The next installment in my “5 Reasons Why…” focuses on Insightly’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. Insightly provides customer relationship and project management software to small businesses worldwide. More than 550,000 users in 180 countries leverage Insightly’s cloud-based application to manage customer interactions, leads, proposals, sales opportunities and projects from any device at any time. Designed to work the way you work, I found Insightly is very easy to use, yet powerful and it includes integrations with Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook, Mailchimp, Evernote and more making it an extremely flexible integration into just about any organization. As I perused the Insightly offering, I narrowed the pluses down to these five key features to focus on for this review.

Opportunity Tracking and Project management.  The top reasons people turn to a CRM are organization, efficiency and sales. A business’s major use for a CRM is to manage their contact interactions and sales but what happens to when the product you sell is a service or that your business model revolves around project management, then what do you do? Hearing that this was a big issue, Insightly stepped in and created a CRM with project management integrated, which was the first of its kind. With opportunity tracking you can see incoming business as well as closed deals so you can predict revenue along with the ability to know if a customer is in need of a renewal. You can easily convert these opportunities to projects! With Insightly project management you can assign tasks to people and groups, track projects against milestone dates and receive notifications with reminders, tasks assigned and tasks that are completed.  This capability gives your business the full visibility to see customer journey, from first touch to sale to service received to make sure that nothing was missed and there are no inefficiencies in the process.  

Ease of use.  There are a lot of CRMs out there, and all claim to transform your business into an efficient sales machine. I can tell you from experience that you will not see these success metrics unless your CRM is fully utilized by your company. Insightly has created a system for small businesses that is easy to use and easy to manage so that adoption is fast.  Everyone can easily learn how to use Insightly and how to make it work for them. With this you will see productivity soar instead of getting lost in your CRM.

Contacts and Linking.  Managing contacts is a critical component of a CRM and I found it to be very easy with Insightly.  Unlike many CRM’s which only allow hierarchical relationships, Insightly developed an easy way to create a network of your contacts called linking which allows you to link multiple items to multiple items.  So for example, your contacts might have relationships with multiple companies -- maybe a former employee is not a supplier or a current customer is a referrer -- all this information is important for you to maintain your overall business relationships.  The Insightly interface allows you to create and view these links easily and so all the important contact information you need is at your fingertips. You can also assign tasks to yourself or other team members and have them linked to a contact, so no vital activity is missed.

Email.  Knowing that most people work from their email, you need to use an application that has this seamless integration between email and CRM so that all communications are easy accessible.  Insightly’s great integration with Google apps allows you to not only save an email into Insightly, but to create tasks, contacts, projects, opportunities or events all from your Google GMail. Same goes for Microsoft Outlook 2013 and Office 365. If you don’t use any of those particular email clients, Insightly provides you with an email link to forward any email to Insightly and it will link to the contact of that email address. It’s extremely simple.

Customization and Integration. Certain CRMs have different focuses on either different departments or verticals and are hard to customize. Insightly prides itself on being a general all purpose tracking system which allows you to make Insightly work for your business needs and requirements. Adding custom fields, custom categories, custom stages and more are easy with Insightly. Also Insightly has great integrations with apps like MailChimp, Quote Roller, Evernote, Zapier, and is constantly releasing new ones to give their customers the ability to seamlessly manage all their applications.  They are also working on an integration with Quickbooks Online (available later this year).  Since businesses are changing the way they work everyday why not have a system that is flexible yet powerful like Insightly.

Ready to See for Yourself?

Are you ready to check it out yourself?  You can watch a very informative video on the Insightly product offering and capabilities.  Next, stop by their pricing page to compare your options. You can also instantly signup for a free account and start using it today.

Wondering why the topic of ‘project management’ came to me today?  Good guess…because today is one of those days that I don’t want to lead.  I don’t want to be in charge.  I don’t even really want to be the parent today.  Thankfully, that is always temporary and usually only when I am sick or very sleep deprived or both – which is the case today.

 What about the project management role?  Raise your hand if you’ve ever thought, “today I don’t feel like leading…I just want to follow.”  Come on…you know it’s happened at least a couple of times and it’s ok to admit it.  The problem is, as the project manager, you do still have to lead.  But it doesn’t always have to be hard.  In fact, the more you focus on best practices routinely in your project management leadership roles, the less chaotic that leadership will be and the less burdensome that leadership will seem.

Your customer is critical. And from most project managers’ perspectives, that is the person sitting across from him at the table or the one on the other end of the phone on the status call. That’s right… that is the customer. But what about the customer’s ultimate end user? Where do they fit in? When is the end user part of the project? On many projects the end user is the one who needs the solution.

I ran across this quote and it troubles me – partly because it is often true and because we are all guilty sometimes of overlooking end users as a central point of reference and information for the project. Here it is… “A user is somebody who tells you what they want the day you give them what they asked for.” This can be taken to mean that the user often does a poor job telling us at first what they want and the gives us a better definition once the project is over and the solution doesn’t really meet their needs.

Factory running costs was highlighted among the biggest challenges facing businesses today, according to the Supply Chain Management (SCM) study, conducted for Access Group. It found that 45% of firms rated costs as one of their top current issues, however, it also found that 48% of respondents admitted that their IT infrastructure to cut costs was lagging behind the game.

“The correlation between IT and factory costs is seen principally in terms of eliminating wasted time and effort. ‘Ahead of the game’ installations offer huge time and labour savings,” said Ian Roper, divisional director, supply chain solutions at Access Group. “Manufacturing and Supply Chain IT systems are not just a business cost – they are a vital tool in controlling and reducing other factory costs. But in a fast moving environment this can only be sustained by continual review, renewal and reinvestment.”

Business intelligence in manufacturing has a broad range of benefits. The most common and favoured benefit of having an integrated business intelligence solution is the ability to become proactive. This eliminates the risk of having to deal with rush jobs in a reactive approach, but also extends business development.

Business intelligence helps to increase the value of customer and business relationships. This can be solely down to the ability to produce and generate quick, accurate reports to stake-holders or business affiliates, offering a much valued insight into the road ahead or past activity.

Not only can reports be offered to boost relationships and trust, but also predict emerging trends, or key market behaviours. The ability to take reports and analyse patterns can boost production whilst working on efficiency. This is all down to informed decisions based on integrated data.

What this can further allow organisations to do is reduce the amount of stock they carry, as notifications can be cited for rising or shrinking trends in market behaviour. This can further improve planning, scheduling and production timing. In turn this can strengthen and add value to customer and business relationships, again being able to generate accurate reports on business behaviour.

There could be significant consequences by not having adequate insight; delivery of production or services could slip. This would not only disrupt the flow of an organisation, but also have a substantial affect on customer or business relationships. For many working in the supply chain sector relationships are built on trust. If this ethos shows signs of weakness they could have a ripple effect for every party involved. This can then potentially cause avoidable strain on your work force and organisation.

The strain on your organisation and workforce is an instance that will cause waves and disrupt your wider supply chain. This can be avoided with the right set of tools and the right insight to proactively see trends emerge. But with tools, such as, business intelligence, you can view, in real-time business analytics, insights and trends, allowing you to act to your advantage.

Having an insight tool in your supply chain could also secure further relationships with organisations when used as an insurance policy. The ability to deliver annual activity or reports can help various members of the chain drill right back to manufacturing, as well as providing solid foundations to conduct market research with like for like comparisons on customer planning and scheduling to predict sales forecasts.

With the correct tools, this can enable businesses to reduce burdens, risks and help strengthen relationships, whilst ensuring that the most pro-active, cost efficient and productive approach can be taken into consideration when planning and monitoring processes. Business intelligence should be used as a sword and a shield.

More information can be found in the whitepaper, Crunching factory costs with supply chain IT.

It's a given - or it should be - that we keep our project clients and team well informed of project status, issues and next steps throughout the engagement. The status report and revised project schedule should be what drive the project on a weekly, if not daily, basis. What about the rest of the stakeholders? What about those at the top of our own organisation who may not know that much about our individual projects, but certainly care about their outcomes. On the very high visibility, or mission critical, or high-dollar projects, they probably care very much about the outcome of these projects.

It would be fun to do a search on this phrase and have your own picture pop up. Mine does not. Neither does yours. But this article isn’t meant to single out who is the greatest project manager of all-time. Though I’m taking suggestions and nominations with first names starting with “B”. The purpose here is to consider what makes a project manager great.

Being the best

We want to be the best – strive to be the best. Most of us do, anyway. And most of those that don’t eventually get weeded out – thankfully – into other professions. The concept of being the best takes me back to my first professional career-type job and my manager told me how when he wrote his first program it compiled right the first time…no errors. I believed him at the time…looking back now I’m not so sure. He’s retired now but still a Facebook friend so I’ll let him comment if he dares. But what I’m getting at is this….right out of college that, to me, was a characteristic of possibly being the best developer ever. No errors coding the first time through. Wow.

This has surely happened to every experienced project manager in the world. The project is going along fine – maybe deep into a critical task or phase – and suddenly you either lose a key resource or can’t onboard the right resource as planned for the project. What do you do? How do you re-act? And equally important – how do you tell your customer?

The Escalation Process

It’s always frustrating when your organization lacks the right amount of skilled resources to fully stock all the projects that are active at any given time. This has happened to me at just about every company I’ve worked for and it’s probably happening to you right now. As the PM there are a few things you can do to combat it, but there’s no guarantee of success with any of them – unless your organization is well equipped to handle the situation. Here’s what you can do:

The next installment in my “5 Reasons Why…” PM-related product overview series focuses on Office Timeline.   Project software is great for managing projects but it is not good at creating elegant project presentations for important executive reviews or client meetings.   Office Timeline is a lightweight timeline maker built right into PowerPoint, which made it easy for me to get up and running fast – and in the busy, face-paced and often overwhelming world of project management any solid tool with a short learning curve catches my attention (and yes, I don’t like to ask for directions either).  It has a familiar and intuitive interface which made it simple to create professional looking timelines and Gantt slides for high-level presentations.

Here are 5 things that I really found valuable…

Built right into PowerPoint.  I have had to do plenty of Client and Executive reporting and came to realize that VP's and customers love to see material presented in a PowerPoint. Office Timeline is built right into PowerPoint.  For me this was pretty cool because it makes it easy and familiar to create nice looking slides for project status reporting, executive reviews, project proposals, kick-offs or any other high level project presentations.  I just opened PowerPoint, clicked on the Office Timeline ribbon and had a slide built in about a minute.  It was that easy.

Unexpected Project Management Functionality.  I could see how Office Timeline can be used as a basic PM Tool for small projects.  It easily creates outlines of key milestones and tasks, calculates task duration, tracks progress against the timeline and tracks percent complete for each task all from within PowerPoint.  Everyone has a project of some type, many are small projects and few of those require using Microsoft Project.  Office Timeline would be an excellent tool for anyone who has a small project and uses Microsoft Office.

Delivers “Wow” Effect.  If you are creating project presentations for execs or customers you may be constantly thinking how to make them look impressive or how to keep them fresh. When I tried the product the primary area of interest for me was whether it was actually able to generate stunning, fresh presentations which would have a “wow" effect on my audience.  It did exactly that, automatically creating stunning PowerPoint visuals.  Beyond all of PowerPoint’s rich formatting which Office Timeline leverages, it also adds a bunch of project focused styling controls to PowerPoint.  This gave me the ability to really customize and style my Gantt charts and timelines.  

Simple Beauty trumps Complexity.  In my experience, a typical project schedule means very little to most of the resources engaged on a project. They may not always say it, but they are thinking it…”Make this more simple for me to understand because I already have too much to do!”  Sending team members a Microsoft Project file, Excel, or Visio file will simply be ignored by most of the “non” project managers working on the project.    Office Timeline was very good at creating, beautiful and clear, visual project representations that would get the attention of everyone on the team.  It creates impressive project slides that would be easy for anyone to digest because they deliver the right amount of detail in the right format for quick and accurate understanding….a presenters dream.

Must Have Time Saver.  Above all this is a productivity tool.  It was so quick and easy to build a great looking project slide, and update it with the click of a button as schedules change.  Part of that is because Office Timeline is integrated into PowerPoint, but the other part is because it is pretty robust automation.  I was able to import data from Excel and have a professional looking project status slide in under a minute.   Previously, building such a timeline or Gantt slide would have taken me an hour or more to build.

Ready for more?

You can check Office Timeline on your own by watching a short video.  You can also download the Office Timeline Free Edition.  Then, let me know what you think?  I’m looking forward to your feedback!

Change. Many of us shudder at the thought of change. I used to be that way in my personal life - even to the point of always wanting to take the same vacation because that was comfortable... familiar... and that's what my parents always did. But thankfully I've loosened up quite a bit and have tried lots of new things (including a move from Iowa City to Las Vegas) and I also now eat many foods I would never have considered trying before. And I did it in time to make sure my younger children - like 2-year-old Henry pictured here - weren't so adverse to change because of my own behavior. Ok, maybe the goatee wasn't the best idea, but Henry enjoyed that “change” for a few hours that day and it was a washable marker so I didn’t get in trouble for it.

In terms of project management, change often makes project managers cringe. The mention of it makes project clients check their wallets for available cash. It can cause disputes when there is a disagreement as to whether or not the change is in scope or out of scope. It can cause ulcers, project delays or stoppages, and personnel changes if the client becomes belligerent or too upset.

When starting a project, it is difficult to know how much it will cost. Project managers are held to account for their budget estimates and with so much uncertainty in projects, it can be one of the project managers' greatest challenges.

The ability to create an accurate budget is an essential skill for a project manager. It can be a daunting task, especially for new project managers; however, once you have created your first budget, you will have an approach to use and it will become easier for future projects.