In this Best Practices article, we will describe how best to manage risk using Clarizen. The process describes a tailored risk management approach according to the main guidelines of PMI® methodologies and ISO standards (see Used References at the end of the article).

 The following diagram shows the flow of Risk Management life-cycle:

In this section, the tools and methodologies that you can use during various phases of managing a risk are briefly described.

Change Management is one of the most important processes of managing projects. This article is dedicated to the best practice of managing change in Clarizen.

The following diagram shows the flow of a Change Request life-cycle:

What is similar?

Both tools use the same building blocks for representing a project plan:

• Projects
• Milestones
• Tasks

In today’s global and competitive environment, time to market is one of the most crucial factors in projects.

Projects become more and more complicated and dynamic. Project related activities have to be executed concurrently by different units in the organization or even externally to meet time constraints. As a result, the project environment becomes complex and hard to manage.

 

Modularization of projects and placing dependencies across different projects, is one way of simplifying the management of this complex project environment.

Following are some characteristics of a complex project where we would recommend dividing the project  into several sub-projects:

You might need to create dependencies between loosely dependant projects or even un-related projects which still can have several points of impact / dependency.

Use Shortcuts to critical milestones or tasks of the different project that you want to track. You will then be able to view progress of the original work items of the other project directly in your project view, either on the roadmap or in the work plan.

You can then use Progress Impact  and Schedule Dependency  links to create the appropriate completion and scheduling dependencies between those shortcuts and different tasks or milestones in your project.
Example of the Loosely Related Projects

Use Project Hierarchy relations to build a tightly related projects’ structure.

Use Progress Impact dependency and Schedule Dependency to create the appropriate completion and scheduling dependencies between different tasks or milestones of the different sub projects.

In an organization where the project manager and the functional managers share responsibilities between dividing and assigning work among the resources in the project, it is important to synchronously work together as to ensure a clear work plan. Clarizen's service enables the managers within a matrix organization to collaboratively plan and execute the project.

Each of the managers can control their own view of the project as they wish.


The following is an example of how you can view roadmaps across several sub-projects: