Capgemini maximizes marketing team productivity with Wrike's unique, integrated project management solution

Interview with Dan Stevens, Director of Marketing Services, Capgemini North America

Dan, could you please tell us a few words about Capgemini and the division that you lead?

Capgemini is a global consulting, technology and outsourcing organization that provides services to companies from various industries. Capgemini provides its clients with insights and capabilities that boost their freedom to achieve superior results through a unique way of working, called the Collaborative Business Experience. The North American Marketing Services team within Capgemini provides a wide range of digital, online and creative services to support the company's strategic go-to-market priorities. These services include Web site design/development, campaign microsites/landing pages, permission-based email marketing, video production, marketing collateral, branding guidelines/templates, creative/themed deliverables for sales pursuits, etc. You can imagine how many support requests we get each week. Since we had a decentralized system in place to gather and manage those requests, it was very difficult to get complete visibility into the active projects/tasks at any given moment and to assign these appropriately, based on resource capacity. It was even harder to understand what every team member was working on at any given moment. When I learned about Wrike, I realized how powerful this solution might be for solving our challenges.

Why did your company choose Wrike?

We needed an end-to-end system to manage our internal support requests. Wrike allowed us to combine our custom-developed request submission process with its innovative service, thanks to the powerful email integration capabilities. All emailed tasks are populated into properly structured project plans that get shared with every member of our team. Now the whole support request process is streamlined. We also chose Wrike due to its level of customer support. Early on in the development process, the team was very responsive to our support requests and provided guidance on how to more effectively use the service. Furthermore, the team was very receptive to new feature requests and was able to deploy these requests within days or weeks!

What changed in the work of your team after you decided to adopt Wrike?

Before we introduced Wrike, the majority of support requests were submitted informally, using traditional communication channels, such as email, phone calls, in-person conversations, etc. Everyone on the team managed his or her own requests and project workload. They also were required to report back (on weekly status calls) on all of the projects they were working on. Wrike made the process evolve. Today, we simply add Wrike's email address to the email message that gets generated from our internal request form submission process, and the project/task automatically appears in our team's workspace. The thing that I like most of all is that the created project already contains the initial task of "contacting the project requester to discuss project details." Once we have the initial project discussion, we identify all project deliverables/milestones and create the associated tasks directly within Wrike. Our on-time delivery rate and customer satisfaction is close to 95%, since we are kept informed about our tasks/deadlines each day via the daily reminder email and online dashboard. This has made a significant contribution to our team's productivity and level of support.

What are the major benefits Wrike has provided to your workflow process?

In addition to the integration capabilities with our internal request process mentioned earlier, the biggest benefit with Wrike is the high level of visibility of the support requests that channel into our team. We are now able to visualize the workload requirements of the entire team and/or any team member in several ways: using Wrike's dashboard, the graphical timeline and the option to sort our tasks and projects by person, by due date, by client, etc. Wrike's unique ability to group tasks and projects differently lets us look at our current and prior efforts from different perspectives. The application easily allows us to analyze our active and completed projects/tasks and run ad-hoc reports to use in our quarterly "value reports" that we share with our team and others within Capgemini. Wrike lets us spend less time on project management and more time on providing strategic marketing services to our internal clients.

Do you plan to extend the usage of Wrike services?

Since Wrike is a scalable solution and as new members join our team, each will be given access to our Wrike workspace. Other Capgemini regions/countries are also planning to integrate Wrike into their respective teams' workflow.