#SALESFORCE PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE SOFTWARE#
Some companies (or departments) are best served by solutions that are designed to specifically address their needs.Īn obvious example is software development. Finding the right solutionīelow are a set of questions that you should consider when looking for a project management system to run either on or with the Salesforce platform, and offers some suggestions on how best to make your decision.įor the purpose of this document, it is assumed that all the solutions have basic project management functionality, like task assignment, scheduling, Gantt chart, collaboration, files sharing, etc. Unless you dig deep, you may not know until it is too late that the option you selected is just not going to work for you. To make it even more difficult, the devil is often in the details. Project management software is most definitely not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Getting a good fit means doing your homework to understand just what kind of solution you need. But there are major differences, and some vendor solutions will work for you while others won’t.
There are so many project management system options out there for two primary reasons: (1) every organization runs projects, so the demand is huge and unsurprisingly (2) no one has come up with the single best project management system that everyone can use. You must test drive the software or, to use the car metaphor above, have it test-driven on your roads while you are in the passenger seat.
You are not going to know by simply looking at what functionality the system has to offer. The only way to be sure that the architecture meets the needs of your organization is to do an in-depth proof of concept. It will be like forcing a square peg (your environment) into a round hole (the system architecture). If the architecture does not fit well with the way your business operates, it won’t matter how much functionality the system has. The architecture determines how hard or easy it is to accomplish different objectives.īeyond the common functionality shared among project and process management systems, the architecture is what really dictates how effective a system will be in your environment. Just because an analyst didn’t include a package in an evaluation doesn’t mean the product shouldn’t be considered by you.Įvery system is based on an architecture. It may be bad, but it also may be that the system just didn’t work for what they needed. Simply because someone gave a system a low rating doesn’t mean the system is bad. There are other considerations that render rankings less effective.
#SALESFORCE PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE SERIES#
Or you can go to one of those rapidly proliferating sites that purport to help you choose the right application based on a series of basic questions that may or may not include what’s really important to you. The criteria and the weighting of criteria are going to be different from company to company – possibly even department to department, or specific project.īeware of using the number of customer reviews as a primary indicator – 100 reviews by companies with 10 licenses each may be a lot different than a single review by a company with 10,000 licenses. If the list is based on a set of criteria that some journalist or analyst came up with, it for sure doesn’t reflect your weighting of the criteria.
Just because a package received the most customer positive reviews, it doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for you. You can look at one of the many lists of “Top 10 Project Management Systems” but it would be about as meaningful as the “Top 10 Cars” list. And so it is with Project Management packages.