Pat Egen’s Weblog

I find myself doing blogs at really strange hours – usually very early in the morning or really late at night.  Hm, like now.  This is on purpose.  I reserve my daylight hours for billable time which every business should do.  It’s the managing of that time that gets me in trouble. And that’s the focus of this blog today.

Project Management.  Ah, those two words have been know to strike fear in the hearts of many.  It’s a thankless job.  More so when you own your own business.  Where does the buck stop? You got it.  In your backyard.

Ok, now that we’ve set the tone, let’s see what we can do to lift it a bit.

ACT.  You probably have figured out from my blogs that it’s something important to my business.  As it turns out, it’s a great tool for managing contacts and tasks, a fundamental part of project management.

For blogging purposes, let’s set up an example.  Let’s say we have a project to remodel a barn. Actually, this is a project I really am doing right now.  There is a bit of irony to this but that will come later.

There are so many parts to a remodeling project that words fail me.  In my project, my son is the architect/project manager. That all by itself is an oxymoron.  He’s doing a great job at being both – the architect of the change, and the project manager of the work.  And that’s not just because he’s my son.  He really is doing a wonderful job.

In this project there are multiple stages,  There are activities associated with those stages. Ok. Got that?  Now, say we add a field to ACT called Stage and we make that field pointed at a drop down list.  Cool? Now we update the drop down list to match our stages in the project.

Ah, if you are a business owner, or someone responsible for a big effort, you are starting to get the picture.

ACT manages contacts.  In a project we deal with contacts. Right?  Ok, who here deals with projects that involve things vs people? Anyone?  I thought so.  Now that we’ve resolved that, how do we make ACT help us?  Several ways.

We can use Opportunities to manage projects and put the stages of a project in an ACT Process element.

Or, we can create a field in ACT that is called STAGE.  We add the stages of a project (oh that might be a sales process too). Then we create groups based on where a customer is located in the Process Cycle.

I think you get the drift. There is more than one way to manage a process/project in ACT.  All it needs is someone who thinks outside of the box.

Try it out.  Ciao for now.