Clarizen: Collaborative Online Project Management for Small-Midsize Businesses
by Bill Ives
I think that project management is one of the killer apps for web 2.0 within the enterprise. It was one of the applications that first excited me about the business potential of web 2.0 (e.g., An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). 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.
I recently spoke with Eran Aloni, Vice President of Product Marketing at Clarizen Inc. This company started in Israel but moved to Silicon Valley in June 2007. They have a community of Clarizen blogs, that gives more of the product and company context, Clarizen announced its beta product at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. The commercial version came out in mid-October. Eran mentioned that most project management tools in the past focused on the planning phase. “You would spend long hours putting together a project plan that often was too rigid to be useful over the duration of the project,” said Aloni. I can relate to this as I have suffered through months of planning and re-planning on enterprise IT projects.
With Clarizen, the focus is on the execution part. While the tool is scalable and can handle complex projects, it is also flexible and makes it easy to start an effort. It can handle efforts like research and development with 100s of tasks and visibility to many people. You can share projects across organizations with security and a permission mechanism. At the same time an individual can see across all the projects they are allowed to view. Despite general Web 2.0 security concerns that some have expressed, it seems to me that tools like Clarizen offer more control over security. This cross-project visibility is much better than trying to share project updates through email, for example.
I saw the interface and it has a nice dashboard that remains consistent as you drill down. It is easy enough for even me to use it, a real test for the business user. You first see across projects and then can look within them to easily see stuff at risk in both a road map and list format. Project notes are wiki like for collaboration and allow for lessons learned. The interface makes it simple for team members to be participants. They can also report progress through email that get integrated into Clarizen through a free application. Clarizen also sends out status email that team members can respond to directly or log into Clarizen for more detail. You can use a draft mode for planning purposes and people are not engaged in the update process until you shift to action mode.
They have created a number or templates, including a professional services template that allows for parallel budget management for billing. The industry specific templates have incorporated industry specific terms. One of the features I most appreciated was the ability to delegate the design and management of project subtasks with Clarizen. You can easily distribute responsibility but the overall project management has visibility and oversight.
I have written in several posts how the transparency of web 2.0 can change behavior. Eran said they he has heard from clients that people like going into the office knowing their tasks are all green and that everyone knows this. It makes good behavior visible. Managers have said they do not have to chase people now for updates. Like Al Essa in the MIT example I referenced at the start of this post, managers are given back much of their day through enterprise tools like Clarizen and can become more coaches and mentors than watch dogs. Automation World and Fast Company, among others, have provided comments on Clarizen and the general improvement of web 2.0 tools.
