IT-Start Up Review by a Project Manager
January 13, 2014
IT-Start Up Review by a Project Manager
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction
I previously used Clarizen at a IT-start up. I helped in the evaluation of this product for this firm as a Project Manager. I used it for several weeks during this evalution period developing several dozen projects in the Clarizen tool. The evaluation covered both the base use of this tool for PM work as well as its colaboration capabilities. In the end, this company decided to not go forward with Clarizen due primarily to its slow reponse time in the cloud. Even with a LAN connection, there were times during the day when the tool would bog down and not work fast enough to allow productive use of the tool itself. Now this evaluation was done during Sep/Oct 2013, and the vendor may have updated their server capacity and performance to address this issue since this time period.
Personally, I thought this tool was OK to use. It did have a few issues to pick on it:
1) Copying projects from / to MS Project didn't work very well which made conversions difficult.
2) When adding tasks to a project, sometime Clarizen would put those new tasks in the wrong place in the project and would fight me at times to correct this result via cut/paste or moving of tasks. I'm not sure if this was a result of the times when the Clairzen servers would bog down, but there were times when this one issue would cause me to spend needless hours correcting very simple changes to project plans.
3) You could add files and collaboration information to projects at the project level (potentially quite useful feature for collaboration and project tracking). It would have been better to also allow this feature at the task level to allow this feature to be used in larger project plans which might have a number of smaller project plans contained inside an overall larger project.
Overall, this tool shows promise. If the vendor can address some of the issues above as well as the performance of the tool itself during heavy usage, it has the potential to be a very useful tool for employers who have significant software development work.
Personally, I thought this tool was OK to use. It did have a few issues to pick on it:
1) Copying projects from / to MS Project didn't work very well which made conversions difficult.
2) When adding tasks to a project, sometime Clarizen would put those new tasks in the wrong place in the project and would fight me at times to correct this result via cut/paste or moving of tasks. I'm not sure if this was a result of the times when the Clairzen servers would bog down, but there were times when this one issue would cause me to spend needless hours correcting very simple changes to project plans.
3) You could add files and collaboration information to projects at the project level (potentially quite useful feature for collaboration and project tracking). It would have been better to also allow this feature at the task level to allow this feature to be used in larger project plans which might have a number of smaller project plans contained inside an overall larger project.
Overall, this tool shows promise. If the vendor can address some of the issues above as well as the performance of the tool itself during heavy usage, it has the potential to be a very useful tool for employers who have significant software development work.
- Adding files and documentation to projects aided in tracking activities and collaboration.
- The collaboration features of the tool allowed for a group of software developers to collaborate well together even if they were not all physically together in the same location or working in the office at the same time. This would be helpful for those who have virtual teams spread across geographies and time zones.
- Clarizen was flexible enough to support both PMBOK and AGILE methodologies
- It needs better cut/paste/move options for tasks within projects or sub-projects within projects
- The feature to add files/documentation to a project if expanded to the task level would allow for better collaboration in larger projects that span several sub-projects.
- At the time of my use, the tool sometimes got bogged down to heavier use. Better capacity planning and performance in the servers used by the vendors would help make this tool a much better one to use.
- Didn't get to use this tool long enough to evaluate ROI issues
- MS Project,MS SharePoint,MS Office 365
The IT-start up firm I was working in the end selected MS Project with Sharepoint and Office 365 over Clarizen since the Microsoft solution was easier to use, more flexible, and could handle a larger workload than Clarizen could.