Achieving Project Success on Salesforce: Tips & Best Practices
We are currently living in a state of flux that has rapidly become the new normal. There is a litany of issues this is posing for a modern business, but one area that is of significant importance is how to continue to make customers successful within a changing delivery landscape. Do this well and you will retain customers, if you don’t — they walk.
The necessity to be agile has always been in play for a good project manager but with sales pipelines stalling, frequently changing customer demands, and existing work getting canceled (all hallmarks of this new remote reality) there is a significant focus on ensuring that any technology-centered project runs smoothly and delivers value quickly. Project management is no longer about simply being on time and on-budget but about fulfilling the value promise made during the sales process.
Communications, stakeholder management, and listening are part and parcel of typical project management, yet these skills are being tested like never before. Being more in-tune with customers and delivering effectively every time is vital to maximize opportunities with existing customers because relying on historical growth is no longer a viable survival method. Obviously this is compounded with project management now being delivered remotely resulting in the loss of certain benefits gleaned from in-person meetings or contact time with a client. Yet conversely, companies are benefiting from lower costs and fewer logistical challenges in bringing people together. As such many companies are finding that it can be possible to get through project work faster.
Many are realizing that if Salesforce is already aligning multiple other business processes, it can also be the basis of a healthy project management process. If you’re reading this, Salesforce is likely already your platform for customer success but can you also make it the anchor to drive project success?
Virtual Project Management
Remote project delivery isn’t new but now the whole team, both on the supplier and customer side, have likely had the remote reality thrust upon them, so the dynamics for making projects successful have evolved. One major evolution is an increased emphasis on customer collaboration so that both company and client remain in alignment throughout a project. In particular, customers want to know how much time they need to spend on activities — there are often multiple projects or changes happening at the same time and, in some cases, there is less staff available to undertake this work. How this plan is communicated effectively in a remote environment is now even more important.
Salesforce for Project Management
Salesforce, as it is for 99% of the world’s largest companies, is used for driving customer success and growth. For many organizations, they wish to take an opportunity and map this into the delivery team for project management. With customer data on Salesforce, it is possible to have relevant commercial information flow through to your delivery teams. By having a project management or PSA tool native to Salesforce, you are able to combine both your commercial and delivery data and have a true forecast of your capacity and portfolio of work.
Too often customers will find themselves repeating their challenges during multiple interactions, from sales to implementation and into customer success. The customer is thinking “wasn’t this info communicated internally?”. This is because effective communications and collaboration don’t exist between teams; it’s a common story. However, Salesforce can act as your platform to break down the silos between your all customer-facing teams.
Salesforce provides some project management functionality, managing tasks, collaboration, and document sharing being useful parts of the system. But as complexity rises so too should the Salesforce functionality, and here you can look towards the AppExchange to discover apps that can help you manage people and projects.
At Precursive we’ve written a playbook to benchmark your current needs and to forecast your future requirements for project management, all within the Salesforce platform. Companies that once might not have had a need for such tools are now finding that they are a necessity.
To discover where you are on this journey, ask yourself three questions:
- Platform, Project Management (PM) or Professional Service Automation (PSA)?
You can find more on this comparison here, but you’ll see PM and PSA sit on a project management spectrum rather than occupy vastly differing spaces; differentiation typically comes in the form of variations in complexity within a project. To understand what’s right for you, start by evaluating the true deliverables and then measure that against requirements. If it is simple task management then Salesforce is a good starting point but given the rising complexity of remote delivery as well as the addition of further requirements, it is probable to see a desire to add intelligent applications to Salesforce, ones that cope with deeper project management or PSA.
2. How can smarter processes be implemented?
Post a technology evaluation, assess the current delivery process against the five ‘P’s. These are the stages that virtual project management on Salesforce should include. While the basics of good project management will not change just because of the remote environment, take a moment to consider alterations in strategy against:
Plan, People, Process, Platform and Performance.
It’s good to know what has changed in order to create a healthier process that remains robust in challenging circumstances.
3. Can Project Management be Future-proofed?
Once the process is optimized, companies often want to accelerate digital change. What is built now can create a future-proof framework to help plot a course for greater alignment, insight and speed for your project management processes on Salesforce, truly creating the agility that tackles changing client needs in times of instability.
Download your free Playbook today to take a deeper dive into getting started with remote project management on the Salesforce platform.
