Communications Work Request Form & Project Management Implementation
My Role: Project Manager
Tools: Mural, Wrike, Microsoft Suite
Timeline: March - July 2024
Background
When I joined the Yale School of Public Health Office of Communications and Marketing, one of the key challenges I observed was a lack of clear communication — both within the team and externally with stakeholders, including staff and faculty. I began by inquiring into existing processes and identifying opportunities for improvement.
To address this, I recommended exploring project management software to streamline workflow and improve accountability, specifically one that integrated intake forms into their overall process. I spearheaded the research process, meeting with multiple teams and evaluating platforms including Wrike, Asana, Jira, and others, to identify the best solution for the team’s needs.
While work request forms existed, I noticed there were quite a few core issues at hand:
Forms were underutilized, and some were broken. After focus groups and surveys were conducted, I learned that faculty and staff felt there were too many forms and they were unclear or required too much effort or information.
The team frequently complained about an inbox flooded with email requests. These emails were often not properly delegated or tracked, and staff or faculty would sometimes reach out to multiple team members, leading to duplicated efforts.
Faculty and staff are busy. They don't want to have to worry about jumping through hoops just to share their work with our team to get it promoted.
Our team wasn’t taking a unified effort to track projects or upcoming events, often leading us to be reactive to events and public health happenings rather than proactive.
There were no robust reporting abilities with our prior form intake process to track how many requests we got, where they came from, and how we could address potential holes or large-scale requests.
The Work Request Process
While interviewing different project management platforms, I began mapping out the work request process. This involved analyzing all current communications team efforts, understanding how work was delegated, and identifying how tasks were currently undertaken. I documented each existing form and then began designing workflows and processes for how forms could be structured in the future to improve clarity, efficiency, and accountability.
Some initial questions I needed to figure out while mapping these processes were:
What metrics do we want to be able to report on? (Department, Requester, Type of Support Needed, etc.)
Who will be assigned which tasks when certain parts of the form are selected?
How much information is essential to gather while not becoming a hassle for the end user?
The Project Management Process
Simultaneously, I worked on determining the best organizational system to manage our work within the project management platform itself. After thorough research and negotiation — which resulted in a 30% reduction on the contract — I selected Wrike as our platform.
I had previous experience using Wrike at Quinnipiac University, and the platform also had a strong track record working with universities. Wrike offered nearly all the features we needed, including customizable work intake forms, reporting tools, and project management capabilities that made team collaboration seamless.
Building on the work request mind mapping, I began mapping out the team’s workflow within the new platform. Since I took on this project just one month into my role at YSPH, this required multiple listening sessions with team members to understand their needs, identify pain points, and determine how to best organize our work.
Some key insights included:
Resistance to change: Some team members were hesitant to adopt new technology, concerned about being “tracked.” I managed expectations by explaining that the platform was intended to highlight the team’s value to leadership and provide visibility into the great work we were already doing.
Individual work styles: Team members had varying approaches to managing tasks, requiring a flexible system.
High project volume: The team was handling a large number of projects, so organization and ease of use were critical.
I initially determined that the most effective way to organize work would be project-based, aligned with the team’s sub-groups: social media, web, and editorial. However, our leader guided me to instead organize work by distribution channel, encouraging the team to consider how each project impacts multiple channels rather than focusing solely on individual sub-teams. This became the initial approach we implemented for organizing our work.
Once the initial structure was established, I was able to begin creating the work request form and define how tasks would be delegated once submitted. I collaborated closely with our web team and the assigned Wrike representative to build the internal Wrike organization structure. Additionally, I developed training materials, created training video playlists, and hosted training sessions to ensure the team was fully equipped to use the software effectively.
Focus Group Usability Feedback
Although I had gathered extensive internal team feedback on how to improve the work request form, it was equally important to hear from those actually using the form. I conducted personalized outreach to our top form submitters to understand their needs and ensure that the proposed new format was intuitive, effective, and met their expectations.
The Final Form
After incorporating feedback and making necessary adjustments, the work request form was ready to be published and shared with the entire YSPH community. I set up each page of the form and conducted extensive testing to ensure it functioned smoothly. Our primary goal was to create one easy-to-use form that faculty and staff could use to address any communications or marketing needs.
The form included conditional logic (“if this is clicked, do this”) to route requests accurately, which required careful setup but greatly improved usability. I also configured the system so that tasks were automatically assigned to the appropriate team members based on the selected options. For example, requests for website support were automatically assigned to our web team.
Back-end of the form: request a photographer
Back-end of the form: website support
Back-end of the form: Event promotion and email deployment
Back-end of the form: submit website updates
Front-end of the form: Department
Front-end of the form: new design project
Setting Expectations with the Entire YSPH Community
As with any new process, communication was vital. We had created a solid system for request intakes, but we needed to communicate this new process to the community. I worked with our Wrike representative to come up with draft communications to go out to the general YSPH community to explain our new process and system. I developed these emails and sent them out via Yale Message to the community.
There were three phases:
Initial notice: informing the community of the upcoming new process.
Launch announcement: providing detailed instructions for using the new system.
Follow-up reminder: soliciting feedback and reinforcing the process.
Dashboards and Reporting
Circling back, one of our main goals was to redesign the work request form in a way that allowed us to easily track and report on submissions for leadership. This would help provide visibility into how our team’s resources were being allocated. To support this, I built multiple dashboards connected directly to the form’s submission data. These dashboards allowed us to monitor key metrics such as the total number of requests, request types, originating departments, and other patterns that could inform workload planning and decision-making.
Here are some of the reasons why I love the Wrike dashboards I set up:
Automatically updates as new requests come in — no manual data entry needed.
Clear visibility into total request volume across the school.
Breakdown by request type (web, design, events, social, etc.) to understand workload distribution.
Department-level insights to see which units submit the most requests.
Resource allocation tracking to help leadership understand where time and effort are going.
Year-over-year comparability through easy dashboard duplication each fiscal year.
Minimal maintenance required — set it once and let it run.
Improved transparency for both the communications team and leadership.
Data-driven decision making that helps guide staffing, priorities, and strategic planning.
Total requests in FY ’24, broken down by request type
Requests in FY ’25, broken down by department/office
Requests this month broken into individual analytics
Total requests FY to date by request type
Web ticket analytics
Overview
Overall, since implementation in July 2024, team feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Even individuals who were initially reluctant to adopt a new system have fully adapted and now rely on it in their daily work.
Additionally, the work request form has proven highly effective and widely used across the school, and the reporting and dashboard features provide us with analytics and insights unlike anything we’ve had before. This was an incredible learning experience for mapping out and implementing a strategic process to improve overall work distribution for the team.