AppExchange and the Salesforce Ecosystem
By: Carrie Brown
Tags: Apps, Technology, Appexchange, Salesforce Tools, Salesforce

(This is Part 8 of a multi-part series by Passage Technology: Reinventing Your Business, Reimagining Your Salesforce — see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and 7. 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.)

Project management touches just about every aspect of how organizations achieve their goals, and it can have a huge impact on costs. The State of Project Management 2020 reports that project management challenges cost businesses $109 million for every $1 billion invested in a project (roughly 11% of all project costs), and one in six IT projects has a cost overage of 200%.

One of the major factors impacting project management is communication. The report shows that, each year, poor communication can cost businesses with up to 100 employees approximately $420,000, and businesses with a staff of 100,000+ employees more than $62 million. And the possibility for costly miscommunications is increasing as the remote workforce expands.

The good news is that you can improve communication by establishing project timelines, goals, and responsibilities with project management team collaboration software. A Pulse of the Profession study from the Project Management Institute found businesses that have implemented a project management structure experience 38% more success with projects than those without a structure in place.*

Managing Projects in Salesforce

Are you onboarding new employees? Integrating systems? Launching a new website or opening a new office? Salesforce can track all of the individual inputs and data points that go into your project, and AppExchange apps can help extend Salesforce’s project management capabilities. Project management apps like Milestones PM+, available on the AppExchange, can help you transform your Salesforce org into a project execution platform.

As internal technology teams implement new business processes and enhance or integrate systems, they need to document their work and stay on track in terms of budgeting, scheduling, and transferring knowledge.

Has the desired functionality been documented? Do you have a testing plan to make sure that users don’t experience bugs or usability problems? Whether a technology project involves Salesforce project management, mobile app development project management, or creating a new customer community, each project will have milestones and tasks within them that need to be completed and tracked.

By creating a project in Salesforce for each IT project type using Milestones PM+ templates, you can set your team up for success to meet their goals while facilitating efficiency, collaboration, and ensuring a smooth transition for user adoption. Following are examples of how organizations used Milestones PM+ from Passage Technology to achieve their goals with technical projects.

Project challenge #1: integrating core business systems and processes on the Salesforce platform

One of Britain’s leading energy companies, nPower needed a tool for managing projects across multiple work streams to integrate all of their internal sales processes. They were also implementing their credit system in Salesforce, which included an integration with Experian and Attradius.

The configurability of Milestones PM+ allowed them to take a controlled, iterative approach to improving program governance. By helping them apply structure to their Salesforce development processes, the app enabled them to adjust their project management processes to accommodate output growth without the loss of performance or quality.

Project challenge #2: historical data and systems from multiple companies are integrated into one Salesforce org

Uniti Fiber is the fiber infrastructure segment of Uniti, a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). As a result of expansion, the Systems Operations team at Uniti Fiber was balancing the challenge of handling an influx of feature requests from all departments while integrating new companies with multiple other systems. They had also tripled their number of Salesforce users in just three years to 600 and were in the process of converting to Lightning in their Salesforce org.

Understanding costs is critical when you build out fiber optics and Milestones PM+ helped Uniti Fiber track and aggregate costs for management. They also used Rollup Helper from Passage Technology, which is free on the AppExchange, to aggregate dollar amounts. With Rollup Helper and Milestones PM+, they were able to track costs from multiple departments, and understand the monthly recurring cost savings.

Conclusion

Using a Salesforce project management app like Milestones PM+ gives you the power to transform your Salesforce org into a project execution platform, whether you’re managing large-scale IT projects, opening new locations, onboarding new employees, or managing marketing projects.

To learn more about Passage Technology’s apps and services, Contact Us or visit Milestones PM+ and Rollup Helper overview pages.

Copyright 2021 — Passage Technology LLC — All Rights Reserved — Not for Distribution without Prior Written Approval by Passage Technology

Source: *

The State of Project Management in 2020 [42 Statistics], Saaslist, Business Software Advisor