What's the best way -- or ways -- to organize a project?

After we roll out Salesforce to replace our Contact and Sites databases in Lotus Notes, the next thing I'll be working on is the Project "form," called an "object" in Salesforce. I'm creating the Project object there to replace the Project form in Dexter so that when you create a Project in Salesforce you can use the account, location and contact information from Salesforce in the same way as you use the company, site and contact information from Contact and Sites in Lotus Notes.

So that's the beginning. But ultimately I'd like to move us into the cloud for all that we do in Lotus Notes. That does not necessarily mean, though, that it makes sense to just re-do everything in Salesforce that we currently have in Dexter. As glad as it makes me that the databases in Notes which I created have helped Pivot employees to accomplish their work for all these years, I'd be the last person to say they are perfect. Well, nothing is perfect. As much as I wish it could be, Salesforce is not perfect, either.

But here's our chance to stop and look at how we work, and see if it makes sense to try a different way. A big piece of what we do in Dexter right now is project management. We create a project, and then a bunch of forms, requests, information and communications about that project. We use other programs for the project besides Dexter: Cap, Autocad, our network file storage, Khameleon, our time tracking spreadsheets or forms, email, faxing, scanning,...more? Lots of items are created that make up the project. Lots of steps make up the project process. What's the best way to organize those items and steps?

I am looking into different possibilities of tools we could use for our project management -- and then I'll be asking our managers and employees to look at them, too, so we can decide what makes sense for Pivot. There are lots of possibilities. Some examples:
- We could create a project in Salesforce, attach all the related files there in that project rather than on the F: or Q: drive or wherever we're storing them now. We could also do all our emailing right from that project. We'd need to figure out how to request others to do things such as create quotes/proposals, work requests, labor requests, etc. Use objects similar to our Notes forms? Or templates similar to Word & Excel templates? Automatic emails?
- We could create a website or a web page for each project and store all the files there.
- We could purchase an application that manages projects using a Gantt chart kind of flow, with milestones determining the flow of one process after another.
- We could do some kind of automation based on a project workflow.
Those are just a few possibilities.

It's fun to try to think about what we do with a clean slate, not assuming we should do things the way we do now, even if they are working. Have ideas? Pass them along!