Enterprise clients especially often have projects they do outside of RFPIO (so do SMB and MM clients), and it's a manual process to track them. I LOVE our view of all projects in flight, and so does one of my clients Francisco and I recently won at renewal up against Loopio. They do portal responses, use LoopUp, etc. and even though they can add the Project and just the highest-level details, that goes against their Project count. Have we ever considered a kind of placeholder project for reporting and visibility purposes only that would enhance our reporting while not being a huge cost for clients? Really curious to get thoughts on this one!
Created date : 2022-06-15
Votes : 8
Comments for the idea :
product-response-mgmt product-response-mgmt Jun 21, 2022
Hi Monica,
I have two suggestions for you. Please let me know if that works for you.
- Create a project and archive it
- Another way if the user would like to maintain a historical projects that has been done outside of RFPIO but still if you would like to keep track of it. We have a feature called Import projects which will have a template where the users need to fill in the details in the given column once done, the project will be created and moved to archived status by default.I have enclosed the screenshot for your reference.
Monica Patterson Jul 7, 2022
Hi aha! team,
I have additional notes here, and thanks for your patience. Here is the scenario:
- I am a proposal team manager
- I want RFPIO to be the source of truth for reporting on ALL my ACTIVE projects so I don't have to manage an Excel spreadsheet
- I have some projects in flight in RFPIO
- I have some projects in portals or in short Excel or Word docs that I cannot or do not want to import into RFPIO
- I would like them to still be part of my reporting on LIVE PROJECTS
- I would like a Project Type that I can use for Live Projects being completed OUTSIDE of RFPIO without having to use an Active Project. This would give me accurate reporting without requiring me to buy additional project licenses that I would actually not be using for a live project.
The proposed solution below works for Arhcived or Historical projects; however, I'm looking for something for in-flight Projects. Thanks!
Tara Kolinsky Jul 7, 2022
I'd agree with Monica - there is definitely a need for this from active projects as much as historical projects. RFP teams are constantly asked to report on total projects running at any given time so I always had to track it in our CRM instead of RFPIO for just this reason.
product-response-mgmt product-response-mgmt Sep 26, 2022
Tara / Monica,
We might have to think how we can implement this. We cannot keep it along with Active projects but still not count in licensing. This will lead to issues if super admin / admin is going to the projects page and see different count and not able to find out why they are different.
If it is only for reporting, why not import in Historical projects. How is this different from Active projects (If it is only project metadata).
Thanks,
Manish.
Tara Kolinsky Sep 26, 2022
Hello Manish - I can totally understand why this is a difficult one to solve for. The reason Historical projects is problematic is because the customer would need to report on all current projects (both those done in and outside of RFPIO). If we have them in historical, they'd have no way to know which ones are actually old/archived and which ones are current but not running through RFPIO.
sunder sunder Sep 26, 2022
Sounds like this is more than just metadata for reporting. If these are truly Live/Active projects, then I'd imagine customers will want to be able to update certain information too. e.g., stages, status, progress, team members etc.
Not an impossible challenge to overcome. We could create a special type of dummy or skeletal project we don't count towards license. But this will have far reaching impact in the application as we have to make the distinction between a standard project and a skeletal project everywhere we deal with projects. Including reporting.
Not rejecting the idea, as we can see why this would be helpful. But considering the potential impact, this could take some time to get prioritized.
Sunder
Tara Kolinsky Sep 26, 2022
You are spot on Sunder! Updating some of the project metadata would also be important!
