[From Wrike] Best Practice: Blueprints with Request Forms

Request Forms have proved to be extremely valuable for work in-take across various teams, whether it's requests coming from clients or across various teams internally.

But now *drum roll* 🥁 Request Forms have become even more valuable with the introduction of the newest Wrike Labs feature, Wrike Blueprints.

Before Blueprints were introduced as a Labs feature, there were four options around what items could be created or duplicated on the Request Form submission:

Create new task
Duplicate task
Create new project
Duplicate project

Now, two new actions have been added to Forms when someone submits a request:

Create task from Blueprint
Create project from Blueprint

With Blueprints and Request Forms you can further streamline the process of getting requested work completed.

Example:
Let’s look at an example of a Marketing Team who use Request Forms and Blueprints to in-take work from other teams within their company.

This marketing team receives a lot of requests from different departments for email campaigns, blog posts creation, paid advertising campaigns etc. The team cleverly created a Form for each type of Request.
The team then leverage Blueprints for each type of request. In the Blueprint task, the marketing manager has included descriptions of what steps need to be taken. A huge benefit of Blueprints is that they can also assign the people who need to work on the tasks and assigning people when creating the Blueprint won’t trigger any notifications for the assignee, so they don’t become distracted with Inbox notifications. Statuses and dependencies can also be added when creating a new Blueprint: all of which do not trigger notifications for assignees either!
Now each time someone submits a Request Form for the marketing team, the task that is generated from their Blueprint has all the important information straight away. This results in happy requesters and a happy marketing team, win-win!

Type of request
Additional information (what to include etc)
Assignees who will be responsible for the task
Other details that can be added when building the Request Form (deadline, attachments, importance etc)

This is just one of many ways to save a lot of time from simply using Blueprints with Request Forms. Comment below with what you like most about Blueprints and a little bit about how you’re using them today.

Need to activate Blueprints for your Workspace? Admins can visit Wrike Labs and activate it for your entire account.

Questions? Comment below.

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Comments

Maria Edwards

Great feature. My org has had the Blueprint labs enabled but I am unable to see the "Create from Blueprint" options you've mentioned. Any Idea as to why this is happening?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi @Maria, thank you!

I'm raising a ticket for you as you should be able to see the option to create from Blueprint. Someone from the Support team will reach out to help 🤝

Bobby Sullivan

@Lisa can you please also raise a ticket for me? I believe I am encountering the same bug that @Maria was dealing with above.

I have tried to edit an existing form to reach the "Create [task/project] from Blueprint" option but it didn't appear. I have also tried creating a new Request Form from scratch to see if that would work... no such luck.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Bobby,

Just raised a Support ticket for you, you should get an email soon! 😊

Jessie Stith

I was also unable to find the Blueprint option in a request form. I reached out to support directly, and the solution was really simple. They've updated the interface, so you just need a few extra clicks to find what you're looking for. In case anyone else is having this issue, I thought I'd share what support shared with me.

In the request form editing page, under the Actions Upon Submission section, #1 will default to "Create new Task." Click the drop-down menu and select "Duplicate Task." A new pop up will open with two tabs: Existing task and Blueprint. Click the Blueprint tab, and you'll have access to your templates from there.

Hope that helps!

Stacey Ens

I would like to know if there is an option to customize the due date for each of the blueprints that I link to a request form. Right now each deliverable maps to the due date selected in the form.

Snap shot of three different deliverables mapping to Dec 2nd - thanks! Stacey

Liam Darmody

367187107974

This is a helpful way of looking at things. I just sat through a session with our Wrike Admin trying to figure out the best use case for my team and am currently uncertain whether or not a form AND a blueprint are needed, or just a blueprint. Perhaps you can help me clarify. Here's our use case:

Sales team closes a deal
Sales team enters deal into our CRM
Client Services team comes into the picture as "project manager" for getting internal processes in motion to fulfill the terms of the deal
For every deal, different internal teams may need to be involved depending on the unique deal terms

So the question I'm trying to figure out is whether or not I should have a form that client services fills out that then funnels into a blueprint OR if client services should just start a new project from a Blueprint directly.

Put another way, is best practice for using forms when there are multiple inbound requests coming from multiple teams?

Glen Turpin

392138438073 I prefer using a form that funnels into a blueprint for several reasons.

Asking questions on the form to capture additional information about the project.
Keeping certain fields consistent or requiring that they're answered.
Capturing a project name and prepending that to all task names.
Using the form to select different blueprints or add elements to a single blueprint based on responses.

Liam Darmody

Thanks for weighing in Glen!

I like the form for that purpose as well. I don't know a ton about step 4 where I can select different blueprints or add elements based on responses, but that seems like a useful feature.

I also can't find any videos on Blueprint usage in the community docs. Do you have any recommendations for blueprint documentation that works well?

Glen Turpin

392138438073, the documentation at https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/360013445394-Blueprints is a good summary.

Some of the more interesting ways to use forms and blueprints applies to circumstances where you have similar but different template needs. You can use a drop-down question in a form to determine which blueprint to use, or you can start with a parent blueprint and use checkboxes to add blueprint sub-tasks.

That gives you a lot of flexibility of outcomes from a single form.

Permanently deleted user

Hi 8790480609!

It's possible to change the date on the blueprint that the Request Form is linked to. You can choose to align the tasks with the projects or tasks due date. If you choose not to align the tasks with these dates, these dates will be identical to those in the original blueprint.

Hope this helps! If you have any other questions let me know 😊

Stacey Ens

Hi Hugh -

Thank you for your note!

What if I want to align a series of blueprints based on my due date. Project end date is 12/15.

Blueprint A would end on 12/1 and blueprint B would begin on 12/2 and end on 12/10 and blueprint C begins on 12/11 and ends on 12/15.

Is this all based on how I set up my blueprint dates that I embed into form?

Stacey

Permanently deleted user

Hi Stacey,

That's correct! One thing you could do is create tasks within your Blueprints that have the Due Date and Start Date that you wish the request forms to have. Then, in your Request Form, choose the "Duplicate Task" option under the Actions Upon Submission menu.

Once you've selected the task that you want to duplicate, the request form will make a task with that same start and due date in your selected folder! You can even choose to align the tasks with dates in the request form if you want to have your start date to be different from the blueprint but the due date to be the same.

Let me know if this helps! If you have any other questions let me know 😊

Wendy Pardo

I am also not seeing the options for create task from blueprint or create project from blueprint. This is the one missing enhancement I am needing to roll-out a bunch of company wide projects. Is there something I need to do to get this added?

Soraya Jung

@Wendy Pardo

I ran into this problem as well. To see the Blueprint option, you need to first select "Duplicate Project" and then it'll give you the option to create the project from a Blueprint. Same goes for creating a task from a Blueprint. Have a look at my screenshot below, hopefully that works for you! 🙂

Susan Bell

Hello, we currently use project templates with our request forms (ex: an email campaign is a project template and it contains all the tasks to launch it). Are Blueprints the same thing? I am unsure of the difference, and why one would be better than the other.

Permanently deleted user

Hey @Susan Bell, great question!

Blueprints are similar to project templates, but they give you a much wider range of organisation than templates. Blueprints are placed in a dedicated folder in Wrike, and you can convert a project or task in to a Blueprint, something that isn't possible with templates. You can also launch new projects or tasks from Blueprints, making the creation process much more efficient.

I would recommend experimenting with both features and seeing which one suits your style of work more.

Hope this helped! If you have any other questions let me know 😊

Susan Bell

Thanks @[Deleted User]! Can you clarify what this means?

You can’t build a Report, Calendar, Dashboard widget, or a Workload Chart based on a folder/project blueprint.

Does that mean if I start using Blueprints to set up projects, those projects won't show up in any status reports we create?

Jessie Stith

Not exactly.

You use a blueprint to create the folder and task structure you need for your project. You can also set up dependencies in a blueprint. The Blueprint space in your left navigation panel isn't an "Active" work space. It's just a space to build out your blueprints and organize your projects or folders before you implement them and come up with a process that can be re-used quickly without having to build a whole project from scratch every time you need to follow the same process/steps/workflow. So while the blueprint is in this "template" phase, you wouldn't want it showing up on a status report because it's just the "template" - it doesn't actually represent the work being done. When you're ready to kick the new project off, you simply right click on it in the left nav panel and select "Create from blueprint". A new dialogue box will pop up and you can adjust dates, decide what notifications to send, and pick a folder for the project to go into. It'll create a copy in the new folder that's ready to be worked on that you can make changes to, and leave your original blueprint in the blueprint section intact. The new copy will be a project/folder (not a blueprint anymore) so it will show up on your status reports.

Permanently deleted user

Hey @Jessie Stith, great answer!

This is exactly what that sentence means, @Susan Bell, hope that helped!

Nivy Swaminathan

Could someone enable the feature for me as well? I don't see the create from blueprint either.

I currently have users submitting requests that show up as task. I would love to be able to assign the incoming tasks as "sub-tasks" to a blueprint format. Is that possible?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi @Nivy Swaminathan, welcome to the forums 👐

When you click the option to "duplicate task", you should be able to choose a blueprint task:

Hope this helps 🙂