It's time businesses move beyond spreadsheets and connect the islands within their organizations. The islands exist in all organizations where different processes and tasks are performed in separate and disconnected systems, lacking connectivity and context. Connecting these islands can improve business visibility dramatically, get operations running effectively and help managers make better decisions quicker, thus, be sharper and much more efficient. When running our operations we should ask ourselves: Do we know who is responsible? What has been promised by whom? Where are the relevant documents? When will results be delivered? What changes were made and when? We use Excel for almost everything, planning, budgeting, execution and control. We schedule with Outlook, communicate with email, report into different systems.

We are working on islands.

One of the most difficult issues in running an organization is setting priorities. Aligning priorities with current challenges and a dynamic reality requires a panoramic view and a profound understanding of the dependencies between the different activities. Having a higher level of visibility puts everyone on the same page.
Using Clarizen will help you connect your company's islands and streamline processes in a systematic way that creates operations accountability and a continuous improvement process. A great company is a company that can sense and effectively respond. I have no doubt that using Clarizen will make your company be a better company with happier customers, more involved employees and increased profitability.

Regardless if you are an existing customer, current prospect or simply a devoted reader of these monthly newsletters, at some point or other you face the challenge of introducing a new solution, such as Clarizen, to your team. After all, it's not about technology, advanced features or a cool web 2.0 interface - it's about disrupting the status quo that each and every one of us gets nervous about, to some extent.

In the purchase process, the quantifiable and explicit factors of the evaluation process are easy - simply list them all in a spreadsheet, assign weighted averages and their respective scores and your RFP is complete. The more implicit and challenging aspect of introducing a new solution to your organization is the team buy-in. Will the team use the new solution? Will they resist it? Will they fall back soon after the purchase to out-of-context email as a means to collaborate?

As the champion evaluating Clarizen for your team, no doubt you are apprehensive about whether the team will embrace the new solution and whether you will achieve even half of the projected targets you set in place when doing your ROI calculations (If you have gotten this far).

Which brings me to the Clarizen Implementation Plan.

For those of you who have already ventured down this path, you may recall how prior to getting on board, the Clarizen team guides you hand in hand through the sales process ensuring that your team has an active role in the evaluation, decision and deployment of our solution. After all, your failure leads to our failure. The SaaS model relies on recurring subscriptions to turn a profit so this ‘marriage' has to be built to last.

As of such, from the initial prospecting through the sale and post account management stages, we have put in place multiple processes and resources to secure team participation, achieve rapid deployment and maximize your return on your investment both before and after becoming Clarizen customers.

During the evaluation phase these are the main resources available:

1. Clarizen 101 Webinars - any new user of Clarizen should start here. Regardless if you're a prospect or existing customer, needing a new user to ramp up on Clarizen (and regardless if you have used MS Project for 10 years), new users truly benefit from taking our introduction webinars offered several times a week. To see the latest schedule visit:
   http://www.clarizen.com/Resources/OnlineDemo.aspx
   
2. Advanced Webinars - Graduated from Clarizen 101? Another free training sessions we offer are twice a week for those of you who are ready to dive deeper into advanced reports, settings and features. To see the latest schedule visit:
   http://www.clarizen.com/Resources/OnlineDemo.aspx
   
3. Custom Team Demos - Even before becoming a customer, if you can get your team on the calendar, we will try to accommodate your schedule and conduct a team webinar so that you are able in a single session to get your key stakeholders on a joint session, address questions and concerns that arise and be able to expedite your evaluation process.
   
4. Web Tutorials - Every new major Clarizen release includes illustrative tutorials giving you a quick overview of the new features and how to access them. These along with additional video tutorials are available via our web site and the application.
   http://www.clarizen.com/Resources/HelpandTutorials.aspx
   
5. Help Library - Clarizen's web-based Help library is constantly being updated to include new features and enhancements and is accessible 24/7. Just click on any of the question marks ‘?' throughout the application to access the related pages in the Help section.
   https://app.clarizen.com/Clarizen/Help/en-us/Clarizen_Help.htm
   
6. Email Support - In the footer of each page in the application, you will find the hyperlink ‘Support', which upon clicking, opens a form already with your account information, leaving you to only fill in the issue you are experiencing that requires assistance.
   
7. Phone Support - for North America users, support over Clarizen's toll free number, 1 -866 -502-9813, is available during PST business hours 8:00AM-5:00PM. For international callers, you should have received an email, when first signing up, with a number to call if you have any questions. If not, please email us using the Support link.

Once becoming Clarizen customers we offer additional resources to help you get your entire team quickly ramped up and your organization deploying the solution with minimal effort. This includes free training, provided to qualifying customers, and entails a training session for your advanced users and novice users.

• Advanced Training is where your project managers and account administrators are walked through the Clarizen settings, build out advanced reports, get tips on how to manage project portfolios, time tracking, customer billing and address all organization-specific requirements as they are indeed unique from one customer to another.
  
• Team Training is where all end users, regardless of the role they will carry in your different projects, are calendared into webinar-based training and are walked through the basics of Clarizen. This can be done in the context of your own projects or over sample projects.
  On-Site Training is for organizations seeking to accelerate the adoption of Clarizen deployment in their organization by conducting frontal training session for all users. This is fee-based training and recommended when time is a key factor or for organizations who prefer their users be physically present in the training session.

To learn more about these different resources and trainings, please email us.

Running a SaaS business is a profession in and by itself. In this post I want to share my views on the key elements of running a SaaS company. I would first state that the most important part is understanding the limitations of your own organization and knowledge. You need to understand that the main question you should be asking yourself is: how do you know that you are making progress?

Staying open and receptive to the market is important for any company, however, determining the most relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and measuring the right metrics is crucial for a SaaS company as the market changes all the time and the customers behavior in not consistent and very hard to predict.

The business model is driving most of the key metrics where the ratio of the Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC) vs. the Customer Life Time Value(CLTV) dictates the validity of the model while the ratio of the CAC and the Initial Customer Contract Value (ICCV) is dictating the level of funding necessary. The ICCV depends on the combination of the number of subscriptions sold to a customer, the average price per subscription and the prepaid term. Understanding the dependencies between the different elements of the CAC, such as the cost of a lead and the conversion ratio to customers, will drive the overall marketing expenses. The CLTV will depend on the ICCV, the expected renewals and the expected organic expansions less churn and will provide a strong indication of the scalability of the model.

The overall go-to-market system has four key elements:

1. The traffic creation that includes online marketing (SEO, PPC, affiliates...) PR and others.
2. The registration process whose target is to convert visitors to leads via the website, landing pages and targeted content.
3. The sale cycle that involves inside sales (hunters), sales scripts, webinar demos, the service itself and selling techniques.
4. Renewals & expansions that utilize the customer success team (farmers), customer interaction via the web and, of course, the service itself.

All of these activities are supported by an analytics system that can drive continuous optimization of all four processes. It is critical to have managers responsible on each of the objectives of traffic, registration, selling, renewals & expansion with clear definition of the target objectives with a strong link to compensation.

I welcome your thoughts as this business is new and still developing.

At these tough times of budget cuts, freezes, job losses, re-orgs and an overall sense of uncertainty, a dose of Clarizen might just be what you need to weather the storm.

Here are some sample scenarios, of how using Clarizen can benefit your organization, some of which are based on stories we hear from our customers:

1. "We have less people to do the same, if not more, work."
   
   After a reduction in workforce the remaining team members are juggling even more tasks, are members in more projects and need to stay on top of their work in order to allow the organization to continue normal operations.  This is one of the core advantages of using a centralized SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, as Clarizen, where all users can easily (even over email) contribute directly to the master project plan, see where their tasks and projects stand at any time and have much of the administrative work of project management removed due to the automation of mundane tasks.
   
   
2. "We lost a few a team members and now need to reassign all their tasks and projects."
   
   
   
   Managing employee transition, even in good times due to health or personal circumstances, can be very costly with project timelines slipping and knowledge being lost due to the nature of on-premise solutions. Managing all resources in one centralized solution where a few clicks of the mouse can shift all tasks from one resource to another, is precious.
   
   
3. "How do I know how much we spent on that project?"
   
   When a project is internal and hours are not being tracked, pinning down the dollar amount of costs, budgets and rates is practically impossible. Often there will be a 'guestimate' but rarely would management be able to review and calculate true costs and areas of future costs savings or higher margins. As hard times hit, more careful analysis of project budgets take place, looking for areas to save. With Clarizen's internal time tracking tool, user hourly rates, budget calculations, customer billing and reports suddenly, with minimal effort, the organization has very accurate insight into these crucial financials and is able to respond quickly to changes.
   
   
4. "We're too large of an organization/department to be able to optimize our resource utilization."
   
   As organizations grow, the ability to optimize resource utilization becomes extremely challenging. Under-utilizing resources and overloading others is always going to plague large organizations but minimizing it is now possible simply by treating each large task or job as a Clarizen project.
   
   
   
   
   Once resources are assigned to tasks in Clarizen, you have instant visibility to resource loads and are able to level the utilization between the available pool of resources.
   
   
5. "We've decided to outsource the XYZ department."
   
   Outsource, offshore, contract-out - call it what you wish, however, they all share in common the need to be able to work as a team across geographies, organizations, time zones, IT platforms, firewalls, and most importantly, have better access control.
   
   
   
   
   Clarizen's 'External User' feature and role-based access structure allow you to control very easily who can edit and view every level in your project, down to the lowest level task. Project confidentiality is not compromised, training external users is not needed due to Clarizen's ease-of-use and all distributed members know precisely what's on their plate and who may be holding their work from being done.
   
   
6. "It's simply too costly to get the entire team on a new solution."
   
   Beyond the inherent advantages of the SaaS subscription model (pay-as-you-go and no installation or other costs beyond licenses), Clarizen is the only on-demand project management company to offer free email-users who can update the master plan without needing a user license. You can have unlimited email users in your organization and training is not needed as it truly is dead-easy to use. We also offer other options to reduce your paid license-base with the Free Partner License program, Invite Friend and other promotions. At the end of the day, what may have looked like a major undertaking getting all your users licensed, can be much less than the initial estimates.
   
   
7. "It's a project by itself finding the right project management solution. I don't know where to start."
   
   We know it's not the most pleasant experience running a web search for 'project management' or similar key words as the results are bountiful and it's hard to find the perfect match without undertaking an entire...project. With this in mind, Rachel, Josh or myself, will spend the time needed with you over the phone and webinar to understand your organization-specific project needs (inc. budget constraints) and either sell you on our solutions or tell you upfront, you're in the wrong place. Most importantly, we will save you valuable time narrowing down your search to a solution that best fits your need. Take us up on this offer and email us now to schedule a call.

By all means, these are not the only ways to justify an investment in Clarizen's project execution solutions. Have any other suggestions on how Clarizen helps you manage your teams in these uncertain times? Please let us know and we will update this list so that other users can benefit from it.

Last week we announced the first of its kind project management integration with Autodesk's AutoCAD solution at AutoDesk University being held in Las Vegas. For the first time, a pure on-demand solution seamlessly integrates with AutoCAD, bringing core project management functionality into AutoCAD.

AutoDesk University participants stand in line to see a demo of Clarizen and get a glimpse of Clarizen mascot Josh Jr. standing guard with Clarizen vest and cap 

CAD solutions are notoriously centered around the individual designer even in this day and age where even solo user design projects require a team effort. For example, there is the manager reviewing the work, the client approving it or the fellow designers providing their input and efforts. Hence, it takes a team to complete a design project in a timely fashion and within a certain budget.

Clarizen is leading this effort to embrace the team and allowing AutoCAD users to work in the comfort zone of their AutoCAD solution, which they are so familiar with, without needing to step outside to their email or any other collaboration solution to collaborate with other team members.

Integration with AutoCAD is yet another offering from Clarizen allowing team members to choose their preferred work environment while at the same time ensure all project data is centralized and made available to other team members. Team members can update their progress in Clarizen, via AutoCAD, Outlook Add-in, SolidWorks Add -in, or simply over email using Clarizen's unique feature ProjectMail.

  Screenshot from AutoCAD's Clarizen Plug-In where users can see and update all their tasks

Numerous analysts, journalists and bloggers have already reviewed the latest integration of Clarizen with AutoCAD, the first of its kind in the industry. Kenneth Wong, from Cadalyst, put together a nice summary highlighting the key points.

Stay tuned for the next integration announcement. With our SOA enabled platform and open API, things are just getting easier.

Even if the entire project team is in the same building, it's quite the challenge to manage the project. You can imagine how much more challenging it would be if the project team is scattered. The challenges of collaborating and sharing information is growing in magnitude as teams become more and more geographically and inter-company dispersed. For example, a Marketing project that involves external web site designers and PR teams, or a Professional Services project that includes dispersed teams and customer representatives, or an Engineering project that includes outsourced developers. All these projects require management of distributed project teams.

Project software is a critical component in making distributed projects work, yet not just any project solution, as there are many available these days. The project software needs to serve the entire team, not only the project manager. It needs to be accessible and easy to use. It needs to be secure and still enable sharing.

As businesses become more dependent on a decentralized environment, they need to adjust correspondingly by putting in place new processes that will allow them to sustain, if not gain, more productivity. To enable these processes, an avant-garde project management software needs to be implemented, one that has been designed around the dispersed team.

There is no doubt that businesses are dependent on their ability to deliver. However, it looks as if being able to meet deadlines is a matter of hit or miss. Most global companies are looking for ways to increase accountability. Without transparency and real time visibility there is no way to take decisions and being right or wrong is a matter of pure luck.

Many companies have tried in the past to implement project management software in order for them to be more accountable and deliver on time but implementing project management software is a project by itself. We just got an email from one of our customers describing the reality of project management:

"Could it be? Could this be the answer we'd been searching for all these long years? We didn't want to get too excited. We'd been down this road so many times but it looked so promising. Finally! The Gods Have Spoken and Clarizen be the name!"

Well, I definitely hope the customer is right. Actually, "the customer is always right" as we say internally at Clarizen.

I truly believe that change is happening and that online project management is overhauling the landscape. Soon, a company not using an on-demand (SaaS) project management software will indeed be left behind.

Every company is doing project management, however, the majority of companies are not using a PM tool to manage projects.

So, why are PM tools not working? I think there is one main reason- lack of team adoption.
The tools are designed for the individuals - not the team. However, teamwork is critical for projects to succeed. Clarizen's Project Team Automation solution is helping businesses be successful in managing their projects via team adoption.

When you have projects you spend 10% of the time on planning and 90% of the time on execution. You have 3 people that are doing planning and 50 the execution. Current PM tools are focused only on planning. So how do people execute their projects today? They use email which lacks any traceability, accountability and visibility. Clarizen is connecting the planning with the execution and delivering real-time visibility that is helping teams make the right decisions and on time.

The only way to connect the plan and the execution is to create team participation. Clarizen is leveraging email, users most commonly used solution, to drive team adoption. In addition, Clarizen enables content collaboration, creating a project repository for all documents, emails and discussions - all of which so critical for project success.

Who is actually managing projects? Who is being held accountable? Who has the deadlines to meet? Often it's the line manager, the VP of Marketing, the VP of Engineering, or anyone of us managers who are not likely to be trained project managers. Current tools are designed for certified project managers and are way too complex to be used by people like you and I.

Clarizen is helping project teams be successful by delivering project execution via team adoption.

Last week the entire Clarizen U.S. team flew with Avinoam, our CEO, to Las Vegas to launch our new marketing campaign called "Kiss Microsoft Project Goodbye" at the Software 2008 / Interop conference.

Don't get us wrong, MS Project is not our direct competitor but it sure does come up very often when prospects contact us in search of something...different.

The term 'Project Management' carries with it much baggage of the past, and is frequently associated with old school solutions that intimidate the average user and require much training to get even the basics. Hence at Clarizen we shy away from using the term 'Project Management' and prefer to be categorized under 'Project Collaboration' or 'Project Execution' two key areas where solutions such as MS Project fall very short.

Clarizen takes projects beyond the Planning phase and keeps team members engaged and contributing also throughout the Execution phase via the integration of user-friendly collaboration tools, Web 2.0 style. Providing a centralized pure SaaS solution coupled with consumer-play collaboration and usability aspects, brings fresh air to the Project Management arena and an alternative to Microsoft Project and other incumbent enterprise solutions which have lost touch with their user base and been slow to migrate down the enterprise 2.0 path.

If I had to define in one sentence what is a good company I would say that a good company is one that can sense and respond whereas a bad company is one that does not respond well to changes. Advances in technology have made it easier for more people than ever from different corners of the world to collaborate and compete in a way that was not possible before. Our business environment has become much more dynamic and demanding.

Let me illustrate this with an example:

When we are driving a car on a highway and drive 55 miles per hour we feel comfortable and safe. However, if we are in a hurry and drive 95 miles per hour we find ourselves much more alert and responsive to the road conditions and traffic around us. Taking this to the extreme, if we want to participate in a Formula 1 or NASCAR race, for most of us this would be impossible as we do not have the skills or the knowledge to drive so fast. Now, imagine your business is like in a Formula 1 car race and you do not have any choice but win this race. You need to have the right car, skills and knowledge in order to win. An enterprise 2.0 company is one that can win this race by gearing up on advanced technologies and methodologies. Hence, Clarizen. Clarizen helps companies execute their projects online with real time visibility and therefore allows them to respond better to changes.