With the launch of Clarizen V4.8, I’m very excited to share with you some of our newly introduced features, giving you the “director’s cut” with built-in narration from the product manager’s point of view. Stressing the global picture and motivation that led us to focus on these features.
Throughout this version our goal was to present information better, in a more visual, clear and most importantly – interactive manner. Let’s have a look at the roadmap and see how much we can see with just one glance.
The roadmap offers fantastic high level visibility into the state and status of the project, offering insights as to the progress of milestones as well as key tasks, planning deviation from a baseline and so forth (to see a quick summary of the features, watch our short roadmap tutorial).
But the major difference is the ability to act on this information right then and there, to take advantage of opportunities, avert risks and mitigate problems. The roadmap has become interactive, allowing creation of new milestones, moving existing ones, creating dependencies, adding notes and much more.
This interactivity allows you to make changes and immediately seeing how they reflect on other elements of the project and then make further adjustments as needed. Making a similar change in the work plan view would not give you the same instant feedback you need to manage complex projects.
Collaboration has also been greatly enhanced – notes can be attached to key points in the project’s life, becoming immediately visible to the entire team and giving them the opportunity to react and respond.
In the effort to increase visibility and interaction we’ve also created the resource load simulation, which enables you to not only see which resources are currently available to be assigned to a specific task, but also simulate the load after assignment.
Assigning resources just became a breeze – you can know instantly who is available, see all the alternatives and also get a clear view of how those resources will be impacted after the assignment. The functionality was mostly there, but making it available in the right context makes it so much more functional and easy to use.
Moreover, like the rest of the features, we’ve tried hard to reveal this functionality only once the user expresses interest in this particular operation, rather than overwhelming them with clutter.
Next up is the enhanced calendar functionality. We’ve added a lot of business logic to this feature, extending the already existing ability to customize the organizational calendar to users and even projects. I won’t go into those details here – you can watch our dedicated personal calendar tutorial for that – but I do want to stress how intuitive it is to view manipulate the calendars now:
The work week schedule is now clearly represented and when special events are added to the calendar, these days are excluded from available work days for a project schedule. Seeing this information at a glance is priceless, allowing you to understand the big picture, to put things in their right context and to take proactive action on the spot.
There are other features which I haven’t covered and you are welcome to review our release notes for this version and watch the video tutorials that give a more in-depth review of each feature. I also urge you to give us feedback – with your help we can gain a better understanding of your needs and hence quickly improving the product in such a manner that is most helpful to you, our customers.