Media

"Clarizen seems to be the direct answer to the problem of a mid-level project manager hoarding control over the Microsoft Project files and not involving team members directly in more aspects of project management. Clarizen allows different levels of engagement - from the novice who only feels comfortable participating via email to the advanced users who log into the system and interact with all of the system’s tools."

"The magic argument to get someone to try project management? Tell them it's easy to use and makes their life easier," Ellis says. "It helps you keep things balanced." Even better is the manager at the top using it and demanding others do as well. When you get management support and an internal champion, employees will get with the program. They'll still complain, but they'll get involved."

"We wanted a single solution that combined project management and team collaboration, to more effectively plan and execute our projects," said Cindee Van Dijk, marketing specialist at Human Factors International, Inc., the world's largest company specializing in usability design. "We tried Basecamp and found that it lacked basic project management capabilities needed to plan and manage our multiple marketing programs on time with the right quality. With Clarizen, we don't go through fire drills like before and we are better organized to meet aggressive project timeframes."

 "Clarizen may not replace all the functionality associated with high-end enterprise applications. But compared to Microsoft Project, BaseCamp or any homegrown application, it's pretty compelling when you realize that with volume discounts it costs about $25 a user per month to run.

Given all the work it takes to set of a project management application across multiple people and multiple organizations, that's a pretty compelling price point. After all, there's probably a hundred other things an internal IT organization could be doing other than setting up project management applications that were never designed to support any real meaningful level of collaboration in the first place."

 "The Web interface is by far the best we've seen, and includes many collaborative features and useful at-a-glance views of every aspect of your project. Clarizen is trying to grab some of the MS Project market share, so it's not surprising that the application operates the way you'd expect project management software to work. Tasks, resources, charts and roadmaps: it's all there, easy to see, and very easy to manipulate."

"Web 2.0 technologies are helping enterprises to more efficiently and successfully complete e-commerce upgrade projects. With these new technologies, project team members are able to stay on the same page and bring new members up to speed faster."

"...Consider this example: I just talked to a $1.6 million PBX consulting and services company called 24-by-7 Service that is using a Web 2.0 team collaboration tool to manage its customer service relationships across seven different time zones. The service has helped them win deals AND it has helped shrink billing cycles. Its monthly investment right now is $50 per project manager, but there are no licenses required for customers to view the application. The company's founder, Charley Ellison, says the Clarizen service (which is the one his company uses) has proved much more useful than the spreadsheets his teams have typically used." 

"When you have a team of two people who are in a cubicle next to your office, it is easy to walk up to their cube and get a status update. However, when you have a large team and some of them are a few time zones away or work for your business partners getting a status update from every team member becomes a chore in itself.

"...But Microsoft is also seeing competition for the smaller project management market from companies such as Clarizen and LiquidPlanner.

How can Microsoft respond in the mini-market of project management when its offerings of Project Professional, Project Server, and Project Portfolio Server all seem so gi-normous to the average user?"

"Starting this week, Clarizen is dangling a potentially tempting new carrot -- big discounts for Project customers who switch."

"Many of the features are very easy to use, a big plus for software that can get very complicated, very quickly. I like for instance that users can easily attach notes to tasks, that it has a wiki feel and that managers who need reports can export to Excel. It may seem trivial but these are the small things that matter when thinking about adoption."

 

Clarizen was invited to present on March 20 as part of the Graduate Circle in Under the Radar, an annual event hosted on Microsoft campus. See Clarizen CEO, Avinoam Nowogrodski, give the 5-minute pitch that was recorded on Vator.tv.

"This product has a very nice, very Web 2.0 user interface, but what I like best about it that most users will never see the UI: managers can set up projects on the Clarizen site, but people responsible for delivering on those projects never have to use it. The product sends e-mail queries that users can update directly, bypassing the main site and the $50 monthly per-user fee as well."

"Clarizen is designed to bring online, collaborative project management solutions to small-midsize businesses (SMBs) so they can manage all of their projects and resources in one place with transparency of web 2.0. This transparency also allows the sharing of projects with team members, partners, vendors and customers."