Clarizen - Great for Teams
Updated August 09, 2019
Clarizen - Great for Teams
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Clarizen
The professional services departments use Clarizen to manage customer implementations. It helps us track project cost/scope/time and also allows us to keep project records tied to that information. We store information about project contacts, documents like the statement of work, requirements, and signatures on the project plan. We use color coding to track project statuses and we add notes which are pushed to internal management teams about the project status.
- Real time updates: as a web based solution when I update a timeline my manager and team can see the updates as soon as they refresh their view
- Highlighting what changes and the critical path: I can set up a view that marks items on the critical path and I can set up a view to highlight any dates that change based on a change I make earlier in the plan. This makes slashing timelines much much easier than most programs.
- Collaborative notes: you can @ team members when adding notes. This is a great way to share project specific comments and also the system keeps a record of these conversations which can be useful for post mortems.
- Reports: You can create custom reports and share them with your team so they can pull similar reports for their own projects
- Export: I'm not wild about the export options. We created a custom project plan formatter to turn the ugly export in CSV to a customer facing color coded PDF. It's not super easy to give your customers something pretty to look at (although they do offer PPTs)
- Gantt Charts: All I want in life is a nice little high level set of milestones to pop into a slide I'm showing to a steering committee. It's just not something the system does. I've just had to screen shot a hard to read gantt from the system or recreate in PPT or Visio. No fun
- Speed: I am not sure what's going on here but Clarizen can be pretty slow to update small changes to project plans. It's rough when you have a laundry list of changes to make but the system is waiting
- We use the time tracking reports to help identify types of projects for which we're under charging for implementation fees
- We use the notes tracking for assisting with post mortems when projects go off the rails
- We use the tracking of ARR and implementation fees to pull together reports based on go live that let us know how we're tracking towards our yearly goals
Clarizen is easy to use, web based, and collaborative. It also does a great job organizing tasks across projects which is great for helping contributors get their work done on time. Management loves the reports they can create on overall status, costs, and when projects are forecasted to go live.