Here at Wrike, collaboration is our bread and butter. For 20 years, our primary goal has been to make it easier for customers to work together. Because we’ve always cared so much about collaboration, the Collaboration category of the Elite 100 is our in-house favorite — and this year’s finalists truly delivered.
Finalists in this category had to show how Wrike helped them break down silos, coordinate across functions and regions, and turn scattered communication into aligned, accountable teamwork.
Representing a growing consultancy, an enterprise marketing team, and a global agency, these three finalists showed that when collaboration is intentional and Wrike is at the center, teams can move faster, communicate more effectively, and scale their impact.
Let’s take a look.
Centralizing a consultancy’s work in one collaborative hub
At GNW Consulting, Toneshia Harris led an initiative to migrate project management and time tracking from Monday.com and Toggl to Wrike. The goal was to centralize work for internal teams, external contractors, and clients in a single, scalable platform. No more wasting time toggling (pun intended) between platforms.
Using Wrike, Toneshia and her team built a unified workspace where tasks, timelines, and timelogs were all integrated. They used custom project templates to standardize delivery, and cross-functional teams were able to refine those templates in real time, bringing them in line with their particular needs.
The rollout was structured yet agile, with Wrike acting as the collaborative core that allowed every stakeholder to remain engaged and accountable throughout the process.
Toneshia Harris, GNW Consulting
Every Wrike task had a clear owner, due date, and detailed description, and collaboration happened directly in Wrike through comments, @mentions, and shared files. Toneshia explained, “Consultants could view dependencies and understand how their work fit into the broader timeline, while project managers used Wrike’s Resources view to ensure resources were distributed effectively.”
Toneshia then took collaboration a step further: GNW extended specific Wrike access to clients, which provided them with transparent views into project timelines and statuses, eliminating the need for constant email updates. That visibility boosted client trust and reinforced Wrike as the central source of truth.
Toneshia’s collaboration-focused rollout delivered measurable impact:
- Reduced tool sprawl and software costs by consolidating platforms
- Improved time reporting compliance by 40%
- Cut project delivery times by 15% through clearer workflows and handoffs
- Increased client satisfaction by keeping stakeholders informed in real time
- Enabled data-driven forecasting for resource availability and capacity
Most importantly, Toneshia leveraged Wrike to help push GNW from ad hoc communication across platforms to structured collaboration. Now, consultants, clients, and leadership are all aligned around the same transparent view of their projects.
Aligning communications, marketing, and PR on shared goals
There’s nothing worse than duplicating efforts. That’s what motivated Hayden Waugh at Trane Technologies to use Wrike to eliminate inefficiency with more effective collaboration.
Hayden faced a common collaboration problem: communications, marketing, and PR teams were working toward the same goals, but in isolation. That’s a tough issue to fix, but Wrike’s tools helped add visibility across teams.
Hayden used Wrike’s calendar tool to create a shared publication calendar, where everyone could see what content was being created, when it was going live, and how each function was showing up across channels. Custom fields made it easy to track content details and source stories, opening up new opportunities to amplify work and coordinate campaigns.
Some team members were initially hesitant about sharing work too early, but Hayden addressed this by demonstrating Wrike’s flexible visibility and access controls, and by carefully curating what fed into each calendar. Setting up that structure helped build trust in the accuracy of what appeared there, and over time, more of the team’s work moved into Wrike. “By adding processes into Wrike,” Hayden said, “We’re able to collaborate internally and with external partners from start to finish on projects.”
When Wrike was first introduced at Trane Technologies two years earlier, initial excitement faded as the setup became overcomplicated. This can happen when processes aren’t designed to mimic the way teams complete work. So, when Hayden took ownership of Wrike, he focused on mastering the tool, simplifying blueprints and request forms, and aligning them with how people actually worked.
[Add request form product screenshot]
Hayden’s work on the frontend paid off: Adoption and satisfaction improved, more projects were managed end to end in Wrike, and teammates began suggesting additional processes to bring into the platform. Planning, execution, maintenance, and reporting are now all captured in Wrike, and internal teams and external partners can collaborate from a single, consistent hub.
Finally, Wrike also helped Trane Technologies better connect daily work to strategy with a very small addition to their tasks. By adding yearly goals as custom fields and tagging work accordingly, Hayden’s team made it easy to show internal and external partners how their campaigns directly supported core priorities. In turn, this helped simplify end-of-year reporting and strengthen alignment.
With other teams getting into Wrike, it’s opening up doors for us to collaborate, share resources, and have visibility into the necessary items we each need to see.
Hayden Waugh, Trane Technologies
As more business units and regions adopt Wrike, Hayden’s enterprise-level team is gaining new ways to coordinate across geographies and solve communication challenges that go far beyond any single workflow.
Connecting onshore and offshore teams for high-volume delivery
And now on to our last finalist. When Open Door, an in-house WPP agency, was formed to manage Amazon Prime Video campaigns across EMEA, Max Fisher faced a major collaboration obstacle: he needed to align a UK-based planning and campaign management team with an offshore activation team in Poland.
The volume required was staggering, and traditional communication methods, such as email and spreadsheets, simply wouldn’t have been enough. Max quickly realized that Wrike would be a critical solution to his team’s unique collaboration issue and set out to make the platform the single source of truth for campaign workflows.
Our primary strategic imperative was to establish Open Door as a highly efficient and reliable agency capable of delivering high-volume, high-quality campaigns for Amazon Prime Video. Wrike directly accelerated this by enabling us to deliver over 120 campaigns in the first three months, a feat that would have been impossible with our previous disparate systems.
Max Fisher, WPP
Max started by building custom workflows in Wrike that mirrored the agency’s end-to-end process, from brief reception in the UK through to final asset delivery in Poland. He set tasks and subtasks to be assigned across both locations within the same projects, which created shared ownership and blurred the line between “onshore” and “offshore.”
Additionally, Wrike’s proofing and commenting tools enabled the UK team to provide precise, contextual feedback directly on assets from the Polish team, reducing revision cycles and miscommunication. Max explained, “All briefs, assets, feedback, and decisions were housed within the relevant Wrike task. This eliminated ‘information silos’and ensured everyone was working from the most current data, fostering immediate trust in the information being shared.”
After the hub team’s success, Max championed a broader rollout, shifting Wrike from a single solution to an agency-wide operating system. He led a phased expansion of the Client Services department, followed by Strategy and Planning. During each phase, he offered tailored training that highlighted how Wrike would enhance each role’s collaboration abilities, rather than just how to click through the interface. Recruiting “Wrike Champions” in each department added even more support for colleagues and reinforced best practices.
To deepen collaboration, Max’s team built:
- Comprehensive request forms to standardize briefs and auto-assign work
- Role-based and cross-functional dashboards for real-time campaign visibility
- Bespoke dashboards for weekly reporting and individual workload views
[Add dashboards product screenhshot]
Wrike even became the backbone of daily standups, with Kanban boards driving conversations and meeting notes captured directly in the platform.
The impact was significant:
- Over 120 campaigns delivered in three months for Amazon Prime Video
- Briefing times reduced from around two hours to 10 minutes
- Nearly two hours saved per week in daily standups thanks to focused, Wrike-led discussions
- An 80% reduction in cross-channel communication and easier access to past decisions and context
Max’s work fundamentally changed how Wrike is perceived across WPP. After years of partial adoption and pushback, OpenDoor’s success is now paving the way for a Wrike rollout to additional EMEA locale teams. In the future, better process standardization and resource sharing will help Wrike support many more WPP campaigns.
And as the icing on the cake, Max’s efforts earned him the winning position in the Collaboration category against some serious competition.
Building a culture of connected work with Wrike
Across GNW Consulting, Trane Technologies, and OpenDoor, one theme stands out: collaboration becomes a competitive advantage when teams center their work in Wrike.
The result? A culture shift toward unified, transparent collaboration, where everyone can see the work, understand the priorities, and contribute to shared success.
Curious how other Elite 100 finalists are transforming their work with Wrike? Explore our stories from the Orchestration, Analytics, and Innovation categories — and stay tuned for more inspiring examples from top teams around the world.
