Passage Technology Blog

Dear PT, 

We use Salesforce^® at our company, but we manage projects outside of Salesforce. This creates numerous challenges, and never more than when an established project plan has dates and deadlines that must be adjusted. Obviously, there is a ripple effect on the project, and most project planning software can handle that. However, when it comes to the associated projects and tasks that also reside in Salesforce, extra work is required, and it can be subject to error.  What can we do about this?

Ty M. Schiff in Gantt, AL

Dear PT, 

With every customer project, there are billable and non-billable hours required to complete the objectives. Of course, customers are very interested in proper accounting—it’s their money on the line. But for our company, the non-billable hours are a necessary cost to us for deploying resources and getting the job done. It is an important metric for measuring efficiency and billing properly, overall and in various departments. Can you help us make sure we are not unnecessarily losing money on these customer engagements?

Bud Jetting in Costa Mesa, CA

Dear PT, 

We use multiple clouds from Salesforce^® throughout our company. Our various functional teams successfully use Projects to track and complete their activities. However, when it comes time for new product creation and launch, it's difficult to manage resource allocation as well as coordinate all of the functions and all of the work. Adding in external partners makes it even more complicated. How can we execute our new product in Salesforce Projects and Tasks in a more cohesive manner?

Gotom Arkett from Revel, France

Dear PT, 

The nature of our business requires completing the same projects over and over. These projects overlap similar projects, each in a different stage of the same project process. The only differences are beginning and end dates, and once in a while a special task or dependency is needed. We tend to create these project plans from scratch each time—how can we streamline our efforts?

Tim Pleats from Standard, Canada

What is technical debt?

The easiest explanation is that hardware, software, or technical processes you implement now may not work in the future. This can manifest in many ways. When you're under pressure to put something together quickly, this can result in bugs that will take a lot of time to fix (possibly more time than doing it correctly the first time). Technical debt can also manifest when you move information over from a legacy system, or it can be something that needs to be fixed with better documentation to help user adoption or ensure people use the tools correctly.

Dear PT, 

At our company, we use the phase-gate development process to create our products, from releasing new most viable products (MVPs) to updating later versions. It is a lightning fast process, so it is important we improve our project management abilities. We’d like to use Salesforce®, but it has limited project management functionality. Any suggestions?

Emma Veepea from Waterfall, PA

How Data Impacts Customer Experience

Just because you have access to tons of data, doesn’t always mean it’s being put to good use. Poor quality data can lead to significant losses.

Making Salesforce Data Work for You

Elon Musk once said, “I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.”

Achieve Project Management Excellence within the Salesforce Platform

Now more than ever, our work lives are full of shifts and changes. We are living in a period of rapid digital transformation, which has been accelerated by the pandemic.

In certain respects, the greatest benefits of using the Salesforce® platform are often directly associated with its greatest challenges.

Setting Up Salesforce

Salesforce is more than a CRM company now—it has a multitude of cloud- and industry-focused solutions and a large marketplace of consulting and app vendors available to customize it via the Salesforce AppExchange. The platform requires a high degree of customization (and most likely packaged apps) to meet your needs; it’s just not a set of licenses you are buying from Salesforce. So by design it can be incredibly helpful for many companies to establish a strategy for implementing Salesforce.