Tiger Tales – Meet Krishna, Our PLM Head Who Wears Many Hats

When the pandemic hit, many companies including Vtiger had to make the transition to having all of their employees work remotely, virtually overnight. Working from home, with patchy internet connections and boisterous kids for company brought about a unique set of challenges. Like all companies, we looked around to find the best tools to keep us powering through this disruption. Although this seemed like a daunting task, we discovered that we didn’t need to look far. We started diving deep into our own product and found that the tools that were already at our disposal would ensure that the transition would be seamless and sustainable.




Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing many of my colleagues, including Krishna, and so was born Tiger Tales. Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing stories of how our employees and clients used Vtiger to get things done without skipping a beat. Just like you get to peek into the homes and lives of others during all those video calls, we want you to get to know the people behind our product a little better. 




I am pleased to introduce Krishna, who shared his insights and experiences on how Vtiger has helped him to stay connected and collaborate with his colleagues and teams while working remotely. Below is Krishna’s story:

Meet Krishna – The man with the ‘magic’ touch

Krishna is currently residing in Mysore, (home of the beautiful Mysore Palace) a small city in the state of Karnataka, India, about 85 miles from Bengaluru (home of Vtiger’s HQ). Krishna joined Vtiger six years back and wears many hats within the company. He is the co-owner of our Help Desk product and Vtiger Calculus, from a PLM perspective. He is also closely involved in pre-sales engagements with larger accounts and on occasion manages implementations as well. On top of all that, Krishna leads the engagement with the Gartner analysts, for which we recently were recognized for the second year in a row as a niche player in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant.




Krishna’s experience transitioning to WFH, full time

Krishna used to split his time between working in the office in Bengaluru and working remotely from his home in Mysore. Krishna elaborates on his experience over the last six months saying, “I did work from home 2 days a week for a few years, but doing it full time was initially a challenge. I DO miss working with my team, our gourmet coffee rituals on the terrace in our new office, and doing deep work in our board room that has a big screen. As a team, we made it a point to go out for team lunches to celebrate accomplishments and to also get to know each other better. Despite this, we have all gotten acclimatized to working from home.” Luckily, the tools that Vtiger’s CRM provides have allowed for Krishna to operate the same way as when he was working in the office with his colleagues. 




Using Vtiger to collaborate across teams

Recently, our content writer published a blog about our recognition on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2020. Krishna explains, ”This involved collaboration with multiple people including graphic designers, webmasters, and even our CEO. I was responsible to ensure the content was up to the mark. Just like a sales deal, we created a Task and Subtasks and assigned owners under the Parent Project. Everything related to the blog was captured in one place with owners and deadlines. When Subtasks were accomplished, the assigned owners marked them as completed so everyone involved with the Task would be informed on the overall progress. When things need to be approved, we sent them across to the appropriate person(s) for review. When questions arose we were able to collaborate using the Comments section on the Task. All of this is made possible from within our internal tool, powered by Vtiger.”

The ability to collaborate on the Task and Subtask records allowed for Krishna and his team to quickly complete all of the work involved and they were able to publish the blog in less than two days. 




To read the blog worked on by Krishna and the Vtiger team, click here.




Breaking down the tools




In order to give you a deeper understanding of the features and tools Krishna and his team used to collaborate on this project, I have broken them down one-by-one below:




Projects

Projects are planned work that involves specific goals, start dates, target end dates, budgets, progress, etc. You can also track the issues identified and fixed by associating projects with the Cases module. You are also able to collaborate with team members using Tasks, Subtasks, and Comments.




To learn more about Projects click here.




Tasks and Subtasks

Considering the Project as a whole, a Project Task is a piece of work allocated to a user or a group that should be accomplished within a defined period of time.




Every Task and Subtask can have a priority, status, due date, owner, and can include “followers” who need to be aware of the progress of that Task. You can also update your calendar with Tasks that need to be completed on or before a particular date and time.




To learn more about Tasks and Subtasks click here.




Comments

Comments are the written communications posted on records in Vtiger. Comments that are added to a record can be viewed and replied to by internal users. Posted comments can also be viewed and replied to by the customer from the customer portal if enabled.

To learn more about Comments click here.