Project Management with Chatter

Always a hard question to answer, but for us at Arkus projects represent our internal and external time trackable initiatives. These include both our projects for our clients and our internal projects such as The Permissioner and Compliance for Chatter (blatant plug) which are on the AppExchange.

As we talked about in a previous blog post we built out a custom Salesforce application to track and manage all of our projects. As an agile shop doing iterative design, it is important that our custom application be able to have enough structure to provide value to the client with equal amounts of fluidity to be able to change things as we go. So while we track a lot of structured data including dates, times, issues, and deliverables we do leave room for changes and updates. This allows us to meet customer needs and drive towards success.

This is where Salesforce’s Chatter comes in.

We have Chatter enabled on all our projects and the start of any project is followed by project and engagement managers following the project. That way any new updates will show up in their feed and can be collaborated on. Since we do all our invoice tracking inside of Salesforce and related to projects those too get followed.

We turned on Chatter tracking for fields such as Status and Stage as well as the tracking of project results such as surveys and scores associated with them. While the Chatter limit is 20 fields, we find that somewhere between 5-10 is a good best practice providing enough information without the dreaded over-chatter.

During our project status reports we post internal comments to Chatter indicating work done and issues added while mentioned people who are involved in the project. This allows for everyone in the company who is following that project to stay in touch or ask questions as the project progresses. One of my favorite activities is my weekly Chatter review of all projects with Likes and comments as needed.

Our use of Chatter for project management keeps everyone informed and up to date without having to rely on time consuming meetings or drowning emails.

If you have an interesting use for Chatter or just want to talk shop, feel free to comment below, hit me up @JasonMAtwood or post on our Facebook page facebook.com/ArkusInc.