Pipedrive has been around since 2010 and has reached ‘Unicorn Status’ as a startup valued at over $1.5 billion in 2020. Over 95,000 sales teams have used the platform and it was listed in the Forbes Cloud 100.

Of course, this shows that Pipedrive is doing something right, but how good is Pipedrive CRM and what does it offer?

To date, Pipedrive has fared really well in the CRM market and their latest AI and automation tools bring some further innovation and excitement to the table.

In this review, we’ll be taking a closer look at Pipedrive and its features and benefits.

Pipedrive: What is the Pipedrive CRM?

As many will already know, CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRMs allow businesses to manage their customers, leads and sales funnel – this is their primary function.

Prospecting and tracking leads from inception through to closure and repeat business is one of the chief pain points for businesses in any sales-oriented industry. CRMs address this pain point, making it far easier to track customers, marketing and sales tasks.

CRMs like Pipedrive organize leads into a sales funnel that allows businesses to track customer relationships in logical fashion.

In principle, this is simple, but as many already know, once leads become disparately organised and poorly managed, keeping track is notoriously difficult.

That’s where a CRM comes in. Pipedrive, fundamentally, is a lead-focussed CRM for sales teams. It will certainly suit marketing teams and virtually any sales-focused small business, startup, SME or SMB.

Does it have the teeth for enterprise-level businesses? Possibly, but that’s probably not where Pipedrive excels. This is a focussed, streamlined and lean tool that is extremely intuitive, effective and efficient to use.

Pipedrive CRM Core Features

Pipedrive allows businesses to track the chronology and progression of their leads and deals.

When you start using the software, you’ll be taken through a 7-step onboarding process that prompts you to:

• Important your customer data from a spreadsheet, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and more
• Sync your email accounts; Gmail, Outlook and other major providers are supported
• Setup chatbots and website forms on your site to capture more leads
• Sync deal calendars

Of course, you can skip anything you’re unable to do immediately.

The main strength of Pipedrive is displaying your sales funnel with simplicity, depth, and customization. That means managing your leads, including auto-tagging them from your leads database or emails, and tracking them from initial contact through to conversion and then repeat business.

The software helps you organize hot deals and rotting deals, providing guidance on when to renew your efforts with an established lead whose interest is waning.

You can create customized funnel fields and tag leads to different sales reps or employees.

Pipedrive is collaborative software, so multiple users can track deals from the same view. There are also extensive options for setting employee permissions that restrict access to business-critical information, personal information, or classified leads.

Sales Pipeline View

Pipedrive, as the name suggests, has a pretty classic sales pipeline/funnel view that organizes lead relationships from start to finish. It’s easy to start adding leads and setting deadlines, adding details, assigning tasks to reps, etc. You simply drag and drop your leads from one part of the sales pipeline to another, somewhat like a Kanban board. You can create multiple pipelines, e.g. one for prospecting new leads and one for post-sales support.

Contact Timelines enable reps and employees to visualize when a lead has been contacted, allowing them to see when to contact them next with new deals or follow-ups. There’s a Mail tab that syncs up relevant emails to and from each lead.

Scheduling new activities is extremely simple. The linear, logical UI is a joy to use and doesn’t require in-depth training to learn. The accessibility of the software combined with its competitive pricing is a boon for smaller businesses.

Productivity and Organisation

Pipedrive doubles up as project management software. You can collaborate with your team, assigning and tracking deadlines, maintaining to-do lists, goals, and more. The calendar view makes deadline tracking simple. This is great to see – modern CRMs need productivity and team management tools like this integrated in the same app – they’re especially important for remote work.Another excellent feature for general sales management and organization is the Product Catalogue. This allows businesses to itemize their products into the software. A simple but useful feature.

Email and Contacts

You can integrate your business emails from Outlook or Gmail with Pipedrive, tagging clients for automatic import into the software. Emails sync up efficiently to the software, letting you monitor and analyze email conversations from within the pipeline view.

The Smart Contacts feature here is really impressive, allowing businesses to automatically crawl the web for publicly available information about their contacts. Smart Contacts searches Google, LinkedIn profiles, other web listings, and many public online databases and sources. It’s an intelligent feature that can provide immediate intel on a lead.

Managing emails is very easy and there’s plenty of scope for email automation here too. There are tons of email templates included in the software – these make it simple to keep in regular contact with leads, past and present, whilst also helping businesses visualize when they haven’t heard back from a lead and/or are sending too many unanswered emails, etc.

Stats and Reporting

Statistics and reporting were some of Pipedrive’s weaker points, but this has improved. All the basics are covered, like forecasting, tracking, and comparing past and present sales data to gain a detailed picture of sales performance throughout time.

There are 4 main reporting features:

• Deals
• Revenue
• Activities
• Leads – which is currently ‘coming soon’

‘Deals’ helps you monitor customer churn, helping businesses analyze their customer lifecycle. Revenue is self-explanatory, allowing decent but basic tracking of deals revenue over time. ‘Activities’ is for reporting, analyzing, and tracking everything else, like emails, demos, calls, or events.

It’s possible to pull up a plethora of lead and deal stats, breaking down the value of deals with other key information. This data can be analyzed using AI-powered intelligence tools, namely the AI Sales Assistant which can reveal actionable sales insights.

For example, a business may be putting too much time into lower-value deals whilst the higher-value deals go largely unmonitored. The same could be true in reverse – focussing too much effort on a handful of higher-value clients may mask the value of other potential prospects. The AI Sales Assistant is designed to uncover these situations and provide alerts on how to address them.

Pipedrive CRM Advanced Features

Prospecting Leads

Formerly, Pipedrive was criticized for not providing enough features to actually prospect and create leads in the first place. This has changed in recent years via the integration of the Leadbooster.

The Leadbooster has 4 primary features:

Prospector: This helps businesses find outbound leads from Pipedrive’s own database of some 400 million profiles and 10 million companies. It works on a credit system – more on that shortly. Basically, you can use this tool to reveal leads with verified emails, phone numbers, and even social profiles. This is an impressive tool and the B2B database provided is quite phenomenal, but it will cost you. Firstly, you’ll need the Prospector add-on, and then you’ll need the credits themselves that cost around $1 each depending on how many you buy each month.

Chatbot: Pipedrive provides a chatbot that engages with website visitors, saving them as leads. It’s an AI-powered chatbot that also prompts businesses when human contact is required. This obviously yields its own value for dealing with customer service queries. The chatbot is easy to add to sites and features plenty of customization options for automating different response trees and playbooks.

Live Chat: Similarly to above, the live chat function can be operated by human customer service agents from a computer or mobile.

Web Forms: Inbound leads can use web forms to share their contact details and their information is instantly uploaded into the funnel. The forms are easy to customize for most CMSs like WordPress, Wix, etc. Web forms can also be analyzed for their click-through rates and other important metrics.

Security Centre

Due to the acute relevance of private and public data to CRMs, security is paramount. Recent regulation and legislation such as GDPR makes compliance even more important.

The Security Centre is fortunately fully equipped to deal with the rigors of modern data privacy and internal and external data governance. Due to the sensitivity of data stored within Pipedrive, they have appointed a Data Protection Officer and have worked hard to ensure GDPR compliance on their end.

They also provide two-factor authentication, account lockdown features (in case of a serious data breach), and numerous permissions settings, as mentioned. Data can be backed up daily and is encrypted on Pipedrive’s server.

Integrations and Apps

Pipedrive provides native Android and iOS apps for tablets and smartphones. Syncing contacts with Outlook and Gmail is simple. There are some 275+ other third-party integrations with the likes of Xero, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Asana, Slack, PandaDoc, and Pipechimp. This allows Pipedrive to be integrated into existing project management workflows as a more dedicated CRM tool. Integrations like Xero make accounting easy, allowing users to sync their deals and financials to the Xero accounting platform. There’s also an open API for advanced connectivity.

How Pipedrive can Benefit your Business

Pipedrive is a streamlined, focussed, and intuitive CRM for sales teams. It performs very well in its primary role – breaking down and organizing the state of leads throughout the sales funnel. Of course, this benefits both sales and marketing teams, due to the integration of email marketing tools.

In a nutshell, Pipedrive provides the following powerful features:

• Providing a powerful but logical way to organize and track leads throughout the sales funnel
• Collaborate and delegate tasks to different team members and reps, or automate email marketing campaigns
• Track leads after initial deals have been closed and focus on repeat business
• Collate financial information from leads for reporting and accounting purposes
• Add website features like chatbots and website forms for outbound lead generation
• Access large B2B databases for inbound lead generation

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive prices their software per user per month, which is standard for software of this type. Naturally, that means that more users and bigger teams = greater overall costs.

The Essential tier costs $15 per user per month, when billed each month, or $12.50 when billed annually. The key features you’d be missing out on here are the product catalog, email templates, and integrations with GSuite and other apps.

The Advanced tier then rises to $29 per user per month, discounted to $24.50 for annual billing. You’ll get most core features aside from advanced security features and some reporting features.

Then, there’s the Profesional tier weighing in at a pretty heavy $59 per user per month, or $49.90 when billed annually. It contains all features.

The Enterprise tier is $99 per user per month and requires a minimum of 10 users. It includes custom onboarding and priority support.

The Leadbooster add-on starts at $32.50 extra per company, which isn’t too bad at all.

There is another add-on, the Web Visitors add-on, that costs an extra $49 month-to-month per company. It’s essentially an integrated and augmented version of Google Analytics that syncs up to the software.

Overall, the pricing here is fair for smaller teams on lower tiers but things could get pricey quickly for larger teams that require some advanced features and addons.

Overall, Pipedrive probably sits in the middle range of CRMs as far as cost goes.

Pipedrive CRM: The Verdict

Pipedrive CRM is clearly well-made and optimized for modern digital sales and marketing teams. The developers have worked hard to add some excellent innovative features powered by AI and Big Data, namely the Leadbooster. The B2B database and Smart Contacts features are two stand-outs that ought to surprise some people.

The interface is superb – clear, concise but also customizable. It doesn’t saturate users with too many features, and it isn’t bloated, which counts for a lot when businesses need a simple but smart CRM solution that gets the job done with minimal onboarding, training, and ongoing maintenance.

Overall, Pipedrive does a really good job of fusing simplicity with intelligence. Reporting and forecasting tools as well as tons of integrations top things off, and the security center is easily sufficient for startups, SMBs, and SMEs to handle and govern their data, privacy, and security.

Is it cut out for large-scale enterprises?

Well, considering how large businesses structure their sales teams, Pipedrive would certainly be a good fit for some enterprise sales teams. Whether it could handle colossal volumes of data is maybe a different matter, but we’ve seen no proof to refute its ability to do so.

The post Pipedrive CRM Review appeared first on Software For Projects.

CRM – customer relationship management – is the process of managing the relationship between customers and the business.

Relationships between businesses and customers form at different stages of the sales funnel, starting with discovery and acquisition, progressing to conversions and sales and then hopefully ending up with repeat business.

This complex process can be broken down and visualised using a CRM that assists businesses in managing their sales pipelines. It serves as a database of customers and their contact with one or more business touchpoints, which range from the business website to social media channels, customer feedback forms, apps and even brick-and-mortar stores.

CRMs enable businesses to:

• Organise and store customer and contact data. Save and sort by job title, email, phone number, location, etc.
• Manage contact to and from customers, e.g. via email. Send emails from the CRM ranging from promotional, sales and marketing material to proposals, invoices and more.
• Analyze the health of your customer relationships, e.g. by measuring how often you’re contacting your customers.
• Report on sales and customer relationships using graphs and tables.
• Most CRMs also integrate team or project management tools, e.g. allowing sales and marketing tasks to be assigned to different team members within the CRM.

Top Features of CRMs

Fundamentally, CRMs act as databases of customer data. This customer data can be managed and organized from one central location, allowing businesses to work with a ‘single view’ of their customers across multiple touchpoints.

Modern CRMs do a lot more than that, however. Here are some top CRM features to look out for:

• Customer, contact and lead management; this is the bread-and-butter of the CRM, the database in which customer details and identifiers are saved for management and analysis.
• Deal management; that allow teams to survey customer deals, projects and milestones.
• Email tools; that allow teams to integrate their email services into the CRM for the purpose of sending bulk emails and/or email automation.
• Lead generation; some CRMs contain databases or web-scraping tools for locating new leads and contacts.
• Project management; for assigning tasks, deals, and milestones to different members of the sales or marketing team.
• Customer service; many CRMs have built-in help desks for monitoring customer service queries. Some CRMs also feature telephony tools for making and receiving telephone calls.
• Reporting and analytics; to view stats and graphs on sales data and performance.
• Integrations; CRMs integrate with everything from email and chatbot services to business intelligence platforms, order management systems (OMSs), and much more.

Agile CRM

Agile CRM has built an excellent reputation for its clean and clutter-free interface with deep functionality and plenty of integrations. It covers both standard customer relationship management; deal management, sales tracking, sales funnel analysis, etc, as well as email marketing and customer service.

The heart of Agile CRM is its customer and lead management area. This works as it should do, organizing customer data from various business touchpoints. Each customer can be sorted and organized using preset or custom tags. View a breakdown of each customer’s deals and assign them to different teams to progress different actions, e.g. book appointments, follow-up calls, etc. Social media tools are well-integrated and the telephony and customer helpdesk features are excellent.

Agile CRM is not as advanced as some of its competitors, but this is an advantage for small or mid-sized teams that don’t manage hundreds of thousands of customers. It’s streamlined and purposeful with some innovative extra features, even including a landing page builder and web form, and pop-up builder. Agile CRM offers all your usual integrations with email services, GSuite apps, etc.

Agile CRM allows users to:

• Manage contacts and deals in a streamlined interface
• Connect and manage multiple customer touchpoints, e.g. from social media
• Assign milestones, projects, and deals to team members
• Manage email marketing
• Build landing pages and other digital collateral

Pricing

Agile CRM has a free version for up to 10 users. From there, it’s $8.99 per user per month for the Starter, which lacks some features like the helpdesk. The Regular tier is a big jump to $29.99 and the Enterprise level is $49.99 per user per month. All of these prices are when billed in one go for 2 years. They’re almost double if billed each month.

TRY AGILE CRM

Pipedrive CRM

Having reached ‘Unicorn Status’ as a startup valued at over $1.5 billion in 2020, Pipedrive has surged through the ranks of CRMs to become one of the most advanced products in the industry. Namely, Pipedrive incorporates several AI-powered tools for populating leads with contact info, finding leads using web scraping, and uncovering problems with sales pipelines and deals.

Pipedrive has all the basics covered too, allowing businesses to manage their customers and contacts across multiple channels. Email marketing tools are well-implemented, allowing users to send bulk emails to their customers via the app. Pipedrive even comes with its own chatbot service that can be integrated onto a business’s website and routed to the app.

One of Pipedrive’s headline features is its Leadbooster that comes with a Prospector tool that works similarly to Nimble’s Prospector. This allows users to search for new leads via Pipedrive’s web-scraped database. Businesses can also use Pipedrive to build customized web forms for placement on-site or through other channels.

Pipedrive’s AI sales assistant analyzes sales data and deals to auto-suggest tips and tricks for preventing deal rot and other sales problems. It may seem like a gimmick but provided Pipedrive is set up properly, it’s reportedly very effective.

Pipedrive allows users to:

• Organize and manage leads and customers alongside social media information
• Leadbooster to help prospect new leads
• AI-powered sales assistant
• Chatbot integration
• Powerful email marketing tools

Pricing

Pipedrive is $15 per user per month when billed monthly for the Essential tier. This rises through $29 for Advanced, $59 for Professional, and $99 for Enterprise. The Leadbooster tools are an extra $32.50 for the entire company, but there is a credit system similar to Nimble.

TRY PIPEDRIVE CRM

Salesforce

Ranking the number 1 most popular CRM for some 7 consecutive years, Salesforce is a real behemoth that comes stacked with advanced CRM features. In fact, for small businesses, Salesforce almost definitely goes too far beyond the standard expected CRM feature set – it’s best for medium or enterprise-level businesses that take advantage of its many features.

Salesforce has all the basics covered, allowing unprecedented organization and control of vast customer data across multiple sales and marketing channels. Salesforce integrates directly with its own order management system and other Salesforce tools, truly allowing it to be an all-in-one tool for businesses that wish to move their systems to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Some advanced features include the Flow Manager which allows users to create advanced process automation. There are plenty of options for setting permissions, e.g. to restrict some employees from gaining access to certain customer data or deals.Advanced reporting tools allow businesses to quickly view and analyze their sales data and pipeline health. Customizable dashboards ensure that team members and higher management are informed of their projects and milestones.

Salesforce allows users to:

• Organize multi-channel customer data and contacts in unprecedented detail
• Advanced integrations with first-party and third-party tools, e.g. order management systems
• Flow Manager for process automation
• Powerful email marketing tools
• Ability to set permissions for employees/teams

Pricing

Salesforce charges $25 per user per month for their lowest-level option for 10 team members max. This then jumps right up to $75 per user per month, $150 per user per month, and $300 per user per month. The more expensive versions allow access to Salesforce’s advanced marketing, analytics, and customer service tools.

TRY SALESFORCE

Nutshell

Nutshell is another modern and innovative CRM that is probably aimed more towards small and mid-sized teams. It has a super-crisp, quality UI which is easy to use with plenty of advanced features under the hood.

At the core of Nutshell are its customer and lead management platform that does everything one would expect it to do. Customers and leads can be organized, sorted, and assigned off to different team members for onboarding, management, booking follow-up calls, etc.

Calls, appointments, and emails can be assigned with automatic reminders. Email marketing is well-implemented, allowing users to send bulk emails to customers. Social media marketing and management tools are well-integrated too and the dashboard can be tweaked and tuned with different filters. Nutshell offers plenty of integrations with business intelligence tools, email marketing services, GSuite, and more.

The drag-and-drop pipeline management tool is augmented by a map view that allows businesses to sort their customers by geographical location. Nutshell’s lead tracking tools are excellent and suit small client-based businesses extremely well, though they might not suit businesses with many thousands of customers as well.

Nutshell allows users to:

• Manage customers, leads, and contacts with multiple views such as map and Kanban
• Advanced pipeline management for tracking deals as they progress through the sales process
• Built-in email marketing features
• Tons of powerful reporting and analytics tools
• Team management tools with customizable dashboards

Pricing

Nutshell’s simple and fair pricing starts at $19 per user per month for the Standard tier, rising to $35 per user per month for Pro. Pro adds sales automation and reporting tools amongst other features. It’s one of the cheaper products on the market – simple pricing benefits small and mid-sized teams the most.

TRY NUTSHELL

Nimble

Nimble CRM is very well-suited to small to mid-sized teams that manage high-value clients and customers. At its core, it’s a powerful CRM that allows for granular tracking of contacts across multiple sales channels and touchpoints. Advanced sales funnel analysis combines with quality data segmentation tools to accurately break down customers depending on where they’re located in the sales funnel.

One standout feature of Nimble is the Today dashboard which displays all daily relevant data in one easy-to-read section. Instantly home in on pending tasks, deals, marketing tasks, etc. Each contact can be displayed alongside their social media info (Facebook and LinkedIn sadly no longer allow this, though), allowing users to gain instant insight into their high-level contacts.

Another of Nimble’s advanced features is the Prospector tool which essentially acts as a web-scraping tool. This automatically pulls up potential lead data as you surf the internet, e.g. when browsing a website or social media page. It’s a powerful and innovative tool that works extremely well for cultivating cold leads.

Nimble is probably best suited to businesses with sets of high-value leads that require more detailed management, but it can handle larger customer datasets too. Nimble is also equipped with plenty of integrations for connectivity to business intelligence tools, email marketing platforms, GSuite apps, time-tracking, and more.

Nimble allows users to:

• Organize and segment customers and contacts in great detail
• Find social media information on current and prospective leads
• Discover more leads with the Prospector tool
• Powerful dashboard that displays daily relevant information
• Comprehensive email marketing tools

Pricing

Nimble charges a flat $25 per user per month when billed monthly. The Prospector is included but requires Enrichment Credits to use. Teams get a number of these each month but more can be purchased from the app.

TRY NIMBLE

Summary: 5 Easiest to Use CRMs

These 5 CRMs represent the latest and greater in customer relationship management. Needless to say, each one covers the basics in excellent fashion, simplifying the way businesses organize and manage their customer’s data and contact information.

With email marketing tools, deal management, and reporting, and analytics, customer data can be managed efficiently and effectively to maximize deal turnover, repeat business, and ROI.

Some of these CRMs, namely Nimble and Pipedrive, come with their own lead-prospecting tools. These are essentially web scraping tools that allow users to prospect new leads when surfing the internet (or by accessing a database in Pipedrive’s case).

Aside from the accomplished and innovative Nimble and Pipedrive, small and mid-sized teams are well-suited by Nutshell and Agile CRM. Salesforce is definitely the heavyweight option and boasts the most integrations, customizability, and Enterprise-level security and data governance tools.

The post 5 Easiest To Use CRMs appeared first on Software For Projects.

Prior to the last couple of decades, project managers were responsible for the manual organization of projects and their staff, and whilst they’ll often still play a part in various industries today, project management has moved towards the ‘agile’ framework.

In a nutshell, modern agile project management is iterative – it places the focus on small, movable tasks that can be easily monitored as they progress towards completion. Atlassian describes agile project management software as granular, progressing towards deadlines in timely but small, bitesize chunks.

And that’s where project management software is today.

Revolving around the agile project management paradigm, modern project management software breaks tasks down into chunks that are easily scheduled, tracked, and monitored towards completion.

These chunks are often displayed and organized in a Kanban board or Gantt chart, which have become hallmarks of project management software.

Project Management Software: Features to Look Out For

If you or your business are considering project management software then what features should you look out for?There are 6 main features to project management software:

• Project planning and calendars; Kanban or Gantt boards with deadline scheduling
• Team collaboration; ability to share files from platforms like Google Drive or Office
• Time tracking; to track how long people are spending on certain tasks
• Reporting; reporting progress, issues, updates, etc
• Project budgeting; budgeting tools to track costs
• Billing and quotes; for invoicing and to keep clients and customers in the loop with costs

Not all project management will feature project budgeting and billing and quoting tools, but most contain a way to track numerical values. For example, Monday has a “Numbers” column that you can add to your board, set a currency, and track and analyze expenses from within the project board.

Primarily, though, project management software is about accurately breaking down and tracking a project piece-by-piece. All the main options achieve this goal through a combination of Kambam boards, time tracking, and calendars. It’s also often possible to analyze your project data, e.g. to see who has spent what time on what projects, what jobs remain unfinished, how close you are to reaching the deadline vs the total hours of work remaining, etc.

Without further ado, let’s break down 6 of the most popular project management software options available today:

ClickUp

ClickUp is one of the top-tier project management tools that comes with a crazy suite of features that suit every project, every industry, and every team. They’ve built an impressive repertoire of clients including the likes of Google and Booking.com.

ClickUp is a cloud-based tool with a very generous free plan that allows access to features including 100Mb of cloud storage per workspace. From there, you’re looking at $5 per month per person with other deals for enterprise-level plans.

As one of the most scalable, fully-featured project management tools around, ClickUp has a reputation for being somewhat overwhelming at first glance – you can’t overstate how many tools there are!

ClickUp is an excellent project management for any task or industry:

• Management
• Remote work
• Software development and programming
• Marketing
• Sales
• Design
• CRM
• Health and environment
• Non-profit and charity

You can break ClickUp into 4 main areas, but the total featureset contains some 50 tools or more.

Project management: There are numerous workflow views like Kanban boards, Gantt views, calendar views, activity views, workload views, etc. You can log projects, break them down into their various components, assign them off and then track them in so many ways,

Team management: There are plenty of features for tracking and managing teams. Time tracking is simple, as is the tracking of individual workloads, allowing managers to tune tasks to spread the workload fairly.

Time Management: Set deadlines, task estimates, and monitor progress towards goals. View graphs that break down the time spent on each project/goal/task and how this contributes to the overall completion of the main task.

Collaboration: There are numerous features for collaboration including scrums and sprints for agile DevOps teams, plenty of file upload tools ith team viewing, reports, and more. Work collaboratively in team rooms via voice or Zoom, track tasks and manage team workload to keep tasks fair and equitable.

Niche Features

There are plenty of niche features here too that are optimized for programming or software development. For example, there are sprint management tools and scrum points that can be tracked with different agile charts. Bug tracking is simple and with Git integration, it’s easy to integrate development project management with this coding-specific management platform.

Financial reporting and budgeting tools are also fully featured here, enabling businesses and teams to set financial goals, track costs, and quickly pull up graphs and reports for financial analysis.

No matter the industry or project, ClickUp has something to offer. There are tools for proofing and annotating documents, managing budgets, and resources, chatting to team members, and working collaboratively via Zoom, etc.ClickUp integrates with numerous other software and its public API enables custom connectivity to virtually any other relevant platform.

Pricing

The full version of ClickUp is 100% free, the only caveat being that the total workspace storage is limited at 100mb. For many users, dare we say the majority of users, this isn’t a major issue. ClickUp’s full version costs just $5 each per team member per month when billed annually or $9 when billed monthly, and there are deals for enterprises or very large teams. Overall, this ranks ClickUp as extremely competitive, especially given the vast selection of tools on offer.

Features

• Project tracking using Gantt view, Kanban boards, calendars, and more
• Ample tools for setting goals and project milestones
• Advanced team management and time tracking
• Tons of communications integrations for webcam and voice
• Document proofing and annotation
• Agile tools for programmers and DevOps
• Vast number of integrations including public API
• Project automation
• Map view
• Too many to list!

Pros

• A colossal number of features
• Suitable for all sectors and industries
• Superb pricing with very generous free version
• Every integration you could possibly need
• Niche features for specific tasks or industries
• Scalable to work with extra-large teams

Cons

• Overwhelming number of features
• Users need to spend some time setting it all up to get the most out of it

Monday.com

Monday.com is a well-known collaborative project management software that bears all the hallmarks of a quality program. It has several views, e.g. Table view, Calendar view, Gantt view, and Kanban view, allowing users to monitor tasks and progress them from ideation through to production and finalization. There’s an innovative tagging and messaging system that allows users to converse across projects, and a dedicated chat panel too for individual and team communication.

The workflow can be automated using reminders and other tools that keep the team tracked towards deadlines. Progress can be broken down and monitored using impressive graphs and KPI tables. Overall, it’s one of the simpler project management softwares, but for smaller teams, it works very well and doesn’t bloat with unnecessarily complex features and endless customization.

Monday.com does work well as a CRM too, but it’s mostly focussed on the project management side of things rather than client or customer-side organization. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of room for customization and Monday.com is frequently adding new features to the platform. There are tons of integrations too, so you can easily connect Monday.com to apps like Slack, Google Drive, Docs, etc.

Templates: With over 200 templates, Monday.com enables teams to get and running immediately without custom-building their own boards. The templates cover pretty much anything you can think of.

Automation: Automation in Monday.com is easy and enables teams to set reminders, archive tasks, send files, etc.

Pricing

There is a 14-day free trial,  but there is currently no free version of Monday.com. Instead, you have to pay per seat and costs vary between tiers. E.g. the Basic plan doesn’t allow for Calendar or Gantt view, and costs $8 per seat per month. It scales through the Standard ($10), Pro ($16), and Enterprise tiers which add more apps, automation, features, and integrations.

Features

• Project management focussed software
• Kanban, Gantt, Table, and Calendar views
• Plenty of automation features
• Private boards for higher-tier packages
• Multi-level permissions
• Decent tagging and communication system
• Swift, easy-to-use interface
• Reasonably cheap for smaller teams
• Performance and deadline tracking

Pros

• Nicely streamlined for project management
• Ideal for remote working
• Reasonably priced
• Simple to use without the bloat
• Powerful automation
• Multi-level permissions for Enterprise version

Cons

• Not so expandable as competitors
• Could get expensive for big teams

Kissflow

Trusted by many huge brands worldwide, Kissflow is a workflow-centric project management software with all the usual views and features. Namely, it includes Kanban, List, Matrix, Task, and Project views which are all modular and easy to edit.

The interface is super-clean and simple – whilst some expandability is possibly sacrificed, this is one of the slickest collaborative project management UIs around. It also integrates very well with GSuite, Excel, and many other apps. The APIs are extensive allowing for deeper customization.

Focussed on task management, Kissflow allows users to track processes from ideation and assignment through to production and completion. There are tons of ways to track projects and discuss with team members as projects move through the app’s workflow. Some nice review and analysis features allow team leaders to track project progress and performance. There’s no rocket science here, just pure, slick project and team management.

Multiple Workflows: With so many workflow options, Kissflow is suitable for many teams working across various departments, e.g. marketing, lead generation, CRM, etc.

Integrations: Kissflow’s integrations with GSuite and other apps are seamless and smooth. It’s very easy to work across integrated apps and incorporate off-platform documents into the workflow.

Requests: Kissflow makes it easy for employees to make requests and communicate with others via the platform. This makes it a good tool for managing employee rotas, onboarding, etc.

Pricing

Kissflow does have a free version that covers 3 users for 1 project, which is great. From there, it scales per project, not per seat. The Standard tier covers 5 users for 5 projects at $35/mo total. Additional users are then $5. This works out pretty competitively and there’s decent scalability to ensure you don’t pay over the odds for your team.

Features

• Matrix, table, list, Kanban, and multiple other customizable workflows
• Integrations with GSuite, Office 365, and many other apps
• Advanced time and performance tracking
• Quality messaging system
• Slick, intuitive UI
• Lots of templates for different teams across various industries

Pros

• Fast and efficient with robust UI
• Focussed on project and team management with little bloat
• Plenty of views and templates
• Excellent APIs
• Fair, scalable pricing
• Good messaging system

Cons

• Doesn’t have the same level of automation potential as other software
• Not as easily expandable as ClickUp

Kanban Tool

So you’ve looked into project management software and decided you only need one thing: the Kanban board. Kanbans are the mainstay of most project management software, allowing businesses and organizations to break down tasks into manageable chunks and view their progression through swimlanes until completion.

Kanban Tool is focussed entirely on Kanbans. Despite its simplicity, it’s trusted by some huge brands worldwide. It even has an on-premises version which could save money vs SaaS project management software.

In terms of functionality, the Kanban boards here are endlessly customizable. Set task dependency, assign tasks easily to teams, track their progress using advanced reporting and automated email reminders and comments. The integrations list is also pretty much endless and with well-documented APIs and SDKs, Kanban Tool is open to full customization.

Security: Kanban Tool boasts advanced security and compliance features that are sometimes overlooked by other collaborative project management software. 2FA, advanced access tiering, and single-session sign-on are all included.

Endless Customisation: The Kanban boards can be customized in more ways than can be described. These are called ‘Power Ups’ – there are over 30 Power-Ups that can be attached to the customizable boards.

Pricing

Pricing is very fair here, with a free version for 2 boards for 2 users with no file attachments. There’s a standard Team package for €5 per member with unlimited boards and attachments and an Enterprise package for €9 per month per member.

Features

• Advanced Kanban boards
• 30+ Power-Ups to modify and customize Kanban boards
• Well-documented, extensive APIs
• Process automation
• Excellent security features
• Analytics and performance suite

Pros

• Extremely robust for Kanban board management and workflows
• Tons of customization
• Cheap for most users
• On-premises option for enterprises
• Robust security
• Automated reminders and comments

Cons

• Purely for Kanban workflows
• Simple UI

Workfront

Workfront by Adobe is one of the world’s leading project and team management software. It’s oriented towards remote work but can be used by anyone looking for a robust team management program with deep functionality for work across nearly any industry.

The programming and software development features are well-developed, with Gantt boards that allow for Agile DevOps and tons of project tracking features.

The dashboard is one of Workfront’s greatest assets, allowing each team member to view their own personal projects, performance, and time management breakdown. The centralized communication hub is extremely good for networking teams together efficiently. Collaborative working spaces allow teams to work from within the app.

Workflow is well-engineered for teams of all sizes; tasks can be assigned, prioritized, tracked, and broken down with KPIs for analysis by managers. Integrations with both Adobe products and third-party apps are extensive and there are well-documented APIs for deep customization.

Permissions: Easily set and manage advanced permissions across all employees and teams.

Visual Collaboration: Collaborate in powerful visual spaces; annotate images, videos, etc, all within the app.

Advanced Reporting: Create reports on KPIs and project progression. Analyze individual, team, and project performance with charts and graphs.

Pricing

Workfront pricing is on request – you have to contact them directly. As you might expect then, it’s not cheap, working out at something like $30 per user per month. Of course, it depends on your project and needs. This is advanced collaborative project management software geared towards SMBs and enterprises as well as productive smaller remote teams.

Features

• Multiple views including calendar and Gantt
• Visual collaborative working space
• Advanced workflow management
• Extensive APIs
• Deep integration with other apps
• World-class security
• Plenty of permissions options

Pros

• Deep functionality for virtually every industry
• Superb support for enterprises and SMBs
• Innovative visual working space
• Excellent messaging system
• Endless API and app support
• Powerful reporting and KPI analysis

Cons

• Expensive
• Need to put some time in to get the most out of it

Asana

Asana is one of the newest and fastest-growing project management software around. It’s modern, innovative, and well-made for remote work and small, agile teams. There are 3 main layouts; List, Calendar, and Boards, all of which enable deep customization.

Team management is simple and the internal messaging system is great. One of Asana’s headlines is its brilliant UI that offers the perfect balance between simplicity and flexibility – it’s got something for every type of team ranging from software developers to creatives, agencies, and more.

At its core, Asana is streamlined towards project and team management and this is where it excels. It’s super easy to set deadlines, assign team members and track task progression from ideation to production and completion. Integrating with GSuite is simple and seamless, allowing users to effortlessly sync their Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides work with the app.

Team Management: Asana excels at team management. Easily tag, manage and communicate with team members whilst passing on feedback and positive reinforcement.

GSuite: Google apps are particularly well-integrated with Asana, allowing teams to easily collaborate using Drive, Docs, Slides, etc.

Analytics: Break down project progress and monitor individual and collective contributions to tasks. Forecast how long tasks will take and predict whether or not they’ll be finished on deadline.

Prices

Asana starts at $11.99 per user per month on the Premium Plan. The Business Plan is $23.99 per user per month. The Basic plan is free and with unlimited projects, it’s probably the most generous free plan for collaborative project management software.

Features

• List, Calendar, and Board views
• Manage teams and set tasks and deadlines
• Track project and individual progress
• Integration with GSuite apps
• Communicate with individuals and teams via message or Zoom
• Analyze project progress and forecast time until completion

Pros

• Slick and intuitive UI
• Superb integration with Google apps
• Generous free version
• Excellent team management features
• Track time and project KPIs

Cons

• Probably best for smaller remote teams
• Lacks some automation features

Summary

Some excellent collaborative project management software here. Competition in this space is super-tight, but each of these brands has something unique to offer.

ClickUp is a bit of a standout, but what it gains in colossal functionality it loses in intuition. However, with a little work, teams can bend and flex this extraordinary software to manage pretty much anything they want.

Kissflow, Monday.com and Asana are simpler, more streamlined and oriented towards modern project and team management. They’re both superb for smaller and medium-sized teams.

Workfront is a bit of a beast, both in functionality and cost, but it’s status as one of the world leaders in project and team management says it all. It’s worthy of serious consideration.

Kanban Tool is ideal for businesses who just need  an advanced Kanban workflow solution.

Each one brings something original to the table.

The post Best Collaborative Project Management Software appeared first on Software For Projects.

In municipal project management, project management software fulfills a similar role to what it fulfills in a business context.

Indeed, many aspects of running a city, town, or other urban areas are similar to running a business.

There are tasks to track and delegate, projects to manage, reports to analyze, and so on and so forth. Project management software breaks down large tasks into bitesize chunks that can be easily accessed by different team members, organized, and most importantly, completed.

Municipal project management software saves both time and money, reducing paperwork costs, streamlining team objectives, and monitoring tasks efficiently from ideation to completion.

Paperwork alone costs businesses, organizations, and institutions millions of dollars each year, wasting valuable working hours in the process.

Project management software erases the need for paperwork whilst strengthening teams, equipping them with the tools they need to crush deadlines and stay ahead of the game.

What is Municipal Project Management?

Municipal project management relates to businesses, institutions, and organizations that operate in both the public and private municipal sectors and industries. Clients include State and County authorities, real-estate developers, retailers, and construction managers. Municipal projects also extend to event management, day-to-day local and areawide admin, and pretty much anything else that involves countywide, citywide, or other areawide planning.

Municipal project management also involves construction and repair, waste management, event planning, and data reporting (e.g. environmental reporting or accidents).

Of course, there are many tiers and scales to municipal project management.

Individual departments may need a way to collaborate their teams together, which is especially important for remote work.

Traditionally, teams might have used a combination of email, Office, and GSuite, relying on spreadsheets and other manual reporting methods.

Now, project management software can empower municipal teams and departments with an effective means to plan and structure their projects.

Software Features for Municipal Project Management

So what sort of features are useful for municipal project management?

Project management software has 6 main features:

• Project planning calendars and other project views; the first step for any project is to set your goals and deadlines, organizing them with smaller tasks and deadlines. Project management software offers a variety of views to help teams track both macro and micro tasks. Kanban boards are one such view that allows teams to visualize task progress from ideation to completion.
• Collaboration and communication; getting your team singing from the same hymnbook is vital for project management. Municipal project management makes team networking and collaboration easy, allowing team members to view the same information and use in-app tools to work together.
• Security and permissions; municipal project management software should have advanced security and permissions features to limit data access.
• Reporting and analytics; generating reports and forwarding them to other organizations, businesses or authorities is a vital function of municipal project management software.
• Email management; municipal project management involves high volumes of communication. Project management software makes it easy to organize and manage email communications.

Let’s take a look at 5 of the best options for municipal project management software.

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ClickUp

ClickUp is probably the most powerful project management software in the world. Its main strength is its near-infinite customizability. This makes it an excellent choice for municipal project management, as its features can be easily tweaked to suit any task or project.

First and foremost, ClickUp offers multiple ways to break tasks down into manageable and trackable chunks. Set tasks, create task mindmaps to assist in ideation, and then set up task dependencies and pipelines. You can add comments and Wikis to each task, providing teams with vitally relevant information that they’ll need to complete their tasks. Tasks can be structured in Kanban boards, calendars, or Gantt views.

• Emails and Communications: ClickUp integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers. This allows teams to centralize their communications which are perfect for liaising with other departments, authorities or contractors.
• Reporting: ClickUp has numerous reporting tools that enable teams to draw up graphs of their progress towards objectives. This makes reporting progress to managers, municipal planners, or other authorities simple.
• Advanced Permissions: ClickUp has advanced permissions features, allowing project managers to prohibit access to certain information or materials.

Pricing

ClickUp offers a quite remarkable fully free version, but it includes just 100Mb of storage space. There are some limits to how many goals you can set in the free version, which could limit municipal project management teams.

The full version costs $5 per user per month when billed annually or $9 per user per month when billed monthly. This is extremely competitive amongst other project management software and it’s tough to beat given the breadth of tools on offer. There are deals available for very large enterprise-level teams.

Features

• Tons of ways to set goals and track projects
• Time tracking features for project managers
• Advanced permissions settings
• Excellent email and other third-party integrations
• Map view
• Collaborative document view with annotations

Pros

• Customization for municipal project management purposes
• Huge variety of tools
• Plenty of integrations including API
• Excellent email and communication management tools

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Requires a lot of setup to get the most out of it

TRY CLICKUP

Monday

Monday is a much more compact and lean tool than ClickUp. Fundamentally, it’s a project management tool with a nice selection of different views for visualizing projects from ideation to completion.

Tagging users is easy and there are plenty of in-app communication options. Integrations with apps like Slack and GSuite help plug Monday into existing workflows.

Monday has a slick and simple interface that doesn’t require intense training or onboarding. Tasks can be broken down into timeline blocks, calendars, and Kanban boards. From there, it’s just a matter of tagging team members on certain tasks, tracking their progress, and reporting on KPIs.

For municipal project management, Monday is excellent for managing any linear task, such as ordering street repairs, contacting contractors, and inserting deadlines and important task information. The map view is especially useful for municipal projects, enabling team members to visualize events and projects on a local map.

• Project Templates: Monday comes with over 200 templates that suit pretty much every industry. There are bound to be some templates that suit the needs of municipal project management and urban planning teams.
• Dashboards: Team members can access a personal dashboard that breaks down their tasks and deadlines alongside key information. Project managers can access analytics and reporting tools to track task progression and employee contributions.

Pricing

Monday offers a 14-day free trial. From there, the Basic plan costs $8 per user per month when billed monthly, but it doesn’t include calendar or Gantt views. This severely limits its scope, so most will look to the Standard plan at $10 per user per month. The Pro tier is $15 per user per month and offers advanced automation and multi-board dashboards.

Features

• Kanban, Gantt, Table, and Calendar views
• In-app communications and tagging
• Analytics and reporting
• Multi-level permissions (Enterprise only)
• Map view
• User dashboards
• Team time tracking
• Private boards

Pros

• Simple and intuitive interface
• Requires little training and onboarding
• Automation potential for larger teams
• Map view is particularly useful for municipal projects
• Dashboards keep everyone on track
• Decent permissions control (Enterprise only)

Cons

• Permissions feature for Enterprise only is unfortunate
• Not cheap for larger teams

TRY MONDAY

Asana

Asana is one of the new kids on the block when it comes to project management. At its core, it’s pretty simple with just 3 main views; List, Calendar, and Boards. These are all very customizable and are easy to tweak and optimize for municipal workflows.

Project managers can create projects, organize them with objectives, goals, and deadlines, provide critical information to team members and then delegate and track tasks. Reporting on progress is easy and the in-app comms are excellent, enabling teams to discuss tasks readily even when working remotely.

With Asana, you can build product roadmaps and plan launches – applicable to construction projects and town/city events planning. Tag team members in and organize sprints – bite-size micro objectives that can be delegated to different people. For example, a city event like a fireworks celebration could be broken down into different tasks – hiring a pyrotechnics team, sound team, and security, cordoning off the street, alerting people of the plans via social media events, etc. This sort of project is really easy to organize with Asana.

With tons of integrations, Asana is easily integrated into existing project management workflows. Excellent GSuite integration makes document sharing and email syncing easy.

• Team Management Features: Asana is very team-focussed and they’ve put a lot of effort into team networking and management. For project managers, tracking team contribution is simple, allowing tasks to be redirected if necessary, say if a task is proving too difficult for a single person to handle.

Prices

Asana has a solid free version that includes unlimited access to a good deal of its features, but there are some important ones missing, particularly when it comes to the team management side of things. The paid versions start at a reasonable $11.99 per user per month when billed monthly. The Business Plan is $23.99 per user per month when billed monthly and provides all team management features and automation.

Features

• List, Calendar, and Board views
• Team management features including workload analysis
• Personal dashboards display key information
• Integration with Gmail and GSuite apps
• Plenty of in-app communication options like Zoom
• Project analytics and reporting features to track progress

Pros

• Simple UI requires little onboarding
• Team-focussed
• Ideal for event planning and launches
• Class-leading team management tools and time tracking
• Advanced integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud and many other apps

Cons

• Doesn’t scale up well to very large teams
• Not quite as customizable as other contenders

TRY ASANA

Fieldwire

Fieldwire differs slightly from the aforementioned software in the list. Whilst other software is focused on project management in a more general sense, providing strength in flexibility, Fieldwire is specifically oriented towards construction and job management.

For the construction wing of a municipal department, Fieldwire is an excellent tool for managing public construction projects, repairs, and maintenance. Its project view is designed specifically for these sorts of projects, allowing project managers to tag in team members, contractors, and other key project stakeholders.

There are some familiar tools here, like Kanban, Gantt, and calendar views that break tasks down into manageable logical chunks. Inspection, reporting, and compliance tools are all perfectly suited for municipal construction projects where reporting progress to regulators is necessary. The building inspector tool is particularly useful for logging inspections and site visits.

• BIM Viewer: Specific features include the BIM Viewer, which enables teams to access technical information; measurements, metadata, and other project specifications. 3D building plans can be integrated into the app, allowing users to digitally assess worksites.

Pricing

Fieldwire offers conventional pricing per user per month. There is a free version with a 5 user limit and limited functionality. The Pro tier is $29 per user per month when billed annually, rising to $49 for the Business tier that adds the BIM Viewer and some other features, and then $89 for Premier. Premier contains everything including a dedicated account manager. As you’d expect, it’s more expensive than the aforementioned three more commercial software (ClickUp, Monday, and Asana).

Features

• Project management views like Kanban boards, Gantt, and calendar view
• Task delegation and tracking tools
• Building inspection tool
• Upload architectural drawings, photos, and reports to visualize project progression
• Robust reporting features for regulation and compliance purposes
• Environment, health, and safety tools (e.g. incident/accident tracking)

Pros

• Robust feature set for construction projects
• Also contains plenty of modern project management features
• Built for US building regulations and compliance
• Superb reporting features
• 3D drawing upload is innovative

Cons

• Oriented firmly towards construction
• Perhaps undeveloped for remote working

TRY FIELDWIRE

Projectmates

Projectmates has been in use by US institutions for some 20+ years, including across the States of Idaho, Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada. At its core, it’s a construction planning software aimed towards high-level construction projects.

Therefore, it’s strictly limited to this niche area, and doesn’t quite include the breadth of project management tools that other contenders offer.

The upshot is, it’s specifically tailored for the US construction industry and contains many native functions for organizing construction bidding and granted management, escalation scenarios, and regulated financial reporting.

Projectmates is a pre-approved vendor for TIPS, which makes it an easy swap for legacy systems. It’s worth mentioning that Projectmates isn’t solely designed for governmental institutions, it’s trusted by some 55,000 retailers, real-estate developers and pretty much anyone else that requires construction management solutions in the public or private sector.

The software itself does offer solid project management that allows project managers to tab in various team members, stakeholders, and contractors. The permissions tiering here is particularly in-depth, preventing unwanted access to sensitive or sanctioned information.

• RFI Management: RFIs, requests for information, are an intrinsic feature of construction project management. Projectmates has an excellent RFI center that eliminates the need for paper documents. Document management is one of Projectmates’ strong suits.

Pricing

There is no pricing information available on the site – all pricing is customized to the institution purchasing.

Features

• Project management views and scheduling
• RFI and document management
• Advanced analytics and financial reporting
• Asset planning and management
• Bid management
• Inspection and regulatory reporting

Pros

• Optimized for US governmental construction projects
• Lots of niche features for construction
• Hasn’t left behind standard project management tools
• Developed in partnership with US institutions
• Equipped for dealing with State and Federal regulation

Cons

• Niche in its scope
• Likely expensive

TRY PROJECTMATES

Summary: Best Municipal Project Management Software

It’s a tough call.

ClickUp, Monday, and Asana clearly differ from Fieldwire and Projectmates, but they’re all capable of similar results.

For construction projects, Fieldwire and Projectmates are the likely choices. They offer plenty of niche features like building planning, inspection management, bidding management, compliance, and EHS.

ClickUp bridges the gap between more commercial (and cheaper) project management software and these more niche offerings. Asana and Monday are leaner and more streamlined to smaller teams and are more than worthy of their place in this lineup.

The post Best Municipal Project Management Software appeared first on Software For Projects.

A growing number of businesses are required to adopt more stringent health and safety rules.

Local, regional, national and international regulations are placing greater regulatory responsibility on businesses, particularly when it comes to environmental reporting and sustainability.

Statista shows that the EHS software market is steadily growing, expanding from $930 million in 2016 to $1.4 billion in 2020.

EHS software provides a powerful, robust and centralised platform to control and report EHS information and data. It replaces traditional paper processes and manual logging in spreadsheets and legacy systems.

Harvard Business Review highlights that the managers of today still waste a significant portion of their time on manual reporting that can be easily optimized by automated, digital platforms, including EHS software.

Not only does EHS software provide a quick and powerful means to report and measure EHS data, but it’s also much more secure than manual reporting.

Modern EHS software serves many businesswide purposes, but it mainly revolves around controlling rules, regulations, and policy; incident reporting, safety briefings, H&S/HSE compliance, environmental policy, etc.

EHS software saves time, reduces risks and helps businesses meet local, regional, national and international compliance demands as well as environmental and sustainability goals.

This is a guide to EHS software, what it is, what it does, and why you need it.

EHS Software in a Nutshell

Environment, health and safety software is typically provided on a licence or through a SaaS platform. It’s designed to monitor and report EHS data but doubles up as a business intelligence tool.

Here are some features you can expect to find in EHS software:

• Regulatory and legal compliance
• Reporting and tracking incidents, workplace injuries, and other risks
• Risk assessments (environmental health management, occupational health management, industrial safety management, etc)
• Employee training
• Developing and maintaining internal business policies
• Monitoring PR
• ID checks
• Monitoring sustainability and environmental responsibilities, e.g. carbon offsetting
• Auditing, environmental reporting, and quality control (e.g. for OSHA or ISO)
• Analysis of EHS data
• Document automation, storage, and organization
• Root cause analysis, predictive maintenance, and predictive analytics

EHS software caters to all individuals within a business. It typically comes with tiered access, connecting everyone together from the factory floor to management, C-level executives, and stakeholders.

It helps secure the safety of the working environment for employees and enables them to quickly and efficiently report problems or incidents.

EHS software can be updated with new features as governments roll out new legislation and regulations for industry compliance.

Whilst most EHS software has a wide remit and featureset, some are more industry-specific.

What does EHS Software Do for Businesses?

Fundamentally, EHS software is management software for all things environmental, health, and safety. This extends to other areas of the business that require risk monitoring. EHS software also measures KPIs and is useful for data analysis.

EHS software is designed to completely replace manual reporting and paper processes. Prior to the advent of EHS software, businesses typically used manual reporting systems and/or spreadsheets. Whilst manual reporting may work on a smaller scale, e.g. a building site, it’s much harder to scale manual processes across the entire company network.

The demand for robust, centralized tracking and reporting systems has spurred on the EHS industry – there are now many EHS software brands competing in the space, some with thousands of clients covering many countries.

By providing a centralized, unified platform, EHS software enables the tracking and reporting of all manner of EHS data.

EHS software provides a powerful business intelligence (BI) tool that can help optimize business processes. By discovering where, when, and why key productivity-damaging events occur, businesses can hone in on bottlenecks and other problematic processes.

EHS Today says that EHS software helped two Fortune 150 companies reduce injury rates and lost workday rates by 67% and 97% respectively. By clamping down on inefficient or dangerous processes, businesses can boost employee safety and productivity.

Integration With Other Data Platforms

EHS software can also connect to various other data platforms, IoT sensors, and mobile devices. Connectivity via APIs allows modern EHS software to integrate with everything from CRMs to OMSs and ERPs.

This allows businesses to efficiently monitor networkwide processes and systems across multiple touchpoints.

Cloud database storage ensures that EHS software can be accessed securely from anywhere with a data connection.

By plugging EHS data into one centrally accessible dashboard, businesses can analyze their data safely and securely from one interface that also doubles up as a reporting tool or data studio.

What are the Benefits of EHS software?

The benefits of EHS software primarily revolve around replacing outdated, inefficient paper processes.

Using paper documents to run a business is woefully inefficient and the time wasted organizing and sorting paper documentation is better spent elsewhere.

When it comes to reporting, compliance, and other legal or regulatory processes and checks, well-maintained, properly organized reports and supporting documentation is crucial.

Failing to provide sufficient documentation to authorities can result in fines, or may even be a breach of the law. Compliance information can be directly uploaded from an EHS to governing bodies, insurers, or auditors.

If companies are storing business-critical information then this also poses a security risk. Using secure EHS software is far more secure.

1)   Saving Papers Costs

Paper has become an unnecessary business expense. It can cost businesses some $25,000 a year to store and maintain paper records, and then there’s the cost of the paper itself which can eat into a company’s ROI. Gartner estimates that some companies can waste as much as 3% of their annual revenue on document storage and paper costs.

Businesses also waste a staggering amount of time looking for lost paper documents; Gartner found that some employees waste as much as 20% of their working week on organizing physical paperwork that could be stored online.

EHS software practically eradicates the cost of paper reporting and storage. This also helps businesses progress towards their paper-free targets, which are mandated in many countries.

2)   Automation

EHS software automates some time-consuming tasks that dent business productivity. Business Money reported that UK employees waste some 40 days a year on tasks that can be easily optimized by robots.

Much of these tasks relate to data input, organization, and the management of everything from rotas, stocktakes, inventory management, accounting, etc. Whilst not all of these tasks lie within the remit of EHS software, EHS software does automate paperwork filing, incident reporting, and data analysis exceptionally well.

An advanced use case would be feeding EHS data into machine learning models or AI algorithms to automatically tune processes for maximum efficiency. An example here is HVAC air-conditioning units – a study published on Towards Data Science optimized business HVAC units using machine learning models to save some 25% energy expenditure across the network.

3)   Predictive Analytics

Predictive analysis allows businesses to respond to developing risks as they develop. An example might be when attendance within a factory is getting dangerously low, risking a serious staff shortage that requires a factory shutdown.

By monitoring data, EHS software algorithms can trigger alerts that enable businesses to act before problems become more serious.

EHS software also simplifies the process of drawing up complex graphs from EHS data, allowing businesses to monitor everything from incident rates to employee attendance, equipment failure, and maintenance schedules.

4)   Visibility

Much EHS software is compatible with smartphones or tablets or comes with mobile phone apps. This allows all employees to benefit from the EHS software, allowing them to check-in/out of sites, monitor and report incidents, and stay in the loop of important business news.

EHS software updates in real-time and increases businesswide awareness of key events, issues, and risks. Keeping employees in the loop boosts their morale, EcoOnline found that over 50% of employees care about sustainability reporting and would like to feel more involved in key business issues.

5)   Process Optimisation

EHS software enables businesses to optimize their processes. Everything from employee management, rota design, attendance reporting, manufacturing/production uptime, and KPI reporting can be optimized with EHS software.

EHS Today highlights how EHS software quickly highlights key issues and risks, allowing businesses to optimize processes to maximize production uptime.

6)   Environment and Sustainability

Environmental and sustainability compliance is eminently important across many industries today. EHS software places significant focus on environmental reporting, enabling businesses to track their carbon neutrality goals, carbon offsetting initiatives, and green and renewable energy usage.

EHS software also simplifies the process of submitting environmental KPI reports to regulatory bodies and other key stakeholders.

What Businesses Benefit from EHS Software?

All businesses are subject to some form of legal and regulatory compliance, but the manufacturing, construction, energy, technology, environmental and financial services industries are amongst the most heavily regulated worldwide.

Any business that finds itself monitoring many processes using outdated methods like paper reports or spreadsheets can benefit from some form of EHS software.

It’s worth mentioning that not all EHS software is maximally outfitted for complex business environments, some are much simpler and more straightforward, aimed primarily at businesses looking to migrate manual processes.

Manufacturing, Construction, and Industrial

EHS software for manufacturing and construction companies enables quicker reporting on key tasks and projects, e.g. production schedules and manufacturing targets. Data can be inducted via machinery software, IoT sensors, mobile devices, and on-premises databases.

Networkwide data can be analyzed from a central dashboard, allowing C-Level executives to hone in on important data, draw up graphs to submit to stakeholders, and monitor the efficiency of their employees and production processes.

EHS software also simplifies environmental and sustainability reporting, as well as compliance.

Energy Industry

The energy industry is fast-moving, diverse, and large in scale. EHS software enables energy companies to report green and sustainable energy compliance, problems across the energy grid, and maintenance schedules.

EHS software also speeds up the process of submitting energy reports to clients and shareholders.

Financial Services and Banking

EHS software for financial services and banking is excellent for storing and organizing business-critical documents. Document storage and automation are big savers in the finance industry.

By eradicating paper processes and streamlining document creation, storage and report, EHS software can cut costs and improve efficiency in the financial services industry. It also simplifies the process of submitting audits and other regulatory or legal documentation.

What is the Cost of EHS Software?

EHS software varies between smaller, scalable platforms that are suitable for smaller businesses and SMBs to large, enterprise-ready SaaS platforms with customizable dashboards and advanced connectivity to other architectures using APIs.

Most EHS software provides an efficient means to track incidents, accidents, injuries, employee attendance, workplace activity, and KPIs. Businesses can set their own goals and create reports within the EHS for submission to authorities, clients, or stakeholders.

How Do You Get Started with EHS Software?

There are many brands and providers of EHS software around today. Selecting one will depend on your desired features, budget, and industry.

Some EHS comparison resources include Capterra (UK and international), Software Advice (international), and G2 (US and international).

Since EHS software has become more popular, there are options out there to suit every business and every budget.

Summary: What Is EHS Software?

EHS software enables the efficient tracking of businesswide environmental, health, and safety data. This covers everything from regulatory and legal compliance to tracking KPIs, monitoring risk, and data analysis.

The main aim of EHS software is to replace manual reporting and paper processes, equipping businesses with a secure, centralized platform to monitor EHS data.

Modern EHS software has become extremely sophisticated and can be integrated into other data architectures. It’s even possible to automate AI or machine learning algorithms using EHS data.

Businesses across virtually any industry can benefit from EHS software. It simplifies the increasingly problematic and time-consuming task of compliance reporting, saving time, money, and effort for both the business and its employees.

The post What is EHS Software? appeared first on Software For Projects.

Welcome to our complete guide to project management, where we’re going to give you all the information you need to formulate, organize, and execute a project management strategy to achieve your desired goal.

Here’s what you can expect to find in our guide:

• An explanation of what project management is
• Why project management is important
• The typical life cycle of project management
• A step-by-step guide to project management
• A description of the triple constraint
• Important project management methodologies and processes
• The top five features that make for a successful project

As we go through each of these points, we’ll also provide links to supporting materials where you can fact-check any claims we make, so you can be confident that you’re getting the facts.

Through those links, you’ll also find more information that was beyond the scope of this guide yet useful to individuals interested in project management solutions.

What is Project Management?

Before we go into details, perhaps it’s best that we establish what project management is for those of you who are new to the idea.

Put simply, project management is exactly what it sounds like – the means by which professionals create a plan and stick to it to get the job done.

This could be done in any number of ways but, through centuries of industry, there are practices that have consistently worked better than others, which are the ones that project management professionals focus on.

By applying knowledge and experience with proven methods, project management seeks to establish an objective for your project to meet and pace that project with a timescale and a budget so that its success criteria is met in time.

It is this focus on the end goal, called the final deliverable, and the finite time span in which the objective must be completed that differentiates standard management from what we call project management.

As you can imagine, this can require collaboration between a lot of people with a lot of skill sets, particularly those invested in business management and human resources management.

Technical skills often play a part too, since any project endeavor requires software to keep all the moving parts in line.

Naturally, if the project is taking place in a technological-heavy industry, there will be an even greater reliance on those with technical skills.

Here’s what you can expect from the project management experience:

• You will define your project and estimate the resources, time, and requirements that the project will need.
• You may organize a business case to review the investment, at which point it is accepted or denied. If accepted, funding will need to be secured.
• You will create and execute a project management plan.
• You will need to motivate and lead the project delivery team through the plan.
• Potential risks to your project will arise and will need dealing with. Remember that no plan survives the first contact, so expect that changes will be required.
• Keep the project’s progress in mind and weigh it against the timespan of your plan and the budget of your plan that is being expended.
• Keep a clear line of communication with any collaborating organizations or stakeholders, if you have any.
• You will need to close the project, hopefully, once it’s proven to be a success. If not, you will need to control the project and decide to expand the plan or cut your losses.

Why is Project Management Important?

Project management is important for those of us who don’t want to waste time and money, which will be almost everybody you ever meet.

If the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, then a project without a set plan is almost guaranteed to fail.

Even if you do succeed with minimalistic planning, you’ll succeed having spent more time and resources than you would have if you’d set up a project management plan beforehand.

Project management plans intend to save three things:

• Time – through pacing your plan and establishing a deadline for the project.
• Money – through keeping costs down and ending those costs once the project deadline passes.
• Quality – through maintaining a working standard that’s balanced against the time and money your project has available.

The Project Management Life Cycle

True to its name, a project management plan is a sustained effort that spans a period of time, meaning that it goes through several stages before coming to fruition.

The whole process can be divided into about four phases, each with distinct considerations that you should keep in mind. Let’s go through them.

Initiation

Predictably, the first steps of your project management plan are often called the initiation phase.

This is where you get an idea, flesh it out, and start thinking about how you’ll reach the desired end goal.

Now, before you fire up a Word Doc or an Excel spreadsheet, it’s worth browsing online for resources that the real project management professionals use.

Perhaps the most useful in this initial stage is the project charter, a template that you can use to plan out the project in a way that’s easy to read and conceptualize.

It’s easy to find charters used by professional institutions online, and if it’s good enough for universities and government resources then it’s probably good enough for whatever you have planned.

Once everything is laid out, it’s best to gather all the parties that are interested in the project.

In this meeting, everybody agrees on the plan laid out in the charter through negotiation, with potential changes to the goal, schedule, and working practices of the plan.

After everybody agrees and stakeholders are happy, it’s time to move into active project management planning.

Planning

Now that you’ve ironed out the details that you’ll need to start the project plan, it’s time to actually get started.

You’ve got the beginnings of a plan but this is where the real planning takes place, hence the name of this phase.

This is best done by breaking the entire process down into manageable pieces.

Once you’ve done this with your project, it’s also a good idea to take a guess of how long each of these segments will take and add these up to get a vague estimate of how long the entire project will take.

A great way to simultaneously map out each task and process while establishing an easy-to-read roadmap for your entire project is to use a Gantt chart.

Using one of these, you can see everything that needs to be done and how each task relates to others.

If data-wrangling isn’t your thing, you can find guides for making Gantt charts online.

Executing

At this point, you’ve identified the goals of your plan and have established a roadmap of individualized tasks and processes that, when all completed, will result in your project’s aims being complete.

Now it’s time to execute your plan.

That’s easier said than done, of course, since the executing phase is where the majority of project management work takes place.

It’s no good to rush ahead with reckless abandon, however.

You’ll want to make sure that the progress you’re making is in line with the plans you’ve made.

Staying on track is important, so make sure that the project doesn’t go over budget, ignore deadlines, or neglect quality for the sake of saving time and money.

It’s a balancing act between these three features and a good project management professional knows when to prioritize one over the others to keep the entire project balanced and on-schedule.

If there are any issues, you’ll want to identify them earlier than later.

Once an issue has been identified, you’ll have to change certain aspects of the plan to prevent any risks, or at least mitigate them if some damage has already been done.

Closing

Assuming that the project has been a success and your goals have been met, it’s no good dropping everything and walking off into the sunset.

Part of good project management is closing the entire process in a way that isn’t disruptive and is beneficial to everybody involved.

First, since you’ll know the final deadline of the entire project, you’ll be able to wind down the process to a gradual stop.

If you’ve paced the project properly, there should not be a last-minute crunch to get the job done.

The chaos of a crunch scenario practically guarantees that resources will be misused or money will be inefficiently spent.

As the closing phase ends, you need to finalize any paperwork that’s related to the project and have the work you’ve done accepted by whoever you’ve organized the project for, if applicable.

If there’s any material or literature that needs to be transferred to a separate team, like the team that’ll run the project once it’s established, for example, then that will also have to be done.

A Step-By-Step Guide To Managing A Project

Above we’ve divided the typical project into four different phases, and these are the phases you’ll see used across the project management industry too.

There’s more to each phase than we’ve explained above, however, so we’re going to walk you through the process in more detail. So far, we’ve got the following steps:

• The Initiation Phase
• The Planning Phase
• The Execution Phase
• The Closing Phase

But each of these can be expanded into sub-steps that are useful for beginners to learn from.

Be advised that our step-by-step rundown of the project management life cycle isn’t concrete, so you’ll have to add or remove certain steps if the example we have here doesn’t gel with the specific project you have in mind.

Remember, a project management plan needs to be tailor-fitted to the nature of the project itself, there’s no one template you can draw from, and knowing what to add is part of the skills that project managers need to develop.

The Initiation Phase

Inside the initiation phase, you generally have three things to do:

1. Create and gather documents in relation to the project. There’s probably going to be a lot, so having the means to archive them.

Project management software is great for this and we’ll be recommending some of them later in this guide.

Some examples you’re likely to come across are business case documents and feasibility studies.

Business cases are where you demonstrate that the project is likely to yield a return on investment that justifies the project’s go-ahead.

Feasibility studies are similar but instead justify the project’s existence to an organization that will contribute resources.

Think of it as a gauge on how possible the project is for the petitioned organization.

2. Gather a team of capable individuals. They need to have the right skill sets to execute the project plan, so they need to be chosen wisely.

To attract the right people, you’ll need to be clear in the job descriptions and what their responsibilities will be regarding the project.

3. Once you’ve got the relevant documents and a team assembled, you’re going to need a location to base your project office at.

You’ll need a physical space where the project managers and the rest of the team can assemble and strategize their approach to the project.

The infrastructure needs to be enough to house your team, so a bigger team will naturally demand a larger space with more equipment for the team to use.

The Planning Phase

As for the planning phase, it’s best to do these five things:

• Make a list of the tasks that need doing. This is where you break down the project into a series of tasks, as we described above.

Along with a Gantt chart, work breakdown structures can be used and implemented into your project management plan.

These diagrams help you visualize the process and make it more evident if you’ve missed anything out.

The same can be said for Gantt charts, hence why they’re the favorite of industry professionals.

Once you’ve used a work breakdown structure to figure out what needs doing, you’ll want to put them in a scheduled order using a Gantt chart.

By combining a spreadsheet format with a timeline, you know exactly where and when you stand with a Gantt chart.

• Before you do anything substantial, you’ll want to establish your budget. Getting a budget as soon as possible helps to minimize over-spending in the earliest stages of your project.

Factor in staff, resources, and any materials or technological items you may need to complete the budget evaluation.

Remember that it will be an estimate, so don’t worry about sticking to it to the last digit.

• With these first two steps, you’ve covered the time span and estimated costs, so it’s best to plan for what could go wrong too.

This is done via a risk management plan that allows you to respond quickly to any hiccups that you may face along the way.

Not everything is under your control, so even the most experienced project management professionals can’t have every project go smoothly.

Instead, knowledgeable project managers have a rigid risk management plan to mitigate any issues.

• Along with the risk management plan, getting yourself a communications plan is key to completing your project in a satisfying manner.

Any group undertaking lives or dies based on the quality of communication between its members, and this only becomes truer when that group is collaborating toward a shared and clearly-defined objective.

• Now that everything has been planned out, the last part of the planning phase is to decide who does what.

Assign tasks based on skill and experience which, if you’ve built a suitable team, shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Make sure everybody knows what they’re doing, ready for the execution phase to begin.

The Execution Phase

Likewise, the execution phase can be broken down into five phases just like the planning phase, with an extra one for general logistics and maintenance of your project management plan.

• Task management involves monitoring the progress of individual tasks and establishing a line of communication so that this progress can be reported back to you.

Both standard team members and product managers need to keep the task management plan in mind when working to a deadline.

The utilization of a Kanban board is a great way to organize this information.

• Speaking of deadlines, time evaluation is something that should be on your mind at all times.

Now that you’ve hammered out a schedule in the planning phase, execution should be undertaken with a conscious concern about how long everything will take.

The project should make progress as fast as possible to maximize productivity but without sacrificing quality or wasting valuable resources.

• You should remember that budget you established too since you won’t be completing any projects without money in the bank.

Money disappears and it can disappear fast if the project is a big undertaking, so try to control costs and resist the temptation to throw more money at seemingly small additions because they will add up.

Measure your spending against the budget and have contingencies established.

For example, if you go over budget have secondary budgetary caps that you will absolutely not go over.

Your Gantt chart should track your spending if you’re doing it right.

• As the project continues, ensure that the job is being done to a sufficient standard of quality.

It’s no good saving money and completing the project fast if the results are subpar, that’s what we call an unsuccessful project.

Always try to deliver the best quality, of course, but also know the expectations of your stakeholders to ensure that nobody is left disappointed.

In the same vein as quality concerns, you should also have an idea of how any changes to your project will take place.

Ensure that there are people managing potential changes to the project and, if the changes are beneficial, implement them in as least disruptive a way as possible.

• Nothing gets off the ground without resources, so ensure that you have sufficient staff and supplies to actually get the job done before starting.

If you’ve planned everything out well, the team should fall into place during the execution phase so that everyone knows their position and what’s expected of them.

Team-building exercises and other HR tools can be used to solidify team relations if you’re working with a disjointed staff.

It’s rare that you’ll have enough resources in-house, so most projects require you to rent or work with contractors who can bring additional resources to the scene.

This is what is called procurement in the industry, and you should arrange some resource reinforcement to make up for any shortcomings in your own stock.

• Other logistics to keep in mind during the execution phase are your means of monitoring the project and its continuation.

Try to see every angle of your project and, where appropriate, rein in certain aspects of the job if they fall under performance standards.

Exercising too much control without justification can be just as harmful as not enough control, however, so you need to know when to intervene and guide the project towards success without smothering it.

Part of this monitoring process relies on the ability of your team to report to you and then the ability of your managers to report to stakeholders.

The first allows you and your managing team to get an accurate read of the staff and how the project is continuing.

The second allows your stakeholders to see data related to the project, which gives them confidence and facilitates their funding of the job.

The Closing Phase

Assuming that all of the above has been taken care of, it’s now time to enter the closing phase of the project.

All projects aim at hitting certain objectives to achieve an end-goal, usually referred to as a deliverable.

You need to have all of your deliverables mapped out before you start and, as they get completed, make sure they’re marked off so everybody knows where they stand.

• First, everyone needs to acknowledge that the project is in fact over.

This means making sure everybody at every stage of the project, from advisory stakeholders to the staff on the ground, knows that the project has met its goals.

This will also mean a lot of sign-offs so that managers have the relevant paperwork to properly close the project.

Having a paper trail for any agreement regarding the project is important.

• Now that you have a wealth of documentation for your project, you’ll need project managers to go over everything to make sure it’s above-board.

Larger operations have dedicated people for this job, of course, but if you’re a small to medium-sized enterprise then it could fall to you as the project management planner. 

• Naturally, you need to dismiss any contracted workers or procured resources if you have any.

If everything was managed in-house, you’ll need to release and reallocate these resources towards the next big project.

To avoid complications, a notification process that lets people know when they get paid is a good idea to weed out problem transactions so that you can sort them out now rather than later.

• Now that the project is closed, it’s always a good idea to look back at how the project went and reflect.

Think about what worked and, if there were any substantial problems, how they came about and what could be done to prevent or mitigate them should they arise again.

A team celebration is always welcome, too.

The Triple Constraint

In the industry, the triple constraint is three things to keep in mind at virtually every stage of project management. In the above steps, you may have noticed that they’ve already come up a few times.

They are:

• Time
• Scope
• Cost

Time pertains to your schedule and, once you’ve got everything planned out and your Gantt chart set up, it’s simple enough to ensure that the project moves along in time.

The scope can refer to size but also the quality of the project, so we’ve already talked about this too to some extent.

Cost is something that any business person is intimately familiar with and, needless to say, it’s best to keep costs down.

So why bring up the triple constraint if we’ve mentioned them individually already? Because each third doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that’s why.

If one of these factors changes, it’ll affect the other two and so your triple constraint plan will need to be adjusted accordingly.

As an example, having subpar quality in a part of your project will likely see that part redone, which draws out the schedule and, in turn, increases operating costs.

Spinning all three of these plates is the key to success in project management.

If one falls, the other two won’t be far behind it and they’ll be hell for you to manage before the project as a whole fails.

Project Management Methodologies

We’ve talked a lot about theory so far, so we think it’s valuable to go over some proven methodologies that project managers often swear by.

If successful project managers have already found that the below methodologies have helped them, there’s no need to try and find your own path.

Waterfall

We’ll start with the most linear, the waterfall model.

This is the best model for those who strategize ahead and expect very little to change.

This means you’ll want your deliverables to be very clear-cut so that you have a definitive win state at which your project ceases.

Waterfalls work best when led by smaller teams of project managers who can draft up the requirements, the solutions, and go about bringing those solutions into reality one after the other, hence its reputation as a linear system of work.

Needless to say, if you haven’t planned ahead or expected that large changes could come to the project, the waterfall isn’t the methodology for you.

Even under a skilled professional who can roll with the punches, the whiplash that a project sustains when sudden and unexpected curveballs are thrown at it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Agile

For many years, agile was the favorite methodology of those working in digital spaces, like building software for example.

You probably have an idea of what it is if you’ve ever heard the word “sprint” in a business context.

It’s where there are time windows in which the team works and works and works until they reach the desired goal, but not the final goal of the project.

After hitting that point, they stop.

There may be a period of break or some lax work on maintenance of the project, until the next time window where the next great hurdle is overcome.

This strategy has bled into the real world, particularly real-world projects that may have an intangible component to them, such as marketing.

Because of their fast nature, agile project strategies are best for iterative thinkers who like to feel their way around a problem instead of tackling it from a distance by planning ahead.

It can also be great for morale since it breaks large undertakings into celebrated small victories after periods of intense work.

That said, it’s a non-standard form of working and very much requires initiation into the style.

You can’t pluck traditional workers off the street and expect them to fall into an agile working pattern without problems.

Lean

True to its name, lean project management is all about keeping potential waste trimmed down so that a team, usually a small one, is working in tandem towards an established goal.

It can only feasibly work on one project at a time but, when it does work, you can expect another iterative work style that streamlines the process and allows everything to be done by a smaller but multi-capable squad.

Since you’re a smaller team tackling everything, feedback becomes even more important with lean models.

This is usually done via end-user feedback who get hands-on experience with what you’ve built, sourcing first-hand criticism of the project so that any major problems can be ironed out at the end of the development process.

Key Project Management Processes

Let’s talk more about the management processes that underpin the project life cycle.

In taking you through the step-by-step of a project, we’ve mentioned some of these in passing, but some deserve more explanation for those who are learning.

Risk Management

This is arguably the most important one.

Murphy’s Law exists and it will rear its ugly head if you haven’t planned ahead and factored in potential mishaps and disruptions to your project.

Defining what those threats are and keeping them in the back of your head isn’t enough, however, you need to have contingency plans set up in case they actually happen.

As you’d expect, the larger the project, the more at-risk it is of suffering from risk.

That’s why the larger projects usually have more rigorous risk management contingencies in place so that the entire ship doesn’t go down if a small part of the hull is breached.

Any contingencies need to be fully communicated with relevant team members too. A contingency plan is useless if the people who can most effectively execute that plan are oblivious to it.

Issue Management

Expanding from risk management, you also need to think about issue management.

What’s the difference?

Well, you can’t have risk managers solely dedicated to stopping risks that have already happened, that’s best relegated to its own issue management team. 

It can comprise some members of risk management but it’s best that your project has the versatility to both foresee future problems and stop problems that have already happened all at once.

You don’t want your risk management team busy helping with issues that have arisen, only to fail at spotting another risk that’s barreling towards your project.

Change Management

Every project is bound to have its changes, that much is a given.

Planning for a project that doesn’t change at all is planning for failure, so you need to not only anticipate changes but have a process whereby you can implement those changes. 

This can be an error in what your exact deliverables are or when you expect them and having a management team for the change process is ideal for keeping the triple constraint in mind.

Remember that any change regarding schedule, budget, or deliverables will affect the other two factors in the triple constraint and potentially bury your project if not implemented correctly.

Procurement Management

We briefly touched upon procurement when writing about the resource management that’s needed during a project, but it’s important that you don’t treat procured resources the same as in-house ones.

When working with suppliers and staffing agencies, you want everything to go smoothly so that you maintain good relations and both parties can exit the project with their reputations intact.

The best way to do this is to be very transparent.

The same goes for your staff, of course, but acquired staff and materials must be transparently contracted so that everybody knows who they are, why they’re here, and on what conditions they leave the project and get paid for their participation.

Communications Management

Almost all of the above processes hinge on a very important but often overlooked aspect of project management – communication.

Having processes set up whereby relevant peoples can get the messages dedicated to them, preferably as fast as possible without being disruptive to their workload, is paramount in allowing everyone to know what they are doing. 

Short of establishing a messaging system, it’s also handy to have frequent meetings.

These can range from smaller, duty-based meetings of relevant individuals to large meetings where multiple topics are on the agenda, just make sure that there’s ample opportunity for those who have questions to find the information they need to work confidently.

Top 5 Features That Can Help Successful Project Management

When it comes to management, you just need to do these five things throughout every stage of project development:

• List tasks so that relevant parties can see what needs doing, and in what order.
• Hold regular meetings or source messages from your team that provide status updates.
• Use an efficient file management system, whether it’s in-house or one of the project management software below.

• If needed, establish an environment where parties can communicate, collaborate, and delegate much easier.
• Speaking of communication, make your reporting system as simple as possible so that concerns get raised faster and clearer by staff.

Project Management Software

There’s not much more we can do except recommend some of our favorite project management software.

Here are our five most popular examples of project management software and, if you want more, you can find our full directory here.

• GanttPro – Yes, that’s right, it’s Gantt charts again.

It can’t be understated how useful these are for planning out project tasks while forming a schedule that can be seen at a glance.

When looking for a platform for Gantt charts, what better option is there than GanttPro?

• Trello – Where GanttPro is the popular option for Gantt charts, Trello is the foremost choice for Kanban boards.

Trello is the textbook definition of a puddle that hides more under the surface.

It’s incredibly easy to understand with its card format yet it has so many customization functions that make it great for tailoring.

• Zube – Another Kanban board, we’d recommend Zube where you want to have an agile workflow style.

This is because transparency is the main feature of Zube, integrating seamlessly with GitHub Issues, and providing an interface where the entire team can see what each other are doing.

• Notion – Notion does many things but it’s probably most reputable for its task trackers, to-do lists, and other Kanban-style functions.

It has many secondary features, however, such as shared notes and documents that everyone can access and even a team wiki that’s great for onboarding people new to the project and explaining what it is that needs to get done.

• Microsoft Project – MS Project is exactly what it sounds like, a project management software made by one of the largest software tech companies in the entire world.

Along with the confidence that you get from working on a renowned company’s platform that has been painstakingly maintained for years, Project has seamless integration with Microsoft Teams, allowing you to meet, chat and share files while working.

Summary

That’s about it from us. After reading everything in this guide, you should have a good foundation of knowledge on what project management is and the concepts that go into a successful project.

As with many industries, the real learning starts by doing, but in project management, your chances at success are helped by meticulous pre-planning and you should be in a better position to do that after having read that guide.

All that’s left is for you to start. If you run into problems, you can always refer back here and to the linked materials provided for guidance. Good luck with your project!

The post The Complete Guide To Project Management appeared first on Software For Projects.

Client portals can be used to provide customer support, collaborate on projects, discuss contact terms, agree on a sale price, communicate with your team, and much more. They provide a secure environment where you can collaborate with clients in a variety of ways.

This guide will share the 4 best project management tools that include client portal functionality. These applications are all feature-rich, simple-to-use, and affordable.

Some links in this post will result in a commission for us at no extra cost to you. It helps us to run the website – thanks!

Suite Dash

Suite Dash is a powerful all-in-one project management tool. It has been designed to achieve all of the tasks which small to medium businesses perform regularly, including project and task management, invoice creation, time tracking, appointment making, email marketing, and customer support.

One of the highlights of Suite Dash is its powerful dashboard system, called ONE Dashboard®. This customisable dashboard makes it easy for managers and employees to accomplish day-to-day tasks.

The client portal is highly flexible and highly customisable. Key features include:

• Pre-built dashboards and pages so you can get started quickly
• Access control lists and ability to set client/employee/management roles
• Website-like page presentation of information for client’s ease of use
• Drag and drop page builder which can incorporate many content types
• File and document sharing
• Messaging systems
• Announcements and email notifications
• Invoice payment integration
• Can embed many types of data including social media and videos
• Complete control over what clients are allowed to see
• Dynamic data placeholders which are populated with user data

Suite Dash is fully compatible with mobile devices, which makes it a convenient for clients and businesses with remote employees. Suite Dash is available for as little as $15 per month.

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Ravetree

Ravetree has created one of the most innovative project management tools to reach the market in the past decade. It provides an intuitive interface that makes it simple to perform common tasks like managing projects, sharing files, tracking time, communicating with clients, managing digital assets, tracking budgets, and receiving sign-offs.

This software is mostly targeted at project driven organisations, like design agencies, engineering companies, accounting firms, and software companies. However, most businesses will find the functionality very useful.

Rave Tree’s client portal component has many excellent features, including:

• Realtime client updates on projects
• Client request submissions
• Realtime chat and emails
• Notifications system
• Sophisticated file sharing
• File approval systems

Pricing starts at $29 per month for a single user.

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Accelo Project Management Software

Accelo has been designed to help businesses in the services industry manage their clients, improve productivity levels, and provide outstanding customer support. It is an all-in-one solution with all of the functionality your business requires to maintain full control over projects and keep clients satisfied.

The company has clearly focussed on ease-of-use with Accelo having a simple user interface which makes it simple to achieve core business objectives. Automation features heavily, with many tasks like creating time sheets and reporting task completion being taken care of by the app.

Key features include:

• Sophisticated project tracking including project profitability estimates
• A single dashboard to bring together all client assets
• Retainer and contract tools
• Time management tools
• Customer support dashboard
• Automated workflows for your employees to follow
• Flexible invoicing
• Automated support ticket assignments
• Sales and quotation tools
• Integration with a wide variety of tools including Jira, Slack, PayPal, Office 365, Mailchimp, Hubspot and more.

Prices start at $39 per user per month.

Check out Accelo: https://www.accelo.com/products/projects

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OneDesk Project Management Client Portal

OneDesk combines the functionality of a sophisticated help desk app with a world class project management tool. It provides all of the features that most small to mid-sized businesses require.

OneDesk is particularly good at assigning tasks, which makes it the preferred choice of many IT companies and customer service providers. The app has been designed to be easy-to-use and is highly configurable. A few of the standout features include:

• Collaboration tools which allow clients to leave feedback on key deliverables
• Secure file sharing and file properties
• Support desk functionality
• Knowledge base articles
• Task management tools including task risk management
• Time tracking
• Live chat
• Project portal
• Customisable colours and images
• Secure client login
• Customisable customer viewable items
• Third party app integration, including accounting and invoicing tools, team collaboration tools, 3^rd party form apps, and social media tools

OneDesk Project Management starts at $30 per month for 5 users.

Check out OneDesk: https://www.onedesk.com/customer-apps/project-management-client-portal/

TRY ONEDESK

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They can help you maintain and improve customer relationships, resolve customer problems, and maintain a record of all customer interactions.

Although CRM tools are mostly about improving customer relationships, modern CRM software will often include additional functionality for managing other parts of a business.

This can include sales, marketing, content management, social media, customer service, telephony, and time tracking tools, just to name a few.

The diversity of CRM tools can make it difficult to choose the right product, particularly if you are a designer or run a design agency.

To make your decision easier, this guide will share some tips for choosing the right CRM for your design business.

We’ll also list the 5 best CRMs for designers and design agencies.

What Functionality Do Designers Need in a CRM?

Before choosing a CRM, it’s important to spend some time thinking about the functionality that your business needs.

If your design business is in a growth phase and is receiving a lot of sales leads, you may need a CRM with strong lead tracking functionality.

If your business is already well established and has a stable roster of clients, perhaps you need stronger customer service tools.

New businesses might benefit from using CRM software with powerful marketing tools.

In almost all cases, designers and design agencies will benefit from choosing a CRM that includes:

• Client Database Tools – A database that stores client contact information, including their email addresses, phone numbers, along with details of client interactions. It must also be capable of storing custom fields for information like website URLs, domain name registrar details, passwords, domain renewal dates, and so on.
• Help Desk and FAQ Functionality – Design agencies often provide support to clients. Having this type of functionality available makes it easier for a design business to track and assign customer support requests.
• Marketing Tools – Some CRMs come with tools to create, manage, and track the success of marketing campaigns. They often provide integration with other advertising, marketing, and analytics platforms.
• Sales Pipeline Tools – A sales pipeline is a snapshot of where a prospect is in the sales process. It helps you keep track of your leads as you learn about their project, discuss the potential of working together, prepare quotes and so on. It makes the sales process much easier to manage and can dramatically improve conversion rates.
• Internal Communications Tools and Task Assignments – These tools are particularly useful for fostering productivity within larger design teams. Some CRMs will also include time tracking functionality, which makes it easier to accurately bill clients.

The following products have excellent usability, functionality, and extensibility, which makes them ideal for designers and design agencies.

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1. PipeDrive

PipeDrive is a powerful CRM which is perfect for design agencies interested in acquiring more clients.

Features

It uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to track the status of sales prospects and their position along the sales pipeline. This feature reduces the amount of time spent on administrative sales tasks and improves the productivity of both the design and sales teams.

Some of the other useful features included in PipeDrive are:

Communications tracking

PipeDrive has automated tools for tracking calls, emails, and in-person client contacts. The email sync, email open notifications, call logging, call recording, and group email features will ensure that every piece of important information is recorded in the CRM. The activity calendar and scheduler make it easy to assign tasks and notify others of your availability.

Workflow automation

The team at PipeDrive has done an excellent job at creating workflow automation tools. Users can automate virtually any repetitive task in the sales process by setting triggers and desired actions. The AI-powered sales mentor monitors your activity and suggests when automation would be appropriate. It’s a great productivity booster.

Mobile apps and integrations

PipeDrive has apps for both iOS and Google Android devices. These apps can sync with a variety of tools including Google Calendar, iCloud, and Outlook to ensure all calendars, messages, and tasks are up to date. An Apps marketplace has integrations for over 150 other services, including Dropbox, Xero, Trello, PandaDoc, and Klenty.

Sophisticated insights and reports

If you like to track the progress of your business, you will enjoy the customizable reports and interactive dashboards provided by PipeDrive. They will help you understand which marketing approaches are most effective, how many leads are being converted each month and much more.

Bottom line

PipeDrive is a powerful CRM system with a focus on sales. It’s pipeline management, sales reporting, customizations, communications tracking, and contact management are all excellent making it perfect for your design agency. It also has G Suite integration.

The only downside of this platform is that it is slightly limited in terms of project management. This limitation can be overcome by using a third-party project management app like Trello.

Visit Pipedrive

2. OnePage CRM

OnePage CRM is a cloud-based sales automation CRM that has been specifically created for designers and design agencies. Although it is a powerful application, its excellent usability makes it simple for the average user to accomplish virtually any task.

OnePage CRM is a comprehensive platform which can handle a wide variety of tasks. It’s extensibility also lets you improve certain aspects of its functionality, so you can modify it to meet your agency’s requirements. It is available as an online app or a native mobile app available for Android and iOS devices.

Features

Some of the best features of OnePage CRM include:

Action streams

An “action stream” is a type of todo list which involves a series of specific actions for clients. These streams make it easier to assign tasks and easily understand which task needs to be completed next. It’s a fantastic tool for boosting productivity.

Drag-and-drop pipeline management

OnePage CRM uses a graphical interface for sale pipeline management. It is a drag-and-drop interface, so users can move prospects along the pipeline very easily. Tasks like adding contact details and notes are also easy to achieve using this interface.

Lead clipper feature

The lead clipper feature allows users to capture a lead from sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail with a single click. As you see someone who would benefit from your design services, you can turn them into a sales prospect and they will immediately added to your contact list.

Bottom line

Power, yet simple to use, OnePage CRM has become a popular choice amongst agencies interested in increasing their sales. The only downsides may be a lack of invoicing and project management features.

Visit OnePage CRM

3. Nimble

Nimble is a browser and mobile-based CRM developed by Jon V Ferrara, who was a part of the team which created the popular Goldmine CRM. Nimble is a modern CRM with excellent social media tools, which are particularly useful for designers who use social media marketing.

Features

The strongest feature of Nimble is its automated contact management tools. It allows the app to automatically populate customer profiles and contact histories from the data found in emails, contact lists, and social media activity.

This feature makes it simple to develop thorough client profiles, which is useful for sales, customer support, and project management. It can also unify contact data from several sources including Gmail, Mailchimp, Office 365 Calendar, Quickdesk, LinkedIn and more.

Some of the other great features found in Nimble include:

Customisable dashboards

Nimble allows users to create sophisticated dashboards that contain a huge amount of information in an easy to understand format. It can be customised to show the sales pipeline, calendar appointments, design tasks, social media signals, pending projects, and much more.

Many actions can be undertaken directly via the dashboard, including assigning tasks to co-workers, updating a task’s status, adding notes, or creating brand new deals. The business signals widget is particularly useful as it can help you discover many new opportunities for customer engagement.

Informative contact records

One of the best reasons to use a CRM is that you can record all of the contacts between your business and current or prospective clients. Nimble is particularly good at this task as it automatically scans several data sources for updates. This means you will always be aware of the latest client discussions and any new tasks that need to be completed.

Excellent todo list management

Nimble has some great tools for assigning tasks and creating todo lists. Each task or list item can be associated with a project, contact, or company and given a completion date.

Sales pipeline management

Nimble uses the same type of visual approach to sales pipeline management as PipeDrive. You can customise the steps in your pipeline and pull prospects through it step by step.

Bottom line

Nimble is a CRM tool that excels when it comes to social media integration, contact management and prospect identification. Its main downside is that it doesn’t offer much in terms of marketing automation tools.

Visit Nimble

4. CRM Runner

CRM Runner is a sophisticated cloud-based service management system and CRM. Although it is primarily targeted at eCommerce, wholesale, and retail businesses, it can also work well for agencies with several employees.

Features

It has a slightly different feature set compared to the other products included in this list. In addition to having the standard types of features included in a CRM, it has excellent employee management, quoting and invoicing tools.

Some of the key features of CRM Runner include:

Employee management

CRM Runner allows managers to assign tasks, send alerts, and rank users based on recent performance. Designers and salespeople can be assigned to new projects and will immediately be notified by the app.

Customisable dashboards

CRM Runner has a well-designed dashboard system which is highly customisable and contains several innovative features. It is also highly extensible with numerous third-party app integrations available.

Invoicing

CRM Runner is particularly strong when it comes to invoicing. Tracking time spent on a project and invoicing clients becomes simple, which is useful for design firms which struggle with this aspect of doing business. The clock-in/clock-out system also makes it simple for staff to track time, even if working remotely. Payment integration speeds up payments from clients, using platforms like Stripe and PayPal.

Bottom line

A very powerful CRM which is ideal for businesses with several employees. In addition to managing the sales pipeline and client contacts, it helps businesses manage staff and take payments. A fantastic all-round solution.

Visit CRM Runner

5. ZenDesk

ZenDesk is one of the world’s leading cloud-based help desk and CRM solutions. Initially developed as a standalone help desk, the company has expanded the capabilities of the app significantly, making it a comprehensive platform.

The focus of ZenDesk CRM remains on customer support. Their software makes it easy to provide support to clients on any channel, including social media, websites, phone, email, and text SMS. It provides powerful workflows which make it simple for support team members to provide world class services to clients.

Features

Some of the best features of ZenDesk include:

Live chat

The live chat feature lets you take sales enquiries and customer support enquiries via your website or mobile applications. Your business can be much more responsive to requests for assistance, which leads to more conversions and improves customer satisfaction.

Integration with many other applications

ZenDesk works with many other applications, including Salesforce and Google Analytics. The incredible extensibility of the platform means you can alter the platform to meet the specific requirements of your design business.

Knowledge base tools

ZenDesk makes it easy to develop a large knowledge base, which benefits clients and educates prospects about your product. This feature also helps your business develop successful content marketing campaigns.

Bottom line

ZenDesk is a very strong CRM with a focus on customer support. Although it is weaker on a marketing and sales front, its extensibility means you can supplement the core application as necessary.

Visit Zendesk

Honorable mentions

Copper CRM – https://www.copper.com/

Wrapping Up

As you can see, you have many potential CRM solutions to choose from. The key to finding the best CRM software for a design agency is to reflect upon the needs of your business and test several products out before committing to a solution.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can dramatically improve the way your business interacts with customers and pursues leads.

It can also provide many opportunities for improving customer support and increasing productivity.

However, to fully take advantage of all of the features in a CRM system, you must choose the right product. This can be difficult as there are many CRM products available with a wide variety of different features. Each business also has a unique set of circumstances that can determine which CRM system is ideal.

You can use the directory on Software For Projects to look at the many different CRM software that is available but you first need to be sure to know ones that are most suited to your business.

This how to choose a CRM guide will help you understand the types of functionality included in most CRMs and share a simple process for picking the best CRM for your business.

What Is A CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that helps businesses manage relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.

CRM software achieves this goal by recording the details of customers in a central database. This information makes it far simpler for businesses to understand what customers want and to identify sales opportunities.

CRM systems can build value for a business by creating a common client-focused knowledge base which allows the employees to better serve clients. It also opens up vital communication channels within the business, making it easier for teams to collaborate.

Over time, CRM software will help your business understand the buying habits and preferences of your customers and prospects. This information is extremely valuable as it drives sales growth, increases sales opportunities, and provides the ability to offer value-added services to customers.

Some of the many advantages of using a CRM system include:

• Stronger customer relationships
• Easier to ensure customer needs are met
• Improved service delivery processes and product development
• Increased staff awareness of customer needs
• Integrated sales, marketing, and customer service functions
• New sales opportunities
• Reduced customer frustration
• Improved decision making
• Greater employee efficiency and productivity

What Features Do CRMs Typically Have?

The sophistication of CRM tools has dramatically increased over the past decade. In addition to recording customer data, modern CRMs can help with marketing, customer support, the sales pipeline, content management, and much more. All these need to be considered when making your CRM selection.

The functionality contained included in modern CRMs can be split into three main categories:

Sales Force Automation

Many CRMs contain functionality for analysing the sales cycle and managing the sales pipeline. They can track each prospect as they move along the sales pipeline, improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Sales automation tools can:

• Ensure your sales team is using their time in the best way possible
• Identify parts of the sales pipeline which need improvement
• Improve lead tracking
• Identify the best performing members of the sales team
• Making it simple for salespeople to find the right sales content for each prospect
• Process quotes and orders more efficiently
• Make it easier for new salespeople to learn sales processes
• Understand which stage of the sales pipeline each prospect has reached
• Track and solve any sales objects or queries from prospects
• Give remote sales staff access to the data and information they need to work externally

Customer Support Automation

CRMs are extremely useful for providing support to customers. They can help your business improve customer loyalty, generate more repeat sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Some of the customer support tools CRMs often include:

• Customer support ticket functionality
• Conversation histories
• Tools for promoting cross-sales and up-sales
• Call centre tools for improved efficiency (automated dialling, call forwarding, call escalation)

Marketing Automation

It is common for modern CRM software to include marketing tools. These tools make it easier for anyone in your organisation to obtain and utilise the most effective marketing materials available. Marketing automation can help businesses:

• Develop and implement marketing campaigns
• Track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
• Ensure marketing materials remain consistent across the business
• Manage marketing campaign budgets
• Automate marketing material distribution
• Maintain email marketing lists
• Improve the effectiveness of targeted email marketing campaigns
• Develop a personalised approach when marketing to prospects
• Use customer filtering to send highly targeted campaigns

Some all-in-one CRMs will focus on all three areas equally. However, other products will have a deeper focus on a particular aspect, which is useful if you are looking to make significant improvements in a single area.

Steps for Choosing The Right CRM For Your Business

1. Think about the main goals of your business

Identifying the goals of your business will help you determine the functionality you require in a CRM. Consider what you need a CRM solution for today as well as what kinds of features that might be useful as your business grows. Some of the key questions to ask yourself include:

Do you need more leads?

Look for CRM software which has excellent marketing and lead generation tools. CRMs with a lead generation focus include HubSpot, Pardot, Contactually, and SharpSpring.

Does your business need to improve how well it tracks prospects?

If so, you may need a package with advanced sales pipeline tracking, like Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Hubspot Sales.

Are your teams struggling to communicate with one another?

Look for a CRM that has excellent internal communications systems which allow sales, market, content, and support teams to work together more efficiently.

Do you need help with email marketing?

Either choose a CRM with internal email marketing software or one which is easily integrated with a third party provider like MailChimp.

Are you looking for insight into how your business is performing?

Look for a solution which offers advanced analytics data and customisable dashboards.

Is your sales team struggling to convert leads?

Use a CRM which has lead scoring so you can qualify leads more easily, focussing your attention on the right prospects.

Do you want to focus on telemarketing?

Choose a platform which offers advanced call centre tracking.

The large number of CRM applications available means you should have no problem finding a platform that meets your needs.

2. Consider usability

CRM platforms can be extremely sophisticated programs with dozens of features. Unfortunately, if the program’s interface is too complex or it has a steep learning curve, your employees may initially find it difficult to use.

To ensure your employees can use CRM software successfully, look at its interface and consider its usability. Is it intuitive and easy to use or does it look challenging? Consider the technical skill of your employees and how they might adapt to the app.

3. How much does it cost?

It’s a good idea to assess the price of specific CRMs before researching their functionality. After all, there is no point exploring the advanced features of a CRM if it is too costly for your business to afford. There are also different pricing regimes for different products, with some tools having one-off up-front payments while others use monthly/annual subscriptions.

4. Will the CRM provider help with initial setup?

Switching to a new CRM can be a daunting task. Employees will need to learn a number of new user interfaces and work processes. If they can’t get to grips with all of the features that are available, the CRM may not deliver on its promised efficiencies, improvements, and return on investment.

Some CRM providers will offer extensive personalised assistance during these initial learning stages. However, others simply direct you towards a manual. Consider how much help your business may require during the initial setup period and what is provided.

5. What is the quality of customer support?

No product is perfect. You may experience bugs, inconsistencies, or other problems with the CRM after purchase. Consider how much support the CRM provider is willing to offer when these issues occur.

Do they offer free personalised support? Is over the phone support available or is the only option a lengthy user manual? Are there plenty of tutorials for complex procedures or will your employees be forced to search for answers on a website?

6. What marketing tools does it offer?

Over the past decade, most CRM makers have increased the types of marketing functionality available on their platforms. In some cases, CRMs have become so advanced that they can fully replace other types of marketing software and services completely. Consider your current marketing strategy to see if the CRM’s capabilities would be suitable.

7. Does it come with a help desk?

Having a help desk integrated into a CRM can be very useful for businesses who often provide customer support. A help desk makes it easier to process customer requests and ensures that all customers receive the assistance they require. It can also help you identify sales opportunities amongst customer requests, including up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

8. Is Social CRM functionality available?

Social CRM integrates social media channels with CRM functions. It makes it possible for businesses to link consumers with their social media activities — giving the business much more insight into consumer preferences and requirements.

Social CRM can also help businesses monitor social media activity relating to their brand and interact with prospects via social media. This can be a powerful feature for businesses with an online presence.

9. Does the CRM offer complete contact views?

High quality CRM software will provide a 360 degree view of each contact, allowing your business to see all of the contacts that a prospect or customer has had. This means that your sales team will be able to see previous sales enquiries, support requests, and other contacts from a prospect.

Likewise, your support team will be able to see what other products a customer owns and what their requirements are. This holistic approach feeds more useful information to your teams, leading to better outcomes.

10. How customisable are dashboards?

Most CRMs will use dashboards to give users access to their favourite functionality and the reports they are most interested in. Dashboards can improve productivity and make it easier for employees to carry out day-to-day tasks.

It’s important to note the amount of customisation available for dashboards can vary greatly between CRM system providers. Some CRMs will let users have virtually any report or function on their personalised dashboard while others are quite limited.

11. How sophisticated are its reporting tools?

One of the best reasons to use a CRM system is that it can give you detailed reports on everything from customer satisfaction through to the productivity of your customer support team. However, some CRMs offer more powerful metrics than others. If your team has the knowledge and time necessary to make used of detailed reports, opt for a CRM that has substantial metrics and reporting functionality.

12. Do You Require Mobile Access?

In recent years, it has become much more common for employees to work using mobile devices. If this is the case with your team, opt for a CRM solution that is mobile friendly.

13. Do you require integration with other software?

If you already have telephony applications, marketing platform, or other types of software,  consider choosing a CRM which can be easily integrated with other platforms. This will help you make the most of your CRM.

14. Read some reviews

Reading impartial reviews of a CRM written by other business owners is one of the best ways to accurately assess a product. Websites like G2Crowd, Capterra, and BestVendor have thousands of reviews from real-world users.

Reading these reviews will help you understand how easily specific CRMs can be integrated, what features are particularly useful, how good the provider’s support is, and much more.

15. Contact the vendor with any questions

If you are unsure about the capabilities of a particular CRM, contact the provider. They should be happy to answer any questions that you may have. In many cases, they will offer to give you a demonstration of the capabilities of their product, which will help you understand if it meets your requirements.

The post How To Choose A CRM System For Your Business appeared first on Software For Projects.

Not keen on using hosted project management software?

Themes

There are not a huge amount of specific project management themes available, I have listed two below, but I would recommend using a fast and quality theme such as Hello Elementor, Astra, Generate Press or Oxygen. Then combining them with a page builder such as Elementor or Thrive Themes and using one of the below plugins to get the Project Management functionality.

Or, if you’re looking for specific WordPress project management themes, give these two a try:

Segments – CRM & Project Management Theme

One of the only dedicated project management themes on the market. This is well designed with great features and has both project management features and a CRM built-in.

Live preview: preview.themeforest.net/item/segments-crm-project-management-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/19343172

WOffice – Intranet/Extranet WordPress Theme (with Projects Manager)

This is a highly feature0-rich theme with a project management extension. The team behind it are also constantly updating so you can benefit from regular updates.

Live preview: https://preview.themeforest.net/item/woffice-intranetextranet-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/11671924

Plugins

Try out these WordPress project management plugins (tested by the Software For Projects team) to run your projects through your WordPress website:

• WP Project Manager
• TaskBreaker
• UpStream
• Panorama
• SP Project & Document Manager
• Kanban Boards for WordPress
• WP ERP – HRM, CRM & Accounting Solution

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