Managing Projects and RFPs in Salesforce - Promising Stuff

I've been working as much as I can on getting the Project object set up in Salesforce. It's the first step to getting the project management functionality of Dexter into Salesforce and I'm excited for it to be ready.

I don't mean to sound like I'm making excuses but I haven't been able to do as much work on it as I'd like because there are so many other things that I also need to do. A week or so ago I was lying in bed around 3 in the morning, unable to sleep, thinking and worrying about all the stuff I had to do. Finally I decided to just get up and clean up my Inbox. I thought at least I'd feel like things were more under control if I did that. I decided to delete or "folder-ize" anything that wasn't a task I needed to do, and the tasks I'd mark with a little green follow-up flag. I went through everything in my Inbox ... and ended up with a huge list of emails with green flags on them! Click scroll, scroll, scroll and everything has a green flag. Not helpful. I'm sure you all can relate.

Anyway, I will keep plugging away on the Salesforce Project. I'm hoping to have a pilot test team within a week or so. I'm feeling a little discouraged about finding an already-made application for managing projects in Salesforce. I'd hoped there might be something "out of the box" rather than my designing everything from scratch. So far what I've seen doesn't seem like a good fit. But I have an appointment next week to see a demo of one that our Salesforce rep recommends. For now I decided not to spend as much time on that search because I want to spend my time getting the Project ready. Then I'll get back into a more dedicated search.

Oh, I did have a kind of exciting development this week. Sandy talked to me about wanting to figure out a better way to manage bids / RFPs. She at first was thinking of ways we could assign teams, tasks, deadlines, etc. in Notes. We met to talk over how we could use Salesforce to accomplish this and I'm eager to work on that (again, waiting until I get the Project working). The exciting development was that when I mentioned this whole RFP management thing to our Salesforce rep he said, in so many words, "We have an app for that." Salesforce themselves has a process they use for managing RFPs and they are offering it to their customers. He sent me a link. Haven't checked it out yet but it sounds very promising.