Project managers face growing pressure: over 55% of projects go over budget, and as many as 70% of all projects fail to deliver what was promised. In this scenario, the large IT projects are especially risky.
Meanwhile, Salesforce is the leader in CRM, holding about 20–22% of the global market share.
With those risks and stakes in view, project managers can’t afford to rely solely on task trackers and spreadsheets. Salesforce for project management offers more: dashboards with real-time visibility, automation to reduce manual work, and integrations that tie customer data into project planning.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Salesforce as a project management tool across every project phase, link it with tools like Jira or Slack, adopt agile practices, see real-world examples, and peek into where this is heading next.
Why use Salesforce as a project management tool
Traditional tools used for project management, such as spreadsheets or standalone task trackers, often fall short when projects become more complex. The result is costly mistakes: according to PMI, 11.4% of investment is wasted due to poor project performance.
Salesforce helps project managers address these challenges by providing a single platform that connects people, data, and processes. Here’s how it addresses common pain points:
Lack of real-time visibility
Most project managers spend hours piecing together status updates from emails or separate systems. Salesforce dashboards provide live updates on milestones, budgets, and workloads, so managers can spot risks early instead of reacting too late.
Scattered communication
Miscommunication is a top cause of project delays. Salesforce integrates with Slack and has built-in collaboration tools like Chatter, making project conversations and updates available in one place.
Resource misalignment
According to the reports, 58% of teams still use spreadsheets to manage resource allocation, which limits visibility and leads to over- or under-utilization of critical resources. With Salesforce, project managers can assign tasks based on team capacity and track utilization to avoid burnout or underuse.
Reactive risk management
Without proper tracking, risks are often handled too late. Salesforce lets you log risks and issues as objects, assign ownership, and track mitigation efforts with alerts and workflows.
Key Salesforce project management software features
Project managers deal with challenges like late status updates, communication gaps, and resource misallocation. Salesforce project management tools offer features that go beyond CRM to help run projects smoothly. Here’s how its main functions map to real project needs:
1. Project planning and Salesforce task management
Teams can create structured project plans directly in Salesforce, using templates, milestones, and automated tasks. Dashboards provide real-time visibility into timelines, dependencies, and progress. Managers spend less time on setup, team members always know their next steps, and deadlines become easier to manage.
2. Collaboration and communication
Chatter allows project-specific discussions, file sharing, and updates inside Salesforce, while Slack and calendar integrations connect daily communication with assigned work. All project information stays in one place, so everyone works from the same data and avoids delays caused by missing updates.
3. Reporting and analytics for Salesforce project tracking
Dashboards and reports in Salesforce offer a clear view of key indicators such as project progress, spending, and resource use. Managers can track real-time metrics, identify potential bottlenecks early, and present accurate information to leadership when needed.
4. Resource and budget management
Workload and capacity planning features help managers see how work is distributed across the team. Project tasks can link directly to financial data, enabling continuous control of spending and allocation. Adjustments can be made quickly when priorities or budgets shift.
5. Risk and issue management
Risks and blockers can be tracked systematically using custom objects in Salesforce. Each item can have an assigned owner and automated alerts for upcoming deadlines or needed escalations. Teams stay accountable and react faster to emerging problems, preventing them from affecting delivery.
Using Salesforce for project management throughout the entire lifecycle
From initiation to closing, your CRM acts as a full Salesforce project management app.
Initiation and planning
- Custom objects and project templates: Create dedicated objects for projects, tasks, or milestones, and utilize templates to standardize the launch of new projects.
- Resource allocation with Reports: Use standard reporting and dashboards to assign people to tasks based on availability and workload.
- Calendar integration: Sync Salesforce tasks and milestones with Outlook or Google Calendar to align schedules across the team.
Execution and monitoring
- Dashboards: project management in Salesforce provides real-time visibility into task progress, deadlines, and workload distribution.
- Chatter: Keep conversations about tasks and milestones within Salesforce, so updates don’t get lost in emails.
- Slack integration: Push status updates or reminders into Slack channels so team members are notified instantly.
- Files and document management: Store documents in Salesforce and use version control to ensure the latest file is always available.
Controlling and reporting
- Custom reports: Track project KPIs like budget vs. actuals, resource utilization, and milestone completion.
- Einstein Analytics (Tableau CRM): Provide advanced project insights, such as forecasting delays or identifying resource bottlenecks.
- Flows: Automate alerts for overdue tasks, budget overruns, or blocked issues so managers are informed immediately.
- Permission sets and Sharing Rules: Control who can see project data to maintain security while still keeping key stakeholders informed.
Closing and evaluation
- Salesforce Surveys: Collect structured feedback from clients or internal teams once a project ends.
- Knowledge Articles: Document lessons learned and publish them as Knowledge Articles for reuse in future projects.
- Record archiving: Store completed project data in Salesforce for compliance and reporting purposes, ensuring information remains accessible for benchmarking.
Integrating Salesforce with project management software
Why integration matters
Integration expands the possibilities of Salesforce as a project management tool and ensures customer data, tasks, and communication stay connected. Salesforce creates a single source of truth where progress can be tracked without switching systems.
Common project management tools that integrate with Salesforce
- Jira for development teams
Connect Salesforce Cases or custom project objects with Jira issues. This integration is especially useful in software development, where customer-reported issues in Salesforce can automatically generate Jira tickets. Updates flow both ways, so project managers see progress without leaving Salesforce.
- Asana or Trello for task boards
Sync tasks and milestones between Salesforce and Asana/Trello. For example, when a new opportunity is marked “Closed Won” in Salesforce, a project template in Asana can be triggered automatically, creating tasks for onboarding or delivery.
- Slack for communication
Using the Salesforce for Slack app, managers can receive automatic alerts in Slack channels when tasks are updated, milestones are reached, or risks are flagged in Salesforce. Team members can also search Salesforce records directly from Slack, cutting down on context switching.
- Salesforce Agile Accelerator
For teams that want a ready-made solution, Salesforce offers the Agile Accelerator app, a free add-on that provides backlog management, sprint planning tools, and reporting dashboards. It’s a practical starting point for organizations adopting Agile within Salesforce without needing heavy customization.
How to choose the right integration
The right setup depends on your team’s needs:
- Team size: Small teams may only need lightweight Asana/Trello integrations, while larger organizations often combine Salesforce with Jira for structured issue tracking.
- Project complexity: For highly technical or regulated projects, deeper Jira integration with full bi-directional syncing is more effective.
- Scalability: Consider whether the integration can handle growth. For example, MuleSoft (owned by Salesforce) supports enterprise-grade integrations across multiple tools and systems.
Project management in Salesforce implementation steps
- Customize Salesforce objects: Define how projects, tasks, and milestones should be represented in Salesforce to match your team’s workflow.
- Define integration goals: Be clear on what you want—automatic task creation, unified reporting, or customer data visibility inside project tools.
- Use integration platforms: Tools like MuleSoft, Zapier, or Workato can provide connectors between Salesforce and project management apps.
- Test thoroughly: Run a pilot with a smaller project to ensure data syncs as expected.
- Train and support users: Provide onboarding sessions so team members understand how the integration works and why it improves efficiency.
Best practices for project management in Salesforce
Getting the most value from Salesforce in project management requires more than just turning on features. The way you configure the platform and engage your team will determine whether it becomes a true enabler of project success.
Customize Salesforce to fit your projects
No two projects are the same. Use custom objects, fields, and page layouts to reflect your processes, whether that means tracking milestones, risks, or change requests. Tailored configurations make the system relevant to your team and easier to adopt.
Automate routine work
Leverage Flows to send deadline reminders, update task statuses, or escalate risks automatically. Automation removes repetitive tasks, reduces the chance of human error, and gives managers more time to focus on strategic decisions.
Build role-specific dashboards
Executives, project managers, and team members don’t need the same information. Create dashboards that surface the most relevant KPIs for each audience—for example, budget and ROI for leadership, task progress for team leads, and personal assignments for individual contributors.
Encourage adoption with training and support
Even the best setup won’t succeed if people don’t use it. Run onboarding sessions, create quick reference guides, and establish a feedback loop so users can share pain points. Highlighting the personal benefits, such as less manual reporting, can speed up adoption.
Keep project data clean
Accurate reporting depends on accurate inputs. Set up validation rules, use duplicate management, and schedule regular data quality checks to ensure information in Salesforce stays reliable.
Use feedback loops for continuous improvement
Salesforce Surveys and reports make it easy to capture lessons learned after each project. Logging this data builds a knowledge base that improves future delivery and aligns with Agile practices of iteration and refinement.
Work with a Salesforce partner for complex setups
While Salesforce offers flexibility, implementing project management workflows often requires expert configuration and integrations with tools like Jira or Slack. A certified Salesforce partner can help design the right data model, automate key processes, train your team to adopt best practices, and ensure your setup is scalable and avoids costly mistakes from trial-and-error customization.
Real-world use cases of Salesforce projects
Salesforce is used across industries not only for CRM but also to support complex project management needs. These examples illustrate how organizations apply Salesforce features to improve delivery, visibility, and collaboration.
Delta Air Lines: Salesforce managing a global project portfolio
Delta runs hundreds of simultaneous projects ranging from IT upgrades to customer experience programs. By building project portfolio dashboards in Salesforce, managers gained real-time visibility into milestones and budgets. This reduced reporting time by 30% and allowed executives to make faster go/no-go decisions on critical initiatives.
T-Mobile: aligning customer service project management in Salesforce
T-Mobile used Salesforce to connect customer cases with internal projects aimed at improving service response. By linking project tasks with customer data, teams prioritized work based on impact. As a result, customer satisfaction scores improved, and service delivery times shortened significantly.
We Are Group: unifying service operations projects in Salesforce across teams
We Are Group, a UK social impact organization, needed to align its support services, partner access, and internal workflows across multiple teams. Our team helped them implement Salesforce (primarily Service and Experience Clouds) to bring previously disconnected processes into a unified system.
Key changes and results related to project management in Salesforce:
- Support and case workflows were centralized, reducing the need for manual handoffs.
- Adoption across teams tripled, meaning more consistent use of the platform for project/task work.
- Improved onboarding and internal collaboration, which made executing cross-team projects smoother.
Future trends and developments for project management in Salesforce
Agentic AI & autonomous assistants
Salesforce already promotes Agentforce, a layer that allows building autonomous AI agents that can act on behalf of users. These agents can trigger tasks, monitor progress, send alerts, and even take corrective steps without constant human input. As trust in AI improves, more project-level decisions may be delegated to such agents.
Predictive analytics and resource forecasting
With more historical project data available, Salesforce’s AI capabilities will better predict delays, resource bottlenecks, and budget overruns. For instance, Salesforce AI already uses expense forecasting and historical cost data to warn when a project may exceed budget. (Salesforce) Over time, forecasts will be more accurate and prescriptive (i.e., suggesting actions, not just warnings).
Deep integration of generative AI
Generative AI will assist in drafting tasks, writing project documentation, summarizing status meetings, or mapping risk narratives. It will become a built-in assistant rather than an add-on. Using natural language to communicate with Salesforce (for example, “Generate tasks for Phase 2 from this scope doc”) will become more seamless.
Smarter cross-system orchestration
Projects rarely live inside one tool. Future integrations will allow projects to span CRMs, ERP, PM tools, and data lakes more tightly. Changes in one system will trigger cascades across others automatically (for example, a delay in ERP affecting resource availability in Salesforce).
More packaged templates and industry accelerators
Instead of building from scratch, more out-of-the-box solutions tailored to industries (construction, healthcare, software delivery) will emerge. Salesforce, AppExchange partners, and third-party consultancies will offer accelerators preconfigured for common project types.
Focus on data ethics, trust, and explainability
As automation takes on more decision roles, questions will rise about who’s accountable. Future Salesforce features will need to provide transparency into AI decisions (why it delayed this task, why it reallocated a resource). Policies and guardrails around data use, bias, and security will become more critical.
Real-time collaboration + immersive interfaces
Expect better real-time collaboration within Salesforce: live editing, shared canvases, embedded whiteboards, perhaps even AR/VR interfaces for visualizing project schedules. The goal will be to reduce switching between tools.
Why Noltic is the right Salesforce partner for your project management needs
Our team helps companies get the most out of Salesforce for project management by combining technical skill with practical business understanding. Our Salesforce architects and developers build clear processes, automate routine tasks, and set up reporting tools that help managers stay on top of progress, resources, and costs.
As a Salesforce Summit Consulting Partner with deep experience across industries, we know how to adapt Salesforce tools to match each organization’s needs. Whether you want to plan projects more accurately, track budgets, or improve team coordination, we can design and implement the right setup from day one.
FAQs
Does Salesforce have a project management tool?
Salesforce doesn’t come with a native project management module out of the box, but it includes all the core elements needed to manage projects effectively. Tasks, milestones, dashboards, and automation tools can be configured to handle planning, tracking, and reporting. Many companies also expand these capabilities with managed packages from AppExchange or by working with a Salesforce partner like Noltic to build a customized solution.
What is the best Salesforce project management app?
The best Salesforce project management app depends on your goals and how your teams work. Popular options include Mission Control, TaskRay, and Inspire Planner, all available on AppExchange. Each offers tools for scheduling, resource allocation, and progress tracking. Noltic helps clients choose and implement the app that fits their workflows best or build a custom setup when off-the-shelf tools aren’t enough.
How to use Salesforce for project management?
Salesforce can be used for project management by combining standard CRM features with automation, reporting, and collaboration tools. Teams can manage projects through custom objects, dashboards, and workflows that track tasks, budgets, and timelines. Integrations with Slack or Jira can add even more flexibility. With guidance from experienced consultants like Noltic, Salesforce becomes a central platform for planning, communication, and performance monitoring.
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