Gantt Anything

The Problem

Jane is the Pinnacle Solutions Projects team leader. She wants to be able to monitor and manage all the projects that her team are working on and quickly visualise how the team's projects schedule fits together. If there are any projects that need her attention she would like them to be easily identifiable.

She wants to be able to quickly set up new projects, add new milestones to current projects, adjust key project dates and add attachments to records all in one place.

Currently Jane has to navigate to multiple different screens to set up new projects and milestones and has to export a number of separate reports in order to extract all the information she needs on a daily basis. It does not feel a particularly efficient way of working - if Jane could do all of this in all on the Salesforce platform it would save her and her team a lot of time.

The Solution

The Pinnacle Solutions Salesforce administrator looked on the Salesforce AppExchange and found Relatable: an app that allows users to set up multi-object related lists and to view their key dates in a Gantt chart. The administrator installed Relatable in the Pinnacle Solutions Salesforce org and set up a view for Jane that enabled Jane to see all her teams projects in one view:

Jane is able to clearly see vital project information such as the relevant account and opportunity, the project type and the project status*. Conditional formatting has been applied to the status and highlights where there is an overdue project that may require attention. Jane can click on the Gantt view button to quickly setup and view the project dates in a chart, seeing how her teams projects overlap and allowing her to identify potential scheduling issues easily.

*the fields to be displayed are fully configurable during setup.

Each row can be expanded to display a projects child records (also fully configurable during setup), in this case project milestones, enabling Jane to drill down into the project specifics:

Pertinent milestone information is displayed in each row and the records key dates are used to show how the milestone fits into the overall project schedule on the Gantt view. Expanding the overdue project row enables Jane to see where the issue lies: the Testing milestone is still 'In Progress' but was due to have been completed four days previously.

In this case Jane knows that the testing was actually completed today because her colleague sent her a PDF of the test certificate. She can now attach this certificate to the Milestone record from within the Relatable view, and as the view has been set up with Inline Editing enabled, she can update the Status and End Date fields on the child milestone row directly.

Jane now needs to add a project to her teams pipeline. In the past this meant Jane would need to navigate to the Project tab to create a new Project record. Then, to add milestones she would have to navigate to the milestones tab on the record page to create new Milestone object records.

With Relatable Jane can do all this from within her single Relatable view. To create a new project Jane simply clicks on the New Record button to pop up the new record form or to add a new blank project row to the view for her to fill in. With this done Jane can then repeat a very similar process to add Milestones by clicking on the New Child Record button. Jane can also add multiple milestones at once, saving herself even more time:

All in all this has saved Jane a lot of time and made her project management role far more efficient.

If you feel you could benefit from Relatable's rich feature set you can get it now on the AppExchange.

Need help with setup or want to talk through your specific use cases? Contact us via our webform or email support@cometconsulting.co.uk.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍