Clarizen

Commentaires: Visibility into projects across the entire professional services portfolio. This gave us a better understanding of our teams and how they were utilized.

Avantages: The ability to customize Clarizen is one of it's strongest features. While not as advanced as some of the bigger SaaS players like Salesforce, it still provides a robust set of features to allow you to create custom business processes to accomplish your companies goals. They compete pretty well against other companies with much larger teams. Another great feature we use a lot is the expansive and complex WBSs you can have for projects. This allowed us to have a better sense of project flow and visibility to where our projects are at.

Inconvénients: Our biggest struggle comes with the idea that a PSA should be a three legged stool (projects/task management, time tracking/resource management, and project financial management). We can only seem to make two work at a time with Clarizen. Our PMs want some pretty detailed project plans to really understand where tasks are and who is responsible, but when you implement that with time tracking it becomes a nightmare for resources to know where to submit there time entries. As our organization grew, the financials and resource management became more important that detailed project plans so we struggled to find a balance of how detailed our WBSs should be because everything within the project plan was tied to time entries and drove project cost. It has become pretty administrative for some of our PMs.

Commentaires: My organization selected Clarizen from a wide array of project management software options just over 2 years ago and we're very happy with our decision. We're a training organization, so slack built into most projects is used up before we get the handoff. This means we must be very efficient and well-coordinated. Clarizen gives us what we need all in a single application. Social, email, file attachment/link to work items... prevent us from checking multiple sources for information. We've customized Work Plans and documentation templates our project managers use to quickly execute tasks. The social functions have replace our Outlook email and we've found that makes projects much more transparent and eliminates hidden agendas that often hit projects. Clarizen support is phenomenal! We have a dedicated expert that currently meets with us every other week and I get quick resolution to any issue posted to their Support Request Center. The dedicated expert has been especially helpful as we're constantly customizing the system to the point that it will soon become the training department's operating system with schedules, timesheets, project plans... everything right in Clarizen.

Avantages: All in one; Social, Work Plans, Scheduling...

Inconvénients: The User Guide is useless.

Avantages: One single platform where both project information and customer information meet, thanks to the Salesforce.com integration. This enables salespeople to keep a real-time view on margins and project progress, without them needing to ask a project manager for a status update or a meeting. The information is right there, up to date and accurate.

Inconvénients: You need to make a solid business case and build a real plan to get the budget approved. Most companies have a lot of tools and some work together with others and... but none beat Clarizen if you ask me - it is a "one-stop" to get all information. So do the math to show you can save money by centralizing the tools, and that you can lower the time spent on managing different solutions. It helps if you show dashboards: management likes dashboards (and numbers).
Clarizen was not so easy to explain to the whole team, it is a very complete solution. So we decided to "drip-feed" it to the teams.

Commentaires: Clarizen is a great platform for project management, workflow management and internal communication tracking. The reporting suite is also very good and there seems to be a keen drive to continually improve the product. Customer support throughout setup and launch was excellent with a product specialist available onsite, phone and web-conference to help train our team and customize our environment. Despite some challenging requests our support team and the flexibility of the system allowed to achieve near all our requirements thus far.

Avantages: Flexibility/Customisation - the system is extremely adaptable and can be used for a number of functions beyond that which it was designed because of it.
Reporting - The reporting suite is excellent but there is still room for improvement in terms of pivots and lining relevant data in reports.

Inconvénients: Support - Although our setup support was great there can be a delay in resolving system bugs but no more than most software services.
Caps on custom fields - There are caps on customisation depending on the package you choose and the price hike between them can be quite significant.

Commentaires: As our organization grew we knew need to migrate from our existing PM tool. We initiated an exhaustive search to find the best solution for our business. There are hundreds of "PM" tools out there of various shapes and sizes. We quickly narrowed this down to a handful of potential partners. We found Clarizen to be the best fit for our business. Clarizen accomplished 80% of our requirements out of the box. Because of the solutions extreme flexibility we were able to develop custom workflows to meet the rest of our requirements. Clarizen is scaleable to meet our growing business needs.

Avantages: Extremely flexible in all aspects of the solution. The end user can customize the views to best fit his specific work requirements. Sys Admins can configure the system to provide custom functionality. Software updates occur regularly and they provide meaningful enhancements and bug fixes. Support has been great.

Inconvénients: Honestly, not come to mind.