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I have a team of about 5 consultants working for me worldwide. Until early July I assigned their projects & activities to them simply by sending emails. Then a new consultant came onto the team and I suddenly began to lose control. The handwritten notes & excel sheet in which I kept track of who was doing what was simply not doing it for me any longer. At one point I had no idea which consultant was working on what because work got done so quickly and things kept changing daily.

We needed a new solution.

After a short selection process I decided to give Wrike at www.wrike.com a try.The primary deciding factors that tipped the scales for Wrike: I can assign activities to my team using regular emails and send them CC to Wrike. Wrike will scan the emails and insert them into the correct project and at the correct spot on the timeline. Email attachments are also imported and attached to the tasks.

Because of this email integration we don't really have to change how we work much.

The team has been using Wrike for about 4-5 weeks now. I love it because it gives me the freedom to continue to send email assignments to my consultants and if I need more details and overviews then I can log on to the online interface. Here I can see all tasks by projects or I can view the report and view all tasks that are assigned to a particular consultant. And my consultants like it, too, because they don't need to change the way they work. They can simply click "reply to all" button and the email is sent to me and the task/conversation is also updated in Wrike.

Every day Wrike sends out a reminder to everybody that contains the current tasks, overdue tasks and tasks that are due in the next few days. If a task has been completed, we can click just one link in that email and the task is marked as completed.

There are, however, two features that I need but which Wrike doesn't offer:

1. Recurring tasks: I have a number of tasks that need to be performed regularly. For instance, we do a full backup our servers monthly (in addition to the backups that our service provider makes). It is currently not possible to schedule recurring tasks, so the consultant has to manually re-enter the task for next month once this month's is completed.
2. Copying a task: We also have a number of tasks that more than one person needs to complete. For instance training activities: I would like to be able to assign a training to consultant A and then make a copy of the activity and also assign it to consultant B and C. Each of them needs to go through the training and when finished mark it as complete. Currently I have to manually send the same email to each consultant separately. It'd be great if I could just drag & copy an activity and make a physical copy.

I contacted Wrike's customer support about this and was told that these two feature requests have been added to the development queue. I am now patiently waiting... ;-)

Overall, our first month of using Wrike is a success. We have more clarity on the projects without having to change the way we work much. Oh... and one of the consultants really, really likes Wrike. He's in there every day tweaking projects and improving them.

We tried lots of tools, and finally built a shortlist that included Liquid Planner, Basecamp and Wrike. Though all the 3 are good, Wrike definitely was the best option for us. The main reasons why:
1. it integrates well with our inboxes.
2. it allows to build overlapping project schedules
3. it shows us the whole picture, not just an individual project schedule.
The last but not the least is its price. Wrike is not free, but it's much more affordable than some of the other pm solutions. It's great that it charges per user and not per project. I simply love it.
Oh, and it keeps us productive with the daily to-do email. We used to create one for ourselves each day, now Wrike does this for us.