HubSpot Ideas

farnold_lac

Expand Project Management Capability

Who: Any job title that manages projects

 

Goal: Clear and concise project reporting and automation

 

Value: Eliminate the need for multiple SaaS tools or excel/Microsoft Projects. Project Management can be difficult and very manual, adding in workflows helps create automation that helps the project life cycle. Fast and quick reporting streamlines project "breakdown" meetings for stakeholders. 

 

HubSpot has a project portion within its Marketing Hub, but it is pretty basic. One of the largest downsides is how the project does not actually interact with any other segment of HubSpot to produce reporting off of it.

 

While I am managing a project I am managing task assignment, budget requirements, scope of work, team availibities, project priorities, etc. 

 

Generally, you produce a project timeline into a Gant chart format so you have a large overview of what exactly is going on in your entire "project portfolio." HubSpot seems to want to add a project management element, but it lacks a lot of what someone may need.

 

Technically, the project portion only deals with task assignment. It pretty much gives you a big list of tasks with little identifying information about what is going on, so you technically would have to produce your own Gant chart in excel or your chosen software. 

 

I utilize HubSpot as a project management tool but I do it from the Deals portion of HubSpot, and I create advanced reporting based on deal information being populated. The benefits of producing project tracking this way are:

 

  • True pipeline oriented tracking for PMP/AGILE frameworks. I can customize it to my liking - for instance a pipeline that has deal stages: Intitiation, Planning, Executing Process, Monitoring and Control, Close Out. 
  • You can measure the average completion time of projects through the Sales Productivity tool by selecting that pipeline and looking at how long a "project deal" takes to close
  • You can leverage workflows that create automation for your projects - say you assign someone to a task or a due date changes, you can automate notifications.
  • You can track budgeting through various properties. By creating Budget, Used Budget and Net Budget properties, you can create properties that calculate monetary values as those properties are updated. I calculate my estimated net budget off of these fields. 
    • We incorporate workflows here as well. Once a Net Budget is less than $500 - meaning there is only $500 left in the project budget, it triggers a workflow that notifies the team that a project is in jeopardy of going over budget
  • I utilize workflows to dictate project timelines based on Close Date. The close date information triggers a workflow that states the project is "In Jeopardy", a "Priority" or a "Non Priority". 
  • I can create task lists for current, completed and overdue tasks
  • I can create properties that designate things like project constraints, cross team requirements and many other useful data points

There are many other things we accomplish doing it this way as well. Our reporting is very strong. I will give you an example of our Project Management Reporting Dashboard below : 

 

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10 Replies
Stig
Participant | Diamond Partner

Love this. A "Projects" or"Delivery" pipeline feature would be a great addition to HubSpot.

DvanderBiezen
Member | Partner

Smart use of current Hubspot functionality! It inspired me to think in a different way to use Hubspot

Raffy
Top Contributor | Partner

@farnold_lac 

Thanks for sharing this. I am trying it out.
Do you have more details about your project management implementation via HubSpot deals?

farnold_lac
Participant

@Raffy what would you like to know?

Raffy
Top Contributor | Partner

@farnold_lacNothing specific.

I have no background in project management. I have gotten by with an occasional plan and to-do list and often deal with things when things get in my face then stumble along. I went skimmed through Asana, took a peek at PSOHub and I am currently groping my way through Monday.com in the hopes of getting more systematic with my project management. Since you repurposed a HubSpot tool, I am actually more interested in what you did than the aforementioned tools.

On the one hand, what you shared looks straightforward hence I said I would try it. On the other, I hesitated thinking I might be missing something. Is something more to learn before I can make this work. Spoiled with the resources provided by HS Academy, I suppose I was looking for a course from you 😉 on the whys, hows, whats of project management to get me going.

I'll spend more time implementing what I can first based on what you described above. I'll ask you questions when I encounter anything as I go along.

Before I go, are you familiar with the Growth-Driven Design course in the academy? Is the agile framework mentioned in there a framework that I can align with? Is it related to the PMP/AGILE framework you mentioned?

LChatchatrian
Member

I agree, I am also using the deals part of Hubspot for project management and I create and implement it for my team! It works really well to automate things, track things and ultimately also link it to the correct person. 

I think this really needs to be implemented by Hubspot and it would eliminate the need to look for other project management software. 

CSkaggs
Participant

We're struggling with seeking a project management tool elsewhere. Don't enjoy the idea of yet another software and would prefer to keep it all in Hubspot. We like Monday's status of "working on it" or "stuck" on tasks/projects. The task list in Hubspot could be upgraded and may solve a lot of our issues. I ask Hubspot to look at software like Monday, Basecamp, etc and imitate in their own way!

linnea
Participant

Love your repurposing, but I would SO love Hubspot to build out better customization, relationship and reporting functionality in their projects tool. I don't need all the bells and whistles from others PM software, but I do need Hubspot to apply what they're good at to their PM tool.

SEnoksen
Participant

Clever!

 

I think a combination of deals and tasks/projects could be the solution. 🙂 

stuartbalcombe
Participant | Partner

This is a really interesting approach. Definitely agree about how you suggest using pipelines to increase visibility into how projects are progress with time in stage and average completion time reports, that's a huge advantage over using custom properties as pipeline movements get timestamped.

We use and recommend a similar approach for managing the onboarding experience for new customers using either Deal or Ticket pipelines in HubSpot for the internal process management and an Arrows action plan for the custom facing tasks and experience.

A few months ago we put together this guide to setting up HubSpot pipelines for customer onboarding and project management.

A few of the HubSpot features I like to use around the pipeline for managing the process:

1. Workflows for updating pipeline stages when customers complete tasks/phases in their plan
2. Workflows to assign internal tasks based on pipeline stage and customer behavior (task queues are a game changer for effciency)
3. Workflows to send both internal and external email notifications and reminders for upcoming and past due tasks
4. Custom reports for project progress and surfacing "at-risk" customers
5. Attaching a customer facing Arrows plan so external participants in a project don't have to be given HubSpot access and get see what they need to do next.

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