What Salesforce has to offer for Project Management?

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The long-lasting customer engagements need wise and thoughtful project management. With the help of project management, this is possible to achieve effective brand communications that ultimately leads to powerful customer experiences during different phases like marketing, product launch, sales, and the purchasing etc.

The best idea to maintain consistency throughout the entire customer journey is the usage of Salesforce CRM for project management. You just have to incorporate the Salesforce instance and the project management activities, this is possible to create interesting customer stories together instead of their distances. This is necessary to consider customer services as a project so that you can be sure of what customers actually want from you.

What Salesforce has to offer for Project Management?

You may utilize a stand-alone project management system too but it cannot be integrated with Salesforce objects later. So, if you are interested in automating data management activities, marketing campaigns, and other business processes then you should use Salesforce instances only for the project management.

Integrating project management capabilities within Salesforce is beneficial for different departments across the organization. For example, Salesforce can be used by marketers to handle typical customer engagement campaigns. For the B2B businesses, project managers can utilize project management tools or they can be incorporated within Salesforce for tracking project expenses and the project time.

Before we discuss the project management in Salesforce, this is necessary to have a look at wonderful project management features offered by the Salesforce and number of options that offered by the AppExchange in Salesforce.

Project Management Features to Look upon in the CRM

  • The CRM system should be able to list the tasks, subtasks and the milestones that would give you a clear idea of dates and the deadlines.
  • The CRM system should have project management tools to manage or track tasks with respect to their dependencies.
  • It should have the collaboration features like chats, forums, feeds etc,
  • You should be able to view the project structure conveniently with the help of different graphs or Gantt Charts.
  • It should be able to notify important dates from time to time.
  • The CRM must-have document management and doc sharing facility.
  • There must be interfaces that can be optimized for mobile devices.

This is the time to discuss where Salesforce stands in this regard and the project management features offered by the Salesforce CRM.

The Project Management Capabilities Popular With Salesforce Licenses

As of now, there is no individual module for project management tasks. Still, it can be used to accomplish all the tasks mentioned earlier. The lack of project management entity implies that the platform needs customization for the best solution. Here, we will discuss what can you do or what is lacking recently with popular Salesforce Licenses?

  1. With Salesforce, we can create multiple tasks and each of them can be assigned to multiple users as well. You just have to click on the task tab with respect to your name and you can check all the files assigned to you. At the same time, the system will send reminders and email notification to make you aware of deadlines and task statuses.
  2. Salesforce doesn’t have the capability to manage the task dependencies. For example, if you change the deadlines for the parent then its child tasks will not be updated automatically. However, we need to customize processes here to fill the gap. Without Salesforce customization, this is not possible bringing all the tasks together within a project.
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Solution: With process builder in Salesforce, it is possible to design multiple custom processes based on your project management needs and the task can be marked as completed or incomplete by the sales representatives.

  1. Salesforce Chatter is a powerful tool to manage the project collaboration like chats, feeds, alerts, notifications etc. With the help of this amazing tool, you can create multiple chats around the topic so that different conversations should not be mixed together. Also, the Chatter will notify you immediately as soon as some changes happen.
  2. There are out-of-the-box document management and document sharing capabilities to streamline the effective collaboration.
  3. With Salesforce app development, this is possible to access the system by project team members anywhere anytime.

In brief, Salesforce has all the features and capabilities that are enough to handle basic project management needs. If you need to manage any complex project then you should hire a Salesforce consultant who can customize the platform or he can use one of the plug-ins available at the AppExchange in Salesforce. In the next section, we will discuss the project management plug-ins that are already available on AppExchange and you can use any of them based on your convenience.

The Project Management Plug-Ins Available On AppExchange

In this post, we will discuss the three popular plug-ins available on AppExchange. These are – Taskfeed, TaskRay and the Mission Control. These plug-ins can be quickly integrated into your project and they are native to the Salesforce.

When setup or managed properly, they are able to deliver engaging customer experiences. Also, they are Lightning ready and easy to optimize for the Salesforce1 mobile platform too. Let us have a quick look at each of the plug-in one by one, so that you can decide yourself which plug-in suits you the best.

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What Salesforce has to offer for Project Management?

1). Taskfeed

The plug-in costs $25 when paid monthly and $20 when paid annually. The free trial of the plug-in is not available and this was launched in the year 2014.

With the help of Taskfeed, this is possible to focus on customer onboard with its out-of-the-box project management capabilities. This plug-in is easy to customize and suitable for complex projects too. It allows users to create convenient project view with graph and Gantt charts models.

Tasks are easy to manipulate with drag and drop interactions and tool automatically handles the task dependencies. It gives notifications and allows project linkage with Salesforce objects too. The customizations are easy and it can be used for almost any Company across different industry verticals.

2). TaskRay

The plug-in costs $26 when paid monthly and $21 when paid annually. The free trial of the plug-in is available for 14 days and this was launched in the year 2012.

It has almost all the functionalities necessary for the project management and discussed earlier for the Taskfeed. The interface is full of visual content so that user can quickly understand the features of the plug-in. The extra features of plug-in other than Taskfeed include – interactive templates, subtasks can also be marked as complete, full integration with Salesforce objects, string service support, and ongoing enhancements.

3). Mission Control

The plug-in costs $29 when paid monthly and $21 when paid annually. The free trial of the plug-in is available for 14 days and this was launched in the year 2012.

This plug-in also offers almost all the functionalities as discussed earlier for Taskfeed and the TaskRay. This would not be saying wrong that the plug-in has full-fledged project management system capabilities that it runs over the Salesforce platform. The extra features include security loggings, low expenses, and resource planning or management etc.

Tip: You are advised to try plug-in first before you focus on Salesforce customizations. If plug-ins are able to handle your project management needs then the overall budget of a project can be managed nicely. Other than this, hire a Salesforce consultant to customize the CRM based on your project management needs.

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