Project Management Best Practices
Solve360 is an internet based application that helps teams plan, organize information and manage day-to-day projects according to your own company's processes and workflow.
Good up-front planning is essential to running a successful project, but let's be real, just because you want it to happen “this way” isn’t going to make it so. Requirements change, issues pop-up and people respond in unexpected ways. The secret to a successful project is managing the daily project activities. This is where most traditional tools like Microsoft Project let you down and where Solve360 becomes essential. Projects don’t fail all of a sudden; they succeed or fail one day at a time and hinge on your team’s ability to continually synchronize information, communicate and manage changes like a smooth running machine.
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The CRM “Money Bar”
I recently had a call with Adrian Sanders, co-founder of a Halfslant, a contemporary art consultancy for alternative spaces and events. He put up some great questions, the type that only someone with street smarts and experience working with a lot of software products would know to ask. After the call he circled back and asked “where can I send feedback to warn the others”. I suggested a post on our blog; here is the latest email as it arrived.
March 11, 2009 It's safe to say that my business starts and ends in Solve360. From the moment in the morning I check my daily activity list to the last review before I call it a day, Solve is where I go to make sure I'm on track.
And basically, once I know what I've got lined up for the day, my world revolves around the contextual search bar, or as I like to call it, The Money Bar. It has proven to be one of the most important parts of my workflow in Solve. And though I've long since lost my ability to read human syntax on computer systems, the layout is a simple, efficient solution that any tech novice will understand.
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Customer Post: SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs oh my (Part 3)
I recently had a call with Adrian Sanders, co-founder of a Halfslant, a contemporary art consultancy for alternative spaces and events. He put up some great questions, the type that only someone with street smarts and experience working with a lot of software products would know to ask. After the call he circled back and asked “where can I send feedback to warn the others”. I suggested a post on our blog; here it is as it arrived.
February 3, 2009 What is the best way to cook eggs? Over easy? Sunny-side up? Poached? I'm a scrambled type of guy personally.
But who asks that question anyways? More often than not, it's “how do you like your eggs?” Unless of course you're talking with business consultants. Then you might hear suggestions like “your eggs should really be fried, everyone is going fried.” Or “you can get maximum leverage from you eggs by poaching them. That's what the English do.”
For me personally, the better question is “what is the best way to cook scrambled eggs?”
Finding the best Project Management and CRM solution for your business is about knowing your own preferences first. As I said in the last post, I'm a networking type, and I really enjoy making contacts, and so my Solve360 setup reflects this. The art world is a lot of schmoozing, so sometimes a friend is a client is a contact. Others may prefer to keep their contact list pruned and closely tied to their business, and keeping personal relationships separate.
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Customer Post: SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs oh my (Part 2)
I recently had a call with Adrian Sanders, co-founder of a Halfslant, a contemporary art consultancy for alternative spaces and events. He put up some great questions, the type that only someone with street smarts and experience working with a lot of software products would know to ask. After the call he circled back and asked “where can I send feedback to warn the others”. I suggested a post on our blog; here it is as it arrived.
January 6, 2009 In my last post, I talked a little bit about why I picked Solve360 as my business platform. As an art consultant for businesses and private clients, one of the most crucial elements of my work is recognizing that a good lead can come from anywhere at anytime, like say on an express train from Warsaw to Krakow in Poland. In this post, I want to show more specifically how Solve360 functionality has proven invaluable already by allowing me to leverage my contact database quickly, build on-the-fly editable “proposal” blogs for potential clients, and create my network in Krakow starting with some small talk on an intercity train.
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Customer Post: SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs oh my (Part 1)
I recently had a call with Adrian Sanders, co-founder of a Halfslant, a contemporary art consultancy for alternative spaces and events. He put up some great questions, the type that only someone with street smarts and experience working with a lot of software products would know to ask. After the call he circled back and asked “where can I send feedback to warn the others”. I suggested a post on our blog; here it is as it arrived.
December 3, 2008 “SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs blah blah blah blah.” Yes, the revolution is here and as a IT consultant, I've helped several business implement their own next-gen software solution from Open Source CRM power houses to the best closed source CMSs money can buy. But at the end of the day, does the end-user really care and should they? Which version of Word do you run? The one that can do spell check with a pretty button or an ugly one? Which Ruby on Rails clone do you worship? The one that preaches simplicity through five different programs or the one that needs ten other applications in its API to do what you need? Online software companies are preaching a lot of things these days, but it mostly isn't about using their software to run a business - it's about doing things prettier, or snappier, or more conveniently, more integrated, more online all the time, more blah blah blah.
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Does Your Business Need a Heart?
Effective communication is the only way to keep your business growing. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system makes it possible to keep dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of meaningful conversations going at once. CRM helps you captivate then keep good customers and streamline your team’s work.
Solve360 is Project Management meets CRM providing the heart to keep your communication pumping.
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Become Vitally Important to Your Customers with Solve360 Collaborative CRM
Sharing information with customers and with your staff throughout the idea, proposal and service delivery stages of a project nurtures conversations and trust. Solve360 keeps the conversation going to get work done.
Calgary – January 21, 2009 – Solve360, a highly innovative SaaS (Software as a Service) offering is the first product to blend CRM and Project Management with the concepts of a social business into a single integrated application. Solve360 is an amazingly fast and intuitive web workspace designed to work out universal team challenges and get results.
Currently 60% of all businesses provide services, yet most CRM systems were built for goods-based industries. Solve360 is specifically created to meet the needs of service oriented teams. It is the perfect way for small teams, outside consultants and contractors or freelancers to earn customer trust, loyalty and business. Solve360 utilizes the concept of blogs to facilitate communication and idea collaboration between all project stakeholders.
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Cases for the Blog
Recently a client asked: “I am trying to understand a real world workflow for the project blog facility. Would this feature be used to manage a blog dialogue within Solve360? Is it to feed into other sites which have a blog like Wordpress? … This would help me understand how to work this feature into my company.”