Project management software with Google Calendar integration: 4 options

More Wrike project management tools for managers and teams 

Even if Google Calendar integration is non-negotiable when you’re choosing new project management software, it’s not the only thing to consider. So, in the next part of this post, I’m going to look at Wrike’s project management features in more depth. 

The benefit of Wrike as a project management system is that our tools go far beyond the top-level overview you’d get in a shared calendar or a free project management app. 

Wrike is built for companies that handle large, overlapping projects where scheduling is only a small part of the project management puzzle. It customizes and automates even the most complex project workflows. This helps you complete work faster, boost collaboration, and generate data-driven insights to inform your project management decisions. 

Plan new projects with ease

With Wrike’s tools, you can take care of every aspect of project planning in one place, before you add the dates to your calendar. Instead of juggling spreadsheets, email chains, and meetings to gather the information you need to create a project plan, you can use:  

• Templates and intake forms to outline and define the business needs driving the project. This includes dynamic request forms, which you can customize for the clients or colleagues you regularly work with, or the types of projects you typically complete. 
• Team folders to securely store reports and documentation from past projects. These files can inform your estimates, projections, and initial meetings with stakeholders, and then share the project plan with your team when it’s ready to go. 
• Task management tools, including AI features to break large tasks into more manageable chunks that can be easily visualized in your team’s shared workflow via dashboards, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and more. 

These tools help you align your project team and stakeholders from the first stages of the project, and set clear expectations for your plan and communication strategy. 

When you plan projects in Wrike, you get much more than just final dates in the calendar — you’ll also have a clear understanding of the first tasks, the resources available, and the processes you’ll use to get there. 

Track task progress, not just deadlines

Project management is smoother when you can track not just how many days are left to complete the work, but how much work is left to complete. 

With Wrike, you don’t just have visibility on the due dates and milestones at the end of each project phase, you also have an at-a-glance overview of: 

• The current workflow status of each task, tailored to your process
• The tasks each of your team members is working on, either in a Table view, in rolling updates and notifications, or a bar graph breaking down their workload
• The number of hours a task has taken so far, powered by Wrike’s built-in time-tracking software 
• The percentage of the work completed for each task

With Wrike, you can display this crucial information in a shared project management dashboard accessible to users with the right permission level, so the headlines are always available to the team members and stakeholders who need to check in.  From that shared overview, it’s easy to click through to find out more about the tasks displayed. If you see something that concerns you, you can head straight to the root of the issue. 

Boost team collaboration

Unlike a calendar, which only shows what team members are working on in a given week, Wrike is designed to bring a team together and help them work collaboratively to get their tasks over the line. 

Wrike gives you insight into task ownership at every stage of the workflow, so it’s easy for team members to identify the person they need to speak to (like the designated approver, the task owner, or the contact person in another team for a cross-functional project) and open a discussion. 

Your Wrike workspace includes project collaboration tools that cover every aspect of task management, asset management, and team communication. These include:  

• Comments on tasks and assets, linked to notifications that turn questions and feedback into real-time discussion
• @mentions to draw a team member’s attention to a task or point of feedback
• Automated notifications and reminders — powered by simple, rule-based automations — straight to team members’ inboxes when they’re assigned to a task, when a task they’ve been involved with changes status, when they’re invited to a calendar event, or when an important deadline is coming up
• Risk management software, so if tasks are falling behind what was laid out in the project plan, you can work together with the team to find a solution and get the work back on track 

Whenever a task changes status in Wrike, it updates across your Wrike workspace.  Whether you’re tracking your project in a dashboard, a Kanban board, a burndown chart, or a team calendar linked to your Google account, you can be confident that you’re always viewing the latest version of the information. 

Create dynamic project roadmaps in seconds 

Wrike helps you view your project roadmap — and the reality — from many different angles alongside your Calendar view. A roadmap includes all the critical milestones, handoffs, and project events you’d see in your Google Calendar. But importantly, Wrike’s project timelines also show task dependencies. 

These dependencies, set up with a simple click and drag, help you visualize and streamline the critical path to the end of the projects, even if countless team members or subteams are involved in the steps leading up to the final deadline. 

It’s easy to add a dynamic Gantt chart project timeline — like the one below — to your Wrike workspace.

With these crucial tools, you have a deeper understanding of how your tasks overlap and connect. You’ll be able to see if your project is on track by checking your project status against the moving date line, and your team can easily reference the chart to see when they can expect it in the coming days and weeks. 

Many of Wrike’s project management templates include a Gantt chart view as standard. Check out our Action Plan Template, Manufacturing Template, Complex Project with Phases Template, and Product Launch Template to enhance your workspace. 

Manage team capacity effectively

Many of the decisions you take as a project manager come down to resource management, particularly when it comes to making the most of your team’s skills and time. While a calendar gives you some insight into who’s available — especially if you’re using it to track PTO and daily schedules — that’s not always enough to optimize the way you distribute new tasks. 

Your Wrike workspace includes tools specifically designed for time management and capacity planning. These features will alert you to team members who are over capacity, and help you reassign or reschedule tasks when you need to. Plus, when you work in Wrike, our software notes patterns in the way tasks are completed. This data informs your risk reporting and progress metrics, and it helps you make more informed decisions about the way you allocate resources during your future projects. 

Sync with all your Google Workspace tools

Wrike includes a full suite of integrations with other Google apps. Just as with the calendar sync, this means you can keep using familiar tools alongside our more powerful project management software, streamlining your work even as it becomes more complex. 

• The Google Drive integration means you can add your files to your Wrike task cards as attachments and view, edit, and collaborate on your Google Docs in real time. Continuing to use Google Drive as your file storage system also saves storage space on your Wrike account. 
• The Gmail integration helps you save time by turning emails into easy-to-track tasks. This means you can schedule, assign, and start monitoring tasks as soon as a suggestion arrives in your inbox. 
• The Google Sheets integration connects tasks to spreadsheets, simplifying your reporting and replacing the mundane work of copy-pasting details between Wrike and your spreadsheet records.  

To show you how this looks in practice, let’s take a look at how telecommunications firm Arvig automates their processes with Wrike and Google integrations. 

Arvig’s team first approached Wrike after a period of rapid growth. They were finding it challenging to manage an increased workload with their old systems, and needed a way to standardize how they approached their projects.

Before introducing Wrike, Arvig’s team faced difficulties with coordinating work on both the portfolio level and for the day-to-day projects falling to their teams. They suffered from a lack of visibility that led to delays and missed deadlines. 

When Arvig implemented Wrike and integrated it with Google Drive and Google Chat, the team created “a single source of truth for information and communication” at the company. These tools have helped them transform a list of “400+ disjointed tasks” into a transparent timeline everyone can follow. 

Their processes have also become more transparent and collaborative. By linking Google Drive to their Wrike tasks, they can edit live and collaboratively, with smooth communications in the Google Chat channels their team knows well.