Always nice to hear why new customers select Clarizen after spending much time evaluating different solutions and planning very strategically how to embrace our solutions to be in line with their company vision.
One important thing to take away from this post is the need to factor in your decision not only product but also service, ongoing support and the frequency of release of new features.
What was the main reason Clarizen was chosen?
Clarizen was chosen for functionality and because it met most of our needs.
The company has a fairly aggressive schedule of new features and what is not present now will be released in a future version.
Clarizen overall was more polished and professional than their competitors and the effort from Jacqueline made an impression on senior management. Clarizen was able to structure a deal that met our needs.
What were you using beforehand to manage your projects?
Nothing, really. We have SharePoint and licenses for MS Project. We have moved all of our information: time tracking and project management into Clarizen. SharePoint for document management is still used. Time tracking and MS Project for schedules are also used. We have actually moved our time tracking expense solution to Clarizen. We still use Project for legacy projects and to draft up proposals but day-to-day projects are in Clarizen.
What other solutions were evaluated? What did you like about them? What didn't you like about them? If possible, please specify the pros and cons of each separately.
Three main solutions were evaluated in addition to Clarizen as part of our final solution evaluation and all of them had a strong product offering; however, Clarizen was ultimately chosen from a group that included: @Task (attask), Celoxis and Work Lenz.
In the end, the Clarizen team delivered the right combination of price flexibility, feature set and robustness and willingness to earn and keep Identropy's business.
What top 3 features did you like about Clarizen?
The upcoming features of V4.5 integration of time and to have flexibility in terms of a resource’s rate by project, resource, etc. was very key. Unlimited document storage is nice at each level of project.
The upcoming Google documents integration and calendars will be nice.
The ability to do timesheet updates on a schedule is nice so my guys have to do this only once. We send reminders on Tuesdays and Thursdays for timesheets and our guys do not have to do anything as far as reminders with me since they have the auto reminders.
Is there anything else that was a factor in the decision to purchase Clarizen?
Overall, we felt like Clarizen cared about our business and would provide support to us on an ongoing basis. So far, Josh has been great about doing this! The motivation to adopt a PMIS solution is much deeper than the need for a time tracking, expense tracking system and a centralized project management system; or even a way to streamline our operational and resource planning activities (prior to this it was done on spreadsheets). It is a way to increase our value and differentiation to our clients, which is consistent with our principles of accelerated time-to-value and transparency. This is how we succeed in the marketplace, by earning our customers trust, and this PMIS solution will allow us to enhance our posture in this area.
Quotes are of Clarizen customer: Clint L Finch | M.S Management/PMP Identropy, Inc. | Project Manager |