Planning Mode to Separate Active/On‑Hold Projects from Planned/Templates

Please consider being able to put a project in a "planning" / "template" mode so when tasks are assigned to resources, the resources' time is not committed and tasks don't show up in the different views until the project is made active. Perhaps add another level to the workflows above the Active level, so any status in that level would automatically make the assignments and tasks "tentative".

This could be helpful when planning and making templates so the resources are not yet committed and resource levels can be forecast. The "proposed" or tentative time could be displayed in a different color on the timelines to represent time of that nature.

Thanks for any consideration (and votes)!!

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Status: Under review

Comments

Permanently deleted user

Hi Megan, this is an interesting idea! We usually recommend using the deferred status group to hide tasks from templates. Do I understand correctly that this would resemble a status from the deferred group, but tasks with this status would be hidden completely from their assignees until Project launch?

Megan Caldwell

Hi Anastasia -

Yes, in a sense the tasks and projects that are in the planning/template "mode" would be hidden, or at least not be part of a resource's committed allocation.

This would be very useful in many ways, especially when planning and performing "what if" scenarios to ensure there is an alignment of resource availability with projects and tasks. AND for building ready-to-go project templates for recurring projects.

Once the project and/or task is made active, the assignee's time becomes committed to the project/task and then shows up in their workload/to-do list in Wrike.

I have tried to use the deferred status, etc., but I it still sends notifications, etc. when I make assignments which I then have to go to the assignee and say "ignore this for now" and it gets to be confusing for them.

Thanks,

Megan

Cathy Coia

I agree that the template are almost useless for planning purposes if the assignees are being notified as you are building the template. It gets too confusing to tell assignees to ignore tasks being assigned to them through a template. This should definatelt be an enhancement to the template feature.

Anastasia Osina

As templates are core for our business processes I agree notifications should be switched off

Elke Vosman

Hi,

I want to make a planning in Wrike, and like to shuffle with resources without bothering them with notifications until the planning is finalised.

So I would like a planning mode (urgently). I'm not sure this is always equal to a template mode. But both have the requirement in common that the user should not be notified until the project is ready for implementation (=active).

Keeley Reed

I wrote out the following idea, and think it might apply to this feed:

Delay Active status when converting templates

Our Templates are set up with teammates already assigned since we have a small company and only one person in each department.

Currently, when a template is converted into an active project, all teammates are notified of the tasks they are assigned to (which could be dozens of tasks spread out over several months if dependencies are involved). My teammates always grumble that they have "50 notifications" in their inbox and then realize it's just because they have been notified about being assigned to a task, and then also notified that a task was deleted or they were unassigned because I am still tweaking the template to fit the new client's needs.

The templates are all set to "Template/Deferred" status, but as soon as I duplicate it and add the duplicated project to a new folder, all of the tasks are auto set to "Not Started," which notifies the teammates that they have been assigned.

This causes two issues:

Tasks can’t be customized for the new client and new project details without everyone seeing all the changes occur in real time
Teammate inboxes are overwhelmed with notifications, which is especially confusing if they are then immediately removed from the task because a different teammate needs to be assigned or a task is deleted because (though part of the template) the task doesn’t apply to the new client.

A solution is to allow for templates to be duplicated, tasks adjusted, teammates reassigned, then the Project Manager can click a button to say “make project active.”

Tarek Zennie

I am an external consultant and this caused me a serious issue with my client. Inadvertently, my Team’s inboxes got full of notorious emails notifications which were triggered by me setting up the project - silly emails about making editorial changes, renaming stuff, and tedious stuff that is not important to the team.

That was rather embarrassing. I worked on setting up my project over the weekend, and apparently my work triggered hundreds of silly and worthless emails to go out, filling in many of the Collaborators inboxes with worthless information which overshadowed much of the valuable information Wrike is intended to communicate.

This, to me is a huge shortcoming, and a solution should be provided. I am a strong proponent of Wrike and I would love to see it succeed. But with something like this, users will quickly lose credibility in both the product and the consultant. Common sense tells me that there should be a way for the USER (person managing the project) to suppress silly notifications on a temporary basis [during the planning period] and/or select what type of notifications to send out. No point notifying the world that a spelling error has been corrected! I am sure you would agree with this.

With this being said, I would appreciate it if this be escalate this to Wrike's development team, and quickly come up with a solution.

Here's a novel idea - a button that switches the project notifications on and off! how awesome would that be!

Permanently deleted user

Hello, Tarek! First of all, thank you for taking the time to share this as a request on the Community after chatting with our Support Team about this experience. I really appreciate the details you've shared here, and with notifications being something we've been internally discussing, your feedback is definitely timely.

Tami Becker

This really truly absolutely must be addressed. Templates are a key to making this all work. There needs to be a "Notifications OFF" for templates. I can't tell you the amount of trouble it has caused, and even worse, it destroys buy-in from the team -- they just start ignoring all of it. And I can hardly blame them because I understand the annoyance. Our Request Forms kick off Projects from templates. Our templates need to have the ability to be edited as often as needed without annoying the team with notifications. Modifications are required on a due to internal issues, or external changes from the industry or a vendor.

***We have "Projects" and "Folders." We need to also have "Templates." Templates (or anything in a "Template Folder") should have full functionality for any type of editing -- statuses can be changed, dependencies modified, descriptions edited, due dates moved, assignees changed -- anything and everything. But there should be no notifications for templates whatsoever until they are duplicated to an active Project or made active via a Request Form.***

Please please please let us know you hear how important this is to us. Our company is not huge, but we are spread across six branch locations; we made a significant $ investment in Wrike and promoted it to the team as efficiency nirvana (ok, well, not that exact word) -- but instead, by the time we launched they had already had enough...

I see so many more things that Wrike can do for us--it's exciting, and we started with our greatest need first. Creating "notifications-off" for templates would go a long way toward restoring my team's faith in the system.

Thank you for everything Wrike does do!! I look forward to this functionality being added in the not too distant future!

Brent Arnold

Yes having some way to plan out resources for future or speculative projects without that resource being notified would be great. I actually have to use Smartsheet for this instead which isnt optimal.

Tom Kessler

Templates were a key reason we chose Wrike, and after learning about this flaw today I feel that templates are largely useless to me. Please give us an option to flag a folder as a true templates folder - one that doesn't schedule assignees or notify anyone until I choose to make it an active project.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your feedback and voting on this idea. Our Product Team is aware of this thread so all feedback helps shape the conversation around this for future developments. If we have any concrete updates to share we'll be sure to post them here. Thanks again!

Brian Lau

This is the one big feature that we are missing from Wrike. Sometimes we have to make so many adjustments to a project that we end up spamming the entire project team. Please let us know if this feature becomes available.

Helene Nguyen

This will be the best if we can get this feature.

Madison Vodicka

I'm having the same problem as everyone else. I work from a basic template, duplicate and tweak it to the specific scenario. When false notifications are constantly sent out every time I make an edit it causes my team to not take Wrike seriously. This was a significant investment for us, and in its current form, it's definitely not as usable as it should be.

Please make a setting to turn notifications OFF in specific folders.

Tami Becker

Madison -- I agree! It is really hard to keep your team's buy-in when they just start to ignore wrike.

Tami Becker

Wrike -- are you listening? I am not particularly confident you take any of the input on this particular issue very seriously. We are all sharing our concerns, I have spoken with multiple staffers in my consult/customer service calls, but there has been no response of any kind that the "powers that be" even recognize this as an end-user issue.

Abid Khwaja

We have the same problems and the same concerns. Templates were never implemented as a feature in Wrike - they shouldn't even be called templates as they are in their current form. Changing a task to "Deferred" does not make for a template. The first thing that must happen is for Wrike staff to stop telling us there is a template feature - there is no such thing.

Without templates, Wrike becomes very difficult to use for all but very simple things - it can't be used to plan large projects and build timelines that will be implemented in the future.

Lorne Noble

Just spoke to support representative who suggested I shared our use case that is similar to the above with a little tweak.

We absolutely need TRUE templates i.e. an area where the template environment is ring fenced from the active task management environment. This environment will put a pause on any notifications (pain points are already addressed in previous comments) BUT ALSO put a pause on recurrent tasks. We simply want a template (including all the notifications, parent tasks, sub tasks, recurring tasks, dependencies, assignment of tasks etc.) to remain dormant until switched to active / live.

Further detail on my frustration - currently it is not possible to setup ANY template in Wrike with recurring tasks! Why? Because when you do the all tasks (recurring included) are considered "active" and the recurrences start a) clogging the template folder which is not being monitored and b) the recurrences turn off if no action has been taken after a certain number of instances recurrences (I think Wrike's default is 10-15). All recurring tasks should not be recurring until the template folder / project is active!!

REQUEST - I think if you create a ring fenced "template" / "non active" environment this should solve my specific recurring task template issue as well as the above notification issues.

Cathy Coia

While I agree with all of these posts, this request has been on this board for almost 1 year - WRIKE product manager - will this be implemented and when. If there is no plan to implement it, please advise.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi everyone, I have an update from our product team. This issue has had our attention for a while now. There is a long list of features that we are currently working on, but developing a solution to this gap in user experience has also already made its way into the queue. The product team is currently in the process of working through different ideas in search of the best solution, some of which have already been brought up by contributors in this Community post. Since the functionality update is still in the discussion phase, we cannot provide any ETAs; however we can confidently say that the problem has been acknowledged and we are thinking through a solution.

I also just want to add that we pay very close attention to all requests on the forums and even when we don't comment here, we are in active discussion with the Product Team about the features being requested.

Tami Becker

Thank you very much for the update Stephanie. It is reassuring to know the product team is starting the process.

Juli Bergerud

I can echo so many of the concerns above regarding notifications for templates; some of my team are pretty much at mutiny...

A related (I believe) concern I have:

I have a template that covers all tasks beginning to end in putting on a seminar. (We do between 25 and 30 of these a year.) Some of the tasks I assign in the template, because the same person does those tasks for all seminars. For each of the others, I need to assign the tasks after the template is duplicated for a new seminar project (some departments assign their team members to support specific seminars).

None of the tasks are unexpected; each team member knows for which seminar he or she will be primary support. They only need to see the tasks under "My Work" so they know their scheduling and have their checklists and reminders.

I'd like to have the assigner's ability to turn on/off assignment notifications 1) globally, 2) by project, 3) task-by-task basis. Yeah, I don't ask for much... I realize that could be very complicated.

There is so much value to Wrike--those of us who don't mutiny so easily can look past this issue--but we really need to have this concern addressed. Thank you for listening.

Samir Kulkarni

6 weeks since the comment from Wrike staff that it was "thinking through the solution". What is the status please? We need to set up dozens of projects for the new year and don't want to inundate staff with notifications during the drafting process.

Elke Vosman

Same at our company. I'd like a feature on very short term!

The usage of Wrike is really limited because of the spam creation due to setting up projects.

The benefits of using Wrike are overshadowed by this. I'm considering going back to MS-projects again ...

Megan Caldwell

Where are we at with this, Wrike? Also, I had put together a new post asking about a Product Roadmap to map out the likelihood and potential timing of features that Wrike has mentioned they're "working on". The post was "pending approval" and then never made its way to the Product Feedback posts. Why? Even just the likelihood of an idea coming to fruition to be available to the product would certainly be helpful with decisions that some of us have to make regarding staying with Wrike or moving on. We're slated for Wrike to renew 1/29.

Abid Khwaja

Our Wrike renew date is in March. We are re-evaluating MS Project as well.

Elke Vosman

Hi everyone, at the moment I'm testing with non existing resources (i.e. I invite non to non existing E-mails).

I do not know whether this works on the long term and also I will have to reassign the tasks as soon as the planning is ready.

but when it works I can at least assign on a task by task basis as soon as I have the planning for the concerned part ready.

Permanently deleted user

Hi all, the Product Team is currently thinking about how to apply this feature effectively. It's too early in the process to share dates but as soon as we have more information we will post them here.

As always, your use-cases and votes help steer these internal conversations so we appreciate your continued input here 👍

Ria Edens

I want to echo the sentiment of all of the other people in this thread. It's hard enough to get a team accustomed to changing their way of working without hearing daily that they are being "spammed" by Wrike. I'm fairly certain that some people may decide to block Wrike from their inbox while I'm in planning mode.

I have been tasked with planning out more than a year of tasks for my team. How can I possibly get them on board with using it if they are completely annoyed with it. I urgently need to be able to put projects, folders, or tasks into planning mode while i work with management to prioritize our initiatives and balance the workload of the team.

I keep getting told by Wrike to tell them to adjust their preferences for notifications, but this isn't even close to solving the problem. I still need the team to receive notifications on current tasks while I'm planning future tasks.

Please figure out a solution and do it soon. It's been over a year since this problem was first mentioned here and you have more than enough people stating that it is an ongoing problem.