Scenario:

You have just received an RFP (or Request for Proposal) from one your clients. This is a client with whom you've worked successfully in the past, kept in contact with about business trends, and have provided with a great deal of professional advice. You open your CRM tool, log the new information, and pass the RFP along to the responsible internal team. The internal team spends their time evaluating the proposal: distilling the requirements, performing analysis, creating a preliminary project plan, and putting together a budget estimate. After some minor clarifications from with the client, the project is a "GO" and work begins.

Being a diligent and responsive project team, reports and task logs from dotProject are bug tracking summaries from Mantis are delivered to the client on a weekly basis. The project is completed, and everything is right in the world.

Until the next time the client contacts you. There is nothing to demonstrate to you the accuracy of your teams' estimates. You know how much the project cost, but you don't know where the bulk of the effort was spent. You don't even necessarily know who was on the project or what their role was. You don't know what other opportunities for business your team witnessed.

There is a serious disconnect between those who face the client and those who face the project. Even worse, a wealth of information and expertise has been collected for working with the client and it does not get shared. There must be more collaboration between those who win the project and those who complete the project.

It seems like there is an opportunity for integration between dotProject and SugarCRM just waiting to happen...