Introduction 

This guide walks you through all the features available in the Project management app of Vtiger. If you are a project manager or belong to a project team, then this guide will help you manage and track your project tasks and meet set project goals.

Target Audience 

• Project Managers
• Project team members
• Administrators

Project Management Process Overview

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 technical and human resources to meet customer requirements and deadlines.

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

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

• Initiation - Determining why a project is needed.
• Planning - Laying out all aspects of the project.
• Execution - Launching the project.
• Monitoring - Observing and analyzing progress.
• 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 to start 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 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 tracking the updates.
• Documents: You can share documents such as project flowcharts and 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. You can use these tools during the planning stage 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 for displaying key information. You can highlight an important comment and display it as a sticky note if there are multiple comments. 

Executing 

• Once you have planned and defined the milestones, you can launch the project and finish the work! 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.

Vtiger Features for your Project Lifecycle

Here are the features related to Project Management Lifecycle.

• Customize Vtiger Projects to define project goals and related metrics

  • Manage your projects easily by adding details to a project.
  • Map Deal (opportunity) fields to Project fields to enable Deal to Project conversion.
  • Convert a deal to a project on closure without losing any historical data captured during a sales cycle.
  • Track project duration, the effort involved, and the budget spent. 
  • Customize projects to capture project-specific data such as Total Time Spent, Effort, and Cost variance.
  • Setting up Workflows to automate activity follow-ups, project task reminders, billing reminders, and update any downstream modules

• Assign project tasks to users and track status, effort, and the schedule

  • Create your project plan and assign tasks to team members and external contractors. 
  • Project tasks can be grouped by Project or Project milestone.
  • Customize the Projects module to capture time spent on a task and actual roll-up time spent on the project level using workflows.
  • Get a visual progress chart using the Gantt chart tool and track blockers for task completion.
  • Your customers can view project progress by logging into the Customer Self-service Portal.

• Bring all your project data into one place

  • Importing customer data from a CSV file or a third-party app like Google Contacts or Office 365.
  • Bringing project and related data from a third-party project management app.
  • Link project collaterals and related artifacts using the Documents module.

• Communicate project-related information with external parties

  • Create and customize lists to access individual and group tasks using Shared Lists, overdue tasks, unbilled tasks, tasks with no time log, etc.
  • Schedule Events to track project meetings with internal teams or customers. Use Google or Office 365 integration to sync your events from or to Vtiger.
  • Task manager helps you to keep track of To-dos related to the Project.
  • Zapier can integrate your favorite event or task management apps with Vtiger.
  • Keep all customer communication in one place using the Vtiger Inbox.

• Collaborate internally to move tasks forward during project execution

  • If you need assistance from an expert in the organization before you can do that, tag them in a comment that instantly lets them know to take a look.
  • Vtiger ensures that you’re always in the know with on-screen, SMS, or email alerts that notify you if a project or project task is assigned to you or a smart alert on a project task due in some time. 
  • Keep track of important projects or tasks and never miss an update by following a record. Admins can configure the rules in Notification settings.
  • Organize your project data with personalized(private) tags such as ‘Code review pending’ and ‘Log Project task time’ or share a tag with all project users such as ‘Tasks approved for billing’.

• Create project billing and rate cards

  • Projects may be executed as a Fixed price or a Time & Material-based project. The cost in a Fixed price project is defined at a project level and billed on completion of a milestone or end of the project. Projects with Time and material mode of execution are billed at a task or resource level and billed on completion of milestones or a defined billing cycle. 
  • Based on the type of project, set up a rate card with a project or a task using Picklist Dependencies.

• Send tasks for approval and generate invoices

  • Project Tasks that record time and material may need task approval before billing. Send such tasks for approval to an internal manager or external parties via workflows.
  • Generate an invoice for approved tasks using the Invoice generator when a project is ready for billing.
  • Customize your Invoice PDF generated using Print Templates.
  • Personalize email content using Email Templates.

• Get agreements, invoices, and other documents digitally signed

  • Get project agreements and invoices digitally signed in seconds with DocuSign and Zoho Sign integrations.

• Use Dashboards to track project performance reports 

  • Track your project team activity, tasks, and performance on your dashboard.
  • Track project metrics such as planned vs. actual effort, planned vs. actual duration by project task or milestone, or project or customer using Reports.
  • Create custom reports and charts and pin them to your dashboard.

• Integrate Vtiger with accounting applications

  • Synchronize contacts, products, and invoices between Vtiger and your company’s accounting system without any manual entry using any of the following integration.
    • QuickBooks (Desktop and Online versions)
    • Xero
    • Tally
    • PayPal
    • Sage

• Integrate Vtiger with contact and email applications

  • Google
  • Office 365
  • Outlook
  • Use Zapier integration to connect Vtiger with 300+ applications via a Zap

• Integrate Vtiger with Telephony and SMS providers

  • Plivo
  • Twilio
  • Exotel
  • Telzio
  • Asterisk
  • Knowlarity

• Integrating Vtiger with Documents management applications

  • Google Drive
  • Dropbox

• Vtiger’s sidebar for Gmail

  • While reading an email from a Contact, you might have often felt the need to look up recent notes, deal status, or related tickets for that contact. Vtiger CRM for Gmail, a Chrome extension, gives you everything you need to know about the Contact right within your Gmail window. 
  • Click here for more details.

• Getting business done on the road with the Vtiger CRM Mobile app

  • Be connected to your customers and don’t miss any activity while you are on the road using Vtiger mobile app.