The Salesforce Platform for Project Management

Published by Rebecca Potts at June 21, 2013

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Plan, track, schedule and monitor. These are all important tasks for a Project Manager. But how is Salesforce keeping up with the traditional desktop software many of us Project Managers are used to? i.e. Microsoft Project and Plan Box.

It is very likely that your company is running many of its departments out of Salesforce. It is more common to see Salesforce used for managing a sales territory and customer service team than it is for project management. However, it makes perfect sense to integrate Project Management into your Salesforce environment.

Here are 7 reasons why:

1. If your Project Management team coordinates projects for Customers (as opposed to internal projects), chances are your Salesforce org already holds important Customer information such as the quote, statement of work, and primary contact. Convert a closed deal to a project to create a smooth transition from Account Executive to Project Manager.

2. Change orders are virtually additional quotes. For consistency, all Change Orders should also be sent through Salesforce.

3. Transparency between the Customer, Delivery Team, Project Manager, and Account Executive is achieved in Salesforce via Chatter Groups and Customer Communities.

4. Project Managers and Delivery Managers can oversee projects by running reports on key performance indicators such as utilization on the project.

5. There are helpful apps available on the AppExchange to customize Project Management in Salesforce for your particular type of business and investment strategy.

6. With Salesforce, project team members can enter their time for every task and associate it to a specific deliverable making it easy for Project Managers to track how much budgeted time is remaining on the project in total and how much time is remaining per deliverable.

7. The Project Manager can set up automatic email reminders on a task a week or so before the due date.

So, how does your organization handle Project Management? We’d like to hear your opinion! Leave a comment below or send us a Tweet @icsfdc.