Projects (Beta)

thegoodhandyman

Hi,

I'm excited to see the addition of projects and have some questions about how it may apply to my process. I have a general contracting construction company that we've used Pipedrive with great success for.

We currently move our deals through our standard pipeline:

Inbox>Needs Estimate>Needs Scheduling>Active>Needs Invoice.

The new Projects seems to present a great opportunity for us to take our construction projects into greater detail within the Pipedrive system. Specifically, we'd like to be able to use the "convert deal to project" and move the new project through a fully different set of phases.

Example:

Pre-Construction>Demo>Framing>Mechanicals>Insulation>Drywall>Cabinets>Punchlist.

One intriguing aspect of Projects is the ability to create new with duplicate activities from a template. Digging into this, I have some questions as I create a template:

1. Creating activities currently requires that a date be set for the activity. This is cumbersome as I am generating a checklist that certainly has activities that should have dates (ex: install sink), but some are more what would be considered milestones (ex: confirm tile qty). I realize that you're encouraging activities to be date-specific to encourage people to get them done, but for planning out projects, "open" activities would be great.
2. As time goes by, I can envision updating a template with additional activities (or perhaps deleting/combining). Is there any way to copy an activity from one project to another? Example, adding a new activity to the template (ex. "install floor protection") and then duplicate the activity to an on-going project. I realize that having a template that auto-updates activities to all current projects would be asking a lot, so if you could duplicate that would be sufficient.
3. Given that some files may be generated in the sales phase (our current pipeline) such as emails about type of materials or drawing from an architect, it would be great to be able to transfer some of those documents to the linked project that we generate from the original deal. The only solution I see currently is to download the document to my desktop and then re-upload it to the new project. I wonder if there is a possibility of instead of "win & convert" to "convert" the deal to a project. Or is it possible to move a deal from one pipeline to another, thus allowing you to keep all of the documents and emails associated, but have it moving through our "construction" phases.
4. Last question would be about any plans to integrate any sort of Gantt chart visualization into the projects. This would be INCREDIBLY helpful to us in being able to visualize and see critical path for our projects.

Thank you for your time. I'm excited to see if projects would be a good fit for us!

All best, Andy

Mike van der Valk

Hi Andy, sorry for the slow reply! @thegoodhandyman

Glad to see your excitement. I'll try to answer all your questions :)

1. We just released tasks & subtasks with optional due dates and owners so you can use these from now on!
2. Currently this is not in the plans but interesting idea I'll discuss with the team. For now you'd have to manually add it
3. We just had an update where we made deal data more visible on a project. On the project left side bar you now have a "deal" panel where you can click on the deal as well to quickly see all emails/files/etc.. does this help you already?
4. This is something in our future vision for sure but not really short term at the moment yet
5. I'll discuss this with the team owning the contact area. For now you can use the "project" section on the left side bar of the deal to see all projects related to the contact.
6. With the tasks & sub-tasks we just introduced not everything will come to your activity list anymore. We'll also be working on a task list view so you can separate your calendar events from your to-do's

Hope this all helps! :)

thegoodhandyman

As an added question, it seems that projects should also show up in addition to deals when you click on a Contact. Currently when you click "See All Deals" we have a listing of all of the won/lost deals associated with that customer. It appears that "projects" don't show up in this comprehensive list which would be confusing to someone trying to see the full list of things that we're doing for a customer.

thegoodhandyman

I have another question about activities. If I have (6) projects running, and the projects are built off of a template that has, for example 30 activities, won't that mean that I'll have (180) activities slated for me? When I look at my activities list, I think it would be pretty overwhelming to imagine looking at a list of close to 200 activities (even if many of them are slated for the future). I'm wondering if there's a suggested work-around?