Rewind: Evaluating Your Project Management Outcomes
(This is Part 9 of a multi-part series — see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and 8. In other entries for this series, we’ll be going in-depth on topics such as how Salesforce Admins can employ new approaches and empower their business partners. In addition, how businesses can streamline operations and objectively evolve strategic decision-making, ensuring group buy-in and productive innovation. And finally how to execute efficient project planning in the Salesforce environment, to be agile while achieving your goals for reinvention.)
When a project has ended, it’s easy to look back and see how it could have gone differently. In project management, like in life, sometimes you can clearly see where a project took a wrong turn, but other times it can be a series of smaller things. That’s why it’s important to take time at the end of each project to rewind — to think about what you’ve learned — so you can evaluate what’s working and what can be improved.
“It is the project manager’s job to ensure that everything runs smoothly on a project, but having a great project manager doesn’t guarantee a successful project outcome. The entire team paying attention to key factors is what will help lead the project to true success. This success will then lead to proactive, organized project plans and an increase in quality of all future projects,” writes Mark Price Perry in Top 10 Tips for Continuous Improvement.
Good project management means that there is less waste. A blog post on Hive explains, “Organizations that invest in proven Project Management practices waste 28x less money because more of their strategic initiatives are completed successfully.”
Setting your projects up for success in Salesforce
To get off on the right track it’s important to use a consistent approach for identifying and executing projects that will help you manage projects for continuous improvement.
What is continuous improvement? It’s an ongoing process to improve a company’s services, products or processes. Improvement goals can be reached gradually over time or achieved with a single breakthrough moment. The goal is to refine the process by incorporating lessons you’ve learned for the next project.
Like Peter Drucker says: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Decide ahead of time how you’ll measure project performance. “Scorecards can be useful to monitor the key performance indicators of processes that support capability and performance,” explains Perry.
When you use a continuous improvement approach, you can proactively control project costs since evaluating the process allows you to see the overall budget more clearly. “If you can determine whether a project’s constraints are likely to break, you can plan better to avoid those mishaps,” writes Stephanie Ray in Continuous Improvement Business Strategy — A Quick Guide.
There are many things that go into setting your project up for success such as communication and encouraging ideas. But at a higher level, another way to set your project up for success is to establish core values like stressing teamwork, being flexible, and supporting the customer. “These core values will create a sense of belonging and a common vision for all involved,” explains Perry.
Once you’ve set your process into motion, you can evaluate and change your continuous improvement process by measuring its efficiency and effectiveness. Using project management software tools can help you stay organized while maximizing resources and collaboration at each stage of the project. The following are examples of project management solutions and tools from Passage Technology’s apps, which are available on the AppExchange.
Using templates
If you have processes that need to be followed repetitively with targeted beginning and deadline dates, the most efficient way to manage them is with a templated project management solution. With the template functionality in Milestones PM+, which is available free on the AppExchange, you can automatically create projects within Salesforce. Templates can be used for project creation including all of the necessary milestones, tasks, durations, dependencies, risks, and issues. We created a Starter Template MPM+ Stage-Gate® Project as an example.
Synching tasks
Milestones PM+ Premium Edition includes task synching, which allows you to enable a unified task list for your entire organization, so your teams can all be on the same page. You can also leverage standard Salesforce My Tasks views to work your project task lists, and tasks can be synced with MS Outlook using Salesforce for Outlook or Gmail.
Tracking projects
Milestones PM+ includes percent-complete tracking. For example, with
Milestones PM+ (out of the box), the percent complete field is based upon the
number of tasks completed/total number of tasks. Milestones PM+
automatically calculates the percent completed field for you.
Building reports
In addition to tracking projects, Rollup Helper can help you build custom embedded analytic reports on any page in Salesforce. For example, the following embedded report chart was created using a Projects report type to report on the quantity of unresolved project issues and risks graphically.
Conclusion
Projects can reinvent a business, and reimagining your use of Salesforce can play an important role. But reinvention also happens as a result of lessons learned from project execution. When you stay flexible and continually look for ways you can improve your project management process, you can leverage opportunities and build on your successes. Project management tools can not only help you stay focused and on track, they can help you maximize resources and collaboration at every stage of your projects — today and tomorrow.
To learn more about Passage Technology’s apps and services Contact Us, or visit Milestones PM+ and Rollup Helper overview pages).
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