Hello everyone, my name is Konstantin Kuznetsov, I am the CEO and founder of RocketSales. In the IT field, a story is quite common when the development department lives in its own universe. This universe has humidifiers on every desktop, a bunch of gadgets and cleaners for monitors and keyboards, and, most likely, its own task and project management system.
What is this about?
Maybe for some it's nothing. But we ran into a problem. We build and automate sales systems, implement CRM, create a cloud infrastructure for business. In addition to development and production departments, client projects often include marketers, salespeople, accountants, and other employees. And we began to think about how to organize an effective project management process.
If the development and production process is organized in a platform like Jira or GitLab, then no one, except for development, understands what's what. To connect a third-party employee to the project, you need to meet with him, explain the context, fix the task somewhere, then control the degree of readiness in work chats, get the result through the chat, and add it to Jira. And so every time.
Development is cut off from other parts of the company, they don't know how to involve us, and we don't know if they need our input.
A couple of years ago we discovered the Asana platform. In this article, I want to tell you how we organized the development and production management process in order to:
- the whole company worked in a single ecosystem,
- everyone had enough functionality,
- it was possible to estimate the cost of each project in hours and money,
- working with clients was long-term: not within the framework of one task, but within the framework of a whole project with a constant backlog of ideas.
A little about getting to know Asana
I spent 10 years looking for convenient software for project management. Trello, Jira, Planfix, Megaplan, Bitrix24 and dozens of other task trackers have not passed the strength test. Then I found Asana. And everything worked out.
In our opinion, it is the best and fastest growing task and project management platform. Today, Asana is the world leader in popularity and user satisfaction. This is evidenced by the graph of the rating g2.
We are Asana fans, we even got certified to be able to implement it to our clients.
I will briefly describe the process from sale to project implementation
Since we sell IT services, our funnel is quite long and, towards the end, it goes to the production department and, sometimes, development.
The sales department performs standard manipulations: audit, approval of the commercial proposal, signing of the contract, transfer of the transaction to production. The production may not accept the contract: it must contain the budget, the date of transfer to production, the estimated time fund for the implementation of the project.
Thanks to the amoCRM + Asana bundle, when transferring a deal from the sales department to production and back, the work is not interrupted anywhere. The area of responsibility of the sales department is indicated in blue, the production department in orange, and the development department in pink.
It is important that the development department, unlike the design department, is not involved in every project. Sometimes system setup does not require custom solutions.
So, when the manager accepted the project for production, the sales manager goes to Asana in 1 click (screenshot). A project is automatically created from amoCRM in Asana.
A task (task) with a project map and commercial offers is automatically created on a common client project board. All clients that are currently in production are displayed here. Here, a responsible manager is appointed, deadlines are set, the type of work is selected, and task statuses change.
The manager can launch any of the proposed automatic business processes in a task:
- Find/Create a Client project + Attach a task there
- Fill out the task with information about the deal
- Create a deal from the current task
The project is filled with all the data specified in amoCRM. Depending on the type of services, a set of subtasks is immediately created for the implementation of actual blocks of work. It remains for the project manager to decompose detailed tasks, assign responsible persons and deadlines.
This board helps to take new projects to work. But it is inconvenient to control the current statuses and the presence of projects at risk on it.
How we group client tasks and projects
From the common board of all projects, the manager adds the project to 3 more boards:
- client's personal board;
- portfolio of active clients;
- manager's portfolio.
Let's figure out why we need each of the entities.
On the screenshot you see client's personal board.
Why this board?
We used to think in terms of tasks. Finished the task, went to do another. It turned out that we do for the client exactly the amount of work that he asked. But we wanted to build long-term relationships, so we moved from working with tasks to working with clients.
We make sure to write down all the ideas for improvements for the client. Even if this is a thought accidentally thrown into the air by the client, we fix it and finish it off. This is how the backlog of tasks is formed, the work with the client does not end.
What is on this board?
Our Asana is connected to several services:
- CRM-system (for interaction with the sales department),
- TimeDoctor (for keeping track of time),
- ERP-system (for aggregation of all data in a single interface).
We have added a quick resource control panel to Asana. You hover over the task and see who and how much worked on the task, what bonus they earned.
The work of the production department is estimated by the hour, so it was important for us to strictly track how much time each employee spent on solving the client's tasks.
What gives the use of the board?
As a result, in the ERP system we see Project Report. Status of the transaction, project participants, budget for the project, number of hours worked and deadlines.
We can predict the cost of similar development projects, KPI calculation becomes absolutely transparent and there is no room for illusions that development is only a couple of hours. If necessary, we always have an interface that we can show the client for reporting.
Asana briefcases
This functionality has been implemented in Asana for a long time. But we didn't appreciate it right away. At first, we simply collected all the projects of our managers into portfolios. It turned out that during his time at the company, Denis Kiselev worked with 61 clients.
Knowing this is cool, but not enough to justify the time spent collecting. And we scored on portfolios. Everything changed when we equated a project in Asana to one deal in a CRM system.
Previously, the manager subscribed to all projects and received notifications of all changes in the Inbox (notification feed). Each status update, a new comment was displayed in the feed, starting with the newest. On Monday, the manager sat down and performed tasks from the inbox sequentially. There was no talk of priorities, sometimes important tasks were not reached.
Now there is an employee portfolio and a project department portfolio. In the first, the manager manages his projects, the second gives the manager control over the current workload of all employees.
Design Portfolio
On the screenshot you can see the projects sorted by employees.
Once a week, the project manager updates the status of each project. Writes what was done last week and what is planned for the next. Sets one of three tags: under control, at risk, there are problems.
The manager can quickly assess:
- the current volume of clients in the design department,
- the number of projects in the work of each manager,
- the number of overdue project tasks,
- the presence of problems and the need to get involved in projects,
- project deadlines, time spent, funnel stage and project priority.
Portfolios also help us report. After updating the status of the project, a report on the work done and planned is automatically sent to the chat with the client.
Employee Portfolio
Even the head of the project department has his own portfolio. If, pah-pah-pah, he removes himself, the new person will see all the projects under his control that he must continue to monitor.
Line employees also appreciated the convenience of portfolio workload planning. In the “Load” tab, Asana analyzes the volume of tasks taking into account deadlines and warns if an employee has planned an unbearable volume of tasks. You can change deadlines and adjust details without leaving this tab.
Bug resolution and custom development
A separate team is responsible for our development. As part of a business process, it receives tasks of two types:
- bug,
- new development.
Bugs are checked, assessed for criticality and transferred to the work of the technical support service.
Development tasks come either from the backlog of the company's internal products, or from the project manager if there is a corresponding request from the client.
The development process, in general, looks like this.
Tasks fall on the development board in Asana. Here she is.
The task setter selects the type of “Bug” or “Feature”, sets the degree of criticality, indicates the customer, internal departments of the company that are affected by the task. When the task complies with all the requirements of the internal regulations, the director clicks on the lightning bolt icon in the top bar above the task and launches the automatic business process “Assess in development”.
The head of the development department receives a notification about a new task for evaluation, the task itself is moved to a separate board of the same name during the evaluation.
After evaluation, the manager moves the task to the sprint corresponding to the month of planned completion. Tasks are always on multiple boards at the same time:
- on the personal board of the project manager,
- on the support board
- on the development board.
All participants and employees controlling the task see the progress, receive notifications, and discuss directly in the comments to the task. When the task is completed, the project manager or responsible technical support specialist “takes” it to their side in order to continue working on the project.
What happened when we returned the development and production departments to a single environment with the team?
First, the client projects have become longer-term. Due to the constantly replenished backlog, the average check has grown.
Second, the the quality of the projects has greatly improved, since the development department could ask a question to marketing, sales, accounting, etc. at any time. We got the opportunity to connect the necessary competencies of the team in time and offer solutions of a completely different level.
Third, and employees, and managers, and customers received full transparency in the planned and completed tasks. We learned to MANAGE projects, realized that this is an absolutely technical process, from which the human factor can be almost completely excluded.
Fourth, The team has become more cohesive. Previously, employees had little idea of what the mythical departments of development and production were doing.
Now, seeing the process of development and technical setup of systems:
- the sales department finds in it ideas and inspiration on how to sell,
- marketers regularly take useful content for posts, articles, positioning and advertising texts,
- managers analyze the needs and behavior of customers, adjusting the strategy.
It turned out to be a win-win-win transformation, in which we, our clients, and our partners won. I would be glad if you share your opinion in the comments: was there anything useful in my article and what project management methods do you use in development!
Source: habr.com