Next, we click “Save.”
Our project blueprint is created in the designated folder.
You can create task blueprints just the same ways — either from scratch or from an existing task.
Now that we created our blueprints, let’s see how we can use them to quickly launch work.
Let’s go to one of them.
We right-click it and choose “Create from blueprint.”
Then we need to follow the same steps as we did when we to launched projects from templates —
title it, select the necessary location,
add task prefixes if needed,
and customize how the tasks should be duplicated, and finally reschedule the project.
But with blueprints,
we can decide whether we want to inform the assignees of the tasks within a given project.
If we check this box, all the assignees will receive Inbox notifications.
The same process is applied to creating active tasks out of blueprints.
Let’s see how to use request forms.
We can now create and add incoming work from custom blueprints.
Let’s open one of those that we have in our demo account and edit it.
In the section where we need to decide what type of an item will be triggered when this form is submitted,
there are two new options — “Create task from blueprint”
and “Create project from blueprint”.
Let’s choose this option, select the blueprint,
and fill out this form.
Let’s go back to my demo account.
We open “Request Inbox” in the “Marketing” folder and see the new project.
And now you know how to use this wonderful feature.
As we mentioned, it’s experimental, so we’d love to get your feedback.
Leave your comments on the Wrike Labs page by clicking the “Send feedback” button over here.