CMS / Project Management solution for a small web company

December 7, 2006 7:38 AM

CMS / Project Management solution for a small web company with specific requirements.

I've spent the past few weeks researching various products but haven't found one that meets all my requirement or there about's. Im hoping someone out there with more experience in this field could guide me to a product that will meet my specific requirements.

These are :

Sales Tracking
I need to find a solution that will enable us to track the efforts made to acquire new clients whilst assigning time and cost values to those efforts via client records.

These efforts should include documentation or record keeping of the clients requirements in relation to the services on offer.
Project & Task Tracking
Each client record should be able to contain multiple projects. Each project should also be able to contain multiple services and finally, each service should have a predefined list of tasks associated to it.

I should be able to track Tasks at the loIst level but associate task properties not only to individual Tasks but also to Project Phases, Projects, Client Records and ultimately to All Client Records thereby offering us a snapshot view of performances at any level.

Task Properties
Certain Task attributes need to be easily accessible and easily modified. This would be best achieved by viewing all tasks associated with Project in an editable grid or table style view only allowing the user to enter a task record and to modify specific attributes such as, Adding Time worked on task, It's priority, creating an issue note, start date and due date.
At the task level I should be able to assign the following attributes to the task;
o Human resource/s used
o Human resource/s rate per hour or day
o Non human chargeable resources.
o Non human resource rate in hours or days
o Estimated duration of task in hours or days
o Actual duration of task in hours or days
o Estimated cost per task (incl all resources)
o Actual cost per task (incl all resources used)
o Task owner notes relating to tasks
o Issues relating to tasks
o Ability to generate new tasks based on proposed issue resolutions.
o Project phase task relates to.
o Task state1; active/complete/inactive/discontinued
o Task state 2; single event/reoccurring event.
o Specify if task is a milestone or not.

Account Billing
Client or Service billing should be based on a project level but associated to a Client Record.
Billing should be subject to the agreed terms which could be payment per Project Phase, Payment per completed Milestone, Payment per completed task or Payment upon completion of Project. For each project, there should be an option to add management fees should they apply to specific services and deposits that apply to specific services. In the case of management fees, they should be added to the total billable amount for all associated tasks or constitute the total invoicing amount subject to the service. In the case of Deposits, the deposit amount should be subtracted from the total billiable amount as calculated at Project level based on the tasks values and the remaining value should then constitute the balance of payment required from the client.

Resource Management
I should be able to add, edit and delete resources as required.
Each resources should have an hourly or daily rate assigned to it.
Each resource should be categorised as either human, company or system.
If a resource is human or a company, it should be linked to a General Contacts record.

help / suggestions appreciated.

posted by toocan to computers & internet (3 comments total)

If you've been looking at CMS products, I'm not surprised that you haven't found what you're looking for. CMS stands for "content management system" -- none of what you describe is content management.

The product category you're looking for is professional services automation, and there are a ton of products out there.
posted by jjg at 8:22 AM on December 7, 2006

I work for a professional services automation software company. On quick review, I believe we handle most of your requirements except billing. We have a billing module in development for release next year. However, it's quite easy to export the data to Quickbooks or something similar to handle billing.

Take a look at http://unanet.com for more info - and feel free to drop me an email at codonnell -at-unanet.com if you have questions.
posted by COD at 9:26 AM on December 7, 2006

Creative Manage Pro is probably the closest thing I've seen to your requirements, though it was designed for traditional ad agencies over web stuff. It has some powerful functionality, but suffers greatly from a sub-par UI. I will say that they have a very friendly and helpful sales team, so it might be worth giving them a call.

However, I ultimately decided it was too much for what I needed to do. Plus, I'd have to shoehorn too many of my procedures into a new format. I've yet to see two web shops do their task and team assignments in the same way; for myself, I am just going to build my own system.
posted by Sangre Azul at 1:51 PM on December 7, 2006