The ability to create and manage timelines is vital to business. They can be used to manage business initiatives, projects, staff holidays, human resources, stock and hire availability and a variety of other resources. Business Administrator’s timelines have now been updated and they are easier to use and more sophisticated in what they do.
One of the core functions of Business Administrator is to provide project management for businesses, which means that Business Administrator can help with managing business initiatives. Project Manager helps manage projects from many points of view, including contact lists, budget management and marketing applications.
Projects are split up into phases so that projects parts can be managed independently. A timeline can be used for the whole of the project or for any part of it. As usual, timeline regions, phases, can be moved, extended or shrunk according to needs.
Phases can easily be assigned colours to either group them, or to make each of them more visible, and graduating tints can be applied to show the growth of the project.
One of the big uses for projects is to enable progressive marketing. As one set of marketing is executed, the contacts are prepared for the next phase. Contacts can be removed from the project at any time, if they wish to prevent being marketed to. All contacts can be marked as ‘marketing not allowed’, which will prevent you inadvertently marketing to them. You should keep those contacts on your system: if they are removed, you will not be able to prevent marketing to them. The chances are that they’ll find their way back on to your marketing lists, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do.
If the marketing project achieves its aim and a contact is turned into a customer, then that contact is automatically removed from the project. This is also true if they become a supplier, or for any other reason that they ought to be removed from the timeline.
Projects can be used for any type of business initiative, and we are constantly developing process templates to make life easier, and management faster.