Salesforce + eProject = Deliveryforce - Part II

I saw a lot of visitors to the Deliveryforce post, so I decided to expand a little on that.

This is what a "Service Economy" value chain (the simple version) looks like. Knowledge workers prepare or acquire skills and competencies that will help them escalate from technical, to human to conceptual roles. They use that knowledge to propose solutions to different issues that companies are facing, and most important of all, the need to deliver on the promise by planning, executing, controlling an engagement.

To sell, you need a process and an enabling technology (salesforce.com is my pick)

• You need to prospect and plan identifying opportunities (90% is starting in the right direction)
• You need to qualify leads
• You need to manage relationships
• You need to manage proposals and follow up
• You need to analyze the data around the sales cycle.

All this is enabled by functionalities in a CRM program. The key issue is that this needs to be web enabled and that sales techniques - including the process - change so much that you are better off purchasing web software that will be managed by an expert provider instead of having a system that will freeze your organization in time with practices that will tend to get old.

Why this is important:

• Organizations need to be about change
• The only way to change is to go from point A to point B
• To go from A to B you need a project or a change initiative
• To manage it you will be required to manage some key elements of a project like benefits, stakeholders, objectives, documents, third parties, risks, issues, changes, and others.

So... why do you need a PPM tool (case in point eProject)?

• Basic premise of project management is that it takes two to tango. You and the client. Projects are a team effort. So therefore, the enabling project management technology needs to enable teamwork, to be collaborative, or get ready for communication problems.
• Timeline management is a critical success factor. eProject for example imports MS Project and shows a web gantt chart that is spectacular.
• Schedule management is critical. eProject has a monthly calendar to plan all project meets, appointments, etc... No more one-to-one communication.
• Document management is perhaps one of the critical issues of large scale projects. People send sensible information via e-mail just like they send viral videos. eProject allows for a central repository of documents with version control and notifications.
• E-mail is for notifications... not for management. eProject provides notifications in a user-defined workflow to be notified about appointments, document changes, etc...
• Progress reports should not require sweat. In eProject, everybody updates the % progress of their tasks and you get an automated. No more calling everyone to update the MS Project File or incorporating changes to a .mpp file which always works out wrong.
• MOST IMPORTANT... are custom apps. You will need to build small apps to store other project information. I have used it to build an improvement opportunities matrix, a stakeholder map, a communications plan and others. you can build any dynamic web app to store the information digitally on a web data base and not in a document that will limit you when delivering a large project.

There are many opportunities with owning value chains, of an economy in general or industry specific ones. In this case, won proposals usually turn into projects (in the service economy), and delivering projects also has a key set of elements that some people / organizations take very lightly.