Introduction

Project Management is the process of applying methods and skills to accomplish goals under predefined conditions and within a given timeframe. Project management involves managing both technical and human resources to meet the customer’s requirements and deadlines. 

If you have big aspirations for your company and your team and are looking to achieve them, try Vtiger’s Project Management process.

Project Management in Vtiger CRM is a simple five-step process as listed below:

1. Initiation - Determining why a project is needed.
2. Planning - Laying out all aspects of the project.
3. Execution - Launching the project.
4. Monitoring - Observing and analyzing progress.
5. Closing - Completing and reviewing the project.

Once you are done, repeat the same for your next project!

Now let us learn about them one by one, in detail.

Initiating

Projects are planned assignments where you define and identify the goals that need to be met within parameters such as start dates, end dates, budgets, resources, etc.

Once you determine the need for starting a project, Vtiger CRM will help you kickstart your project smoothly, and nobody can stop you! 

Deals: A deal is a sales opportunity that you are pursuing to sell your products or services. If you win a deal, you can convert the deal into a project to supply products or services to your customer.

Projects: With the Vtiger’s Projects module, you can specify your goals, budgets, period, and other parameters required for a project to succeed.

We recommend that you work together with your customers to map out the project details during the initiation stage. Use these tools in Vtiger CRM to add project details. 

• Events: You can schedule meetings with your customers to discuss a project using the Events module. You can log these events, monitor their status, and create reminders for them. Since Vtiger integrates with Google Meet, you can send a Google Meet link to your customers from an event and collaborate with them through real-time video calls.
• Appointment pages: With appointment pages, you can allow the customer to pick a date and time for your meetings. When your customer decides and schedules the meeting, an event is created for the appointment.
• Quotes: If you are starting a billable project, you can create a quote and link it to the project. You can add details such as products, services, prices, taxes, terms, and discounts to your quote. You can also send the quote and other documents to your customers for e-signing and track the updates.
• Documents: You can share documents such as project flowcharts, blueprints directly from the CRM. You can also collaborate and discuss with your customers using the Document Viewer.

Planning 

Planning a project involves defining all the aspects of the project, as requirements in terms of resources, deadlines, risks, and limitations. 

• Milestones:  Have you noticed stones placed beside roads indicating the portion of the journey completed? Similarly, adding a milestone gives you an idea of how the project is advancing. Project Milestones indicate important achievements in a project that will lead you to accomplish the goal.

During the planning stage, you can use these tools to collaborate with your teammates.

• Comments: Share and discuss your ideas with your team members using comments. You can also grab an individual member’s or group’s attention using @mentions. 

If you have reference documents related to the project, link them instantly using the Documents module in your comments.

• Sticky notes: Sticky notes are useful to display key information. If there are multiple comments, you can highlight an important comment and display it as a sticky note. 

Executing 

Once you have planned and defined the milestones, you are ready to launch the project and get the work done! For this, Vtiger CRM provides the tools below. 

• Tasks: All activities you perform to accomplish a project are defined as Tasks. And in turn, each task can have multiple sub-tasks associated with it. In Vtiger’s Tasks module, you can add the task, subtasks, related tasks, and dependent tasks to help you carry out your work effortlessly.
  • Timelogs: With timelogs, you can keep track of the time spent on your tasks and recognize which task takes up most of your time. It will help you distribute your time and reach your deadlines smoothly. If you are working on a billable task, then you can charge for the tracked hours.
  • Reminders: You can set reminders on your tasks to finish the work on time. For example, if you put a task on hold for three days, you can set a reminder to follow up and finish it later.

Monitoring 

It is essential to keep an eye on a project’s progress. Monitoring helps you review the team’s performance, add or modify targets, and re-plan the project if necessary. Vtiger offers you these monitoring tools to track a project.

• Gantt chart: A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that provides a graphical illustration of scheduled tasks and milestones in detail. Gantt chart helps you plan, coordinate, and track specific tasks and balance your team members’ workload.
• Analytics: If you want to know the number of tasks completed, pending tasks, tasks assigned to team members, etc., you can derive these details using the Analytics widget. You can customize and add new charts to see the metrics. You can also add different conditions to group the data.
• Reports: Reports display data in an organized manner in tables, graphs, and charts. Using Vtiger CRM’s reports, you can extract relevant data from projects, milestones, and tasks. You can also schedule reports to get timely updates about your projects. These reports may help draw conclusions and make decisions to improve your process. 

Closing 

Once you have reached all the milestones and completed all your tasks successfully, it is time to review the other stages of the project, tie the loose ends, and close it.

• Cases: A case is an issue or a request raised by a customer. You can link the cases reported by your customer concerning the project and address them before closing the project.  
• Invoices: An invoice is a non-negotiable itemized statement issued for the products or services rendered to the customer. After you finish a billable project, you can send an invoice to the customer with the details of the work you have completed. You can also send the invoice for e-signing and track the updates.  

Finally, you can conduct an evaluation post-completion to analyze what has been done and what could have been done better.