Not all projects are the same- Simple projects trade power for speed (e.g. an assessment before or duringan opportunity), whereas complex projects require staffing, scheduling, P&L tracking, billing, contact management, and all the messaging and collaboration between project constituents and clients.
Project Templates - Project templates consist of predefined base configurations intended to speed up the process of creating new projects. They’re reusable, editable, and consist of milestones, stages, and the other elements that relate to tasks, which form the structured to-do lists all projects require. Set time estimates by task, preferred resources, approximate percentage weight each task contributes to the progress of a project, and much more.
Task Activities - With a project task being a type of action item within the CRM’s activity manager, they’ll be listed together with other to-do activities across the suite, linking directly to each project. Each task allows users to log time manually, or use a timer.
Task Messaging & Collaboration (aka “Chatter”) - Communicating updates is a vital aspect of successful project evolution. BizAutomation streamlines this by providing a collaboration mechanism to keep all project constituents in the loop (internal employees, consultants, and client contacts) not unlike forum style message boards we all use for various topics, which keeps an audit trail of topics and messages within every task.
Resource Planning & Scheduling - Assign tasks to internal and external resources based on individual or team availability and skill rating. Color coded drop-down menus visually communicate more (green) vs less (red) availability according to the time demands allocated to each task.
Project Administration - Each Project has a tab view dedicated to the project manager, who can make changes such as assigning and changing employees to tasks, adding and removing tasks from a project template, etc..
Analytics
Time, Billing, & Tracking - Because both time and materials, as well as fixed bid projects revolve around time, we created time contracts, which at their core are score cards that can be assigned to each project. As time is allocated to tasks, the score card is updated, decreasing as project time is consumed, so it can be compared against the original budget on a leader board, to help manage the velocity of the project.
Time can be added as a service line item within a sales opportunity in the CRM’s opportunity management (presented in a Quote or Estimate) then once approved, converted to a sales order where it can be billed - automatically updating the project’s P&L.
Profit & Expense (aka P&L) - From the project, track expenses from costs, such as payroll, and other purchase expense line items in purchase orders, as compared to profit from income tied to billable services, and profit margins coming in from sales orders.
Project management is but one cog in the engine that is your business, which is why stand alone project management is such a challenge. Here’s just a partial list showing how project management leverages other portions of the suite: