Clarizen Software

Biggest benefit is "one source of truth".

Pros

The ease of use that comes from being a SaaS solution has been the strongest feature. In addition, because it is web-based, some of the configuration can be done using CSS, which does not take a lot of programmatic experience to implement.

Cons

As a PPM, there are still gaps (as of this writing) in some basic PPM functionality. The most glaring to me is the lack of Capacity Planning functionality. It can handle Resource Allocation, and Resource Loading, but if you are looking for a way to forecast out what your expected capacity for future work is, you can only do it through heavy configuration.

As for configuration, it has pros and cons, but one of the more challenging limitations is in changing a custom field. If, for example, you decide that the data type on a field must be changed from string to number, you cannot simply change the data type. You must create a new field with the correct data type, find all the configuration instances where that field exists (in, for example, custom actions you've programmed Clarizen to take) and replace them, then delete the old field. It's a very clunky process.

The last big con we have found is that there is no archiving of data. If you want to archive your data, you must dump everything out into a EDW of some sort. This is doubtlessly to keep the database slim, but that means that the system is always an "As Is" system, and you lose the ability to analyze trends.

Visibility into projects across the entire professional services portfolio. This gave us a better understanding of our teams and how they were utilized.

Pros

The ability to customize Clarizen is one of it's strongest features. While not as advanced as some of the bigger SaaS players like Salesforce, it still provides a robust set of features to allow you to create custom business processes to accomplish your companies goals. They compete pretty well against other companies with much larger teams.

Another great feature we use a lot is the expansive and complex WBSs you can have for projects. This allowed us to have a better sense of project flow and visibility to where our projects are at.

Cons

Our biggest struggle comes with the idea that a PSA should be a three legged stool (projects/task management, time tracking/resource management, and project financial management). We can only seem to make two work at a time with Clarizen. Our PMs want some pretty detailed project plans to really understand where tasks are and who is responsible, but when you implement that with time tracking it becomes a nightmare for resources to know where to submit there time entries.

As our organization grew, the financials and resource management became more important that detailed project plans so we struggled to find a balance of how detailed our WBSs should be because everything within the project plan was tied to time entries and drove project cost. It has become pretty administrative for some of our PMs.

Pros

Functionality, intuitiveness, collaboration tools, the configuration settings aren't too hard to use, and I like how it integrates with Salesforce

Cons

I wish the exported Excel files could include the charts/graphs that are created in reports. It has this capability with PDFs, but so far I haven't seen anything for Excel.

Pros

The way you can link all facets of a project from bugs to requests. I also like the searcability of the interface.

Cons

I would like to see the ability to add conditional logic to customized fields in order to create work flows.

Great visibility into my projects.

Pros

The tool offers A LOT of functionality. As I'm not a system administrator, I am not aware of everything that Clarizen can do, but whenever our admins unleash a new feature, I'm always excited by it. The new Android app is super nice/handy to have, especially for logging time. The support is great: we have logged bugs before, and these are generally resolved very fast. I am not blocked for long whenever something like that happens.

Cons

The fact that there are so many features also has a downside. I feel like there is a lot more to discover, and sometimes, things are no consistent. For example, in some views, I can hide the right-hand vertical "space" (or menu) and in others, I can't. I also find that column resizing is quite burdensome, and I have to resize columns in multiple views (it doesn't propagate.)

It is really good for indepth project management with a lot of tools available. Can be a pain in the ass to configure when the application need to so specific for your organization. (Recommend to use a IT projectmanager, Clarizen does not provide this or they just leave the project without any reason)

Pros

The massive functionality of designing the software to the specific needs in detail. Generating Reports from all kinds of data to be viewed by manageres and to control projectmanagement on a deeper level. It is a highly manageable application that can be used in all kinds of situations.

Cons

The ability to adapt the softwares permissions on a field level could not be done. Permissions can only be set to action buttons. One property card per module per user profile was for our situation not the best option.

The user manual could also be expanded on a more detailed level. Clicking on a question mark icon (linked to the user manual) displayed the exact same information as hovering over it. It was not giving the best information so we had to contact support instead of a simple answer in the user manual.

I used Clarizen to track my time for specific projects while working on an operations team. I think our company got way too specific with the tasks, as I would be tracking time as little as 15 minute increments, but I do think that is a plus with the software! You can be assigned to many, many tasks and be reporting time to all of them. It is easy to use and search for what you are looking for and a very short learning curve.

My organization selected Clarizen from a wide array of project management software options just over 2 years ago and we're very happy with our decision.

We're a training organization, so slack built into most projects is used up before we get the handoff. This means we must be very efficient and well-coordinated. Clarizen gives us what we need all in a single application. Social, email, file attachment/link to work items... prevent us from checking multiple sources for information.

We've customized Work Plans and documentation templates our project managers use to quickly execute tasks. The social functions have replace our Outlook email and we've found that makes projects much more transparent and eliminates hidden agendas that often hit projects.

Clarizen support is phenomenal! We have a dedicated expert that currently meets with us every other week and I get quick resolution to any issue posted to their Support Request Center. The dedicated expert has been especially helpful as we're constantly customizing the system to the point that it will soon become the training department's operating system with schedules, timesheets, project plans... everything right in Clarizen.

Pros

All in one; Social, Work Plans, Scheduling...

Cons

The User Guide is useless.

Advice to Others

It's so customizable that you can spend the rest of your career optimizing Clarizen and it's all worth the time.

Clarizen is the foundation of our project management process. It provides a wide range of features and customization to support the needs of our design team, project managers, production, upper management and sales staff. With customized reports, each team member can see the data that is important to them. With customized views estimating can see what is important to them, sales can see that they need and project management can see their information. The dashboards are great to show a snapshot of how many projects are doing. It is obvious the people at Clarizen have put a lot of time and effort developing and refining the project management process. It's a great program to get everyone on your team involved

Pros

The almost unlimited features and options

Cons

There are almost too many choices, it takes a while to really gain a full understanding of how everything works

Advice to Others

If there is something you are trying to do in the program but can't figure it out, join one of the free questions and answer sessions. There is probably a workaround that will get the job done.

Clarizen is a feature-rich tool that has lots of capabilities and customizability.

The negatives I have observed are the omission of some fundamental features like Undo, and some quirks, particularly in adjusting predecessors, cascading updated dates and adding new tasks in the work plan.

Pros

Sharing, resource management, Very powerful reporting tools

Cons

No undo, Workplan can be quirky and often have to refresh the page for updated/correct info to show. Slow.

We researched for the best project management software app we could find and ended up at Clarizen. It has the best features and an easy to use interface. Very helpful tools to get the job done and the pricing was fair.

As our organization grew we knew need to migrate from our existing PM tool. We initiated an exhaustive search to find the best solution for our business. There are hundreds of "PM" tools out there of various shapes and sizes. We quickly narrowed this down to a handful of potential partners. We found Clarizen to be the best fit for our business. Clarizen accomplished 80% of our requirements out of the box. Because of the solutions extreme flexibility we were able to develop custom workflows to meet the rest of our requirements. Clarizen is scaleable to meet our growing business needs.

Pros

Extremely flexible in all aspects of the solution. The end user can customize the views to best fit his specific work requirements. Sys Admins can configure the system to provide custom functionality. Software updates occur regularly and they provide meaningful enhancements and bug fixes. Support has been great.

Cons

Honestly, not come to mind.

Advice to Others

We tried to rush the implementation. Clarizen can work out of the box, however the system is extremely flexible and configurable and we found out shortly after beginning the implementation that we needed more time to do it right and bring all the functionality to our end users.

Interesting experience, however the tool is too detailed and not easy to use if you are not a PM. There are too many dependencies that need to be filled in before moving ahead. The timesheet feature is not very user friendly. No integration with QuickBooks online Canada. No customization allowed with this tool.

Pros

It captures the right areas required for project management, provides more detail that Microsoft project and allows for all projects to be captures in one place. Has great reporting and pictures of timelines and milestones

Cons

Timesheets are to complicated and difficult to complete. No option for capturing project expenses against a project. difficult to enter in dependencies, very repetitive task, rather than allowing for templates to be used.

Advice to Others

Tool needs to be a little more simpler for smaller organizations.

Clarizen has moved us from spreadsheet based project management to collaborative, efficient portfolio management. Adopting Clarizen was straight-forward and it was quick to see the benefits. Managing many projects simultaneously across many customers and project types is now possible and manageable.

Our development team have a much easier time of knowing what they should be working on in disparate cross-company project teams. The accompanying iPhone and Android apps help ensuring time-sheets are kept updated and communications are not missed.

It is hugely customisable in regards to setting up simple forms, workflows with notifications and visual aids. We've been able to recreate our own methodologies in Clarizen.

The only issue we have had is reaching the limit of custom fields possible without moving to the unlimited license model.

Support has been excellent and dependable.

Clarizen offers a range of tools for your project management needs and especially for the value, it proves to be one of the top products on the market.

Pros

Works well with Salesforce.com by providing additional helpful information

Cons

Requires a lot of training and time to adapt for non-techsavy staff

Working with Clarizen for a few years. Started before the rich reporting capability existed. Using it for Portfolio and Project Management in an Advanced Engineering Product Development team.

Pros

It is Microsoft Project Management on steroids. It gives you the same capability to manage a project but adds features to provide a complete solution. Easy customization to fit each department needs. Resource Management across of projects, Collaboration at all levels, robust reporting module...

Cons

The reporting module provides the capability to easily create dashboards. I have created dashboards for every level and function of the organization. However, it is difficult for a manager to see his staff's dashboard.

Advice to Others

Try it, Clarizen makes it easy to give it a trial run. I was able to implement 200+ licenses across 3 sites and 2 countries without paying any consulting fees.

After launching Clarizen in our organization, it was easier than ever before to do resource management and get timesheets in. Therefore the data is more accurate so we can now make sound business decision based on accurate information.

Pros

It's easy to use and to change configuration or customize to best meet your user's needs.

Cons

Cost management is great but could use the concept of effective date to make it easy to use when spanning the fiscal year or promoting individuals.

Advice to Others

Make sure you get a professional services package, that week on site made a world of difference when we launched and it continues to pay off over a year later.

Working on clarizen was a new world for me as I had never used an online project management tool. As most project managers it is hard to move out of the comfort zone which really works, but Clarizen was different. It provided the flexibility of updating projects on the go as well as task assignment to resources and updates to stake holders. Clarizen also helped us to decrease the time to update project status as it was easy to get reminders on updates and also daily status reports on emails for escalation. The social collaboration part is one of the best I have experienced so far on any type of platform for the "working" environment.

Pros

Social Collaboration
Customization right down to the fields being used in each and every element.

Cons

I would see that at times the interface due to it's beauty becomes a bit slow.

Advice to Others

I would expect that anyone who tries out Clarizen would definitely be interested in using it in it's organization.

Compared all PPM solutions we have used in the past Clarizen provided a much needed increase in reporting and customization to meet our needs. It allows us to not only track the additional information we need but report on it in a way that make portfolio review much easier that it had previously been

Pros

Modern look and feel, customization, and reporting.

Cons

External collaborator option is too expensive, e-mail tracking and integration for capturing communication customers who are not users in Clarizen is limited

Clarizen is a great platform for project management, workflow management and internal communication tracking. The reporting suite is also very good and there seems to be a keen drive to continually improve the product.

Customer support throughout setup and launch was excellent with a product specialist available onsite, phone and web-conference to help train our team and customize our environment. Despite some challenging requests our support team and the flexibility of the system allowed to achieve near all our requirements thus far.

Pros

Flexibility/Customisation - the system is extremely adaptable and can be used for a number of functions beyond that which it was designed because of it.
Reporting - The reporting suite is excellent but there is still room for improvement in terms of pivots and lining relevant data in reports.

Cons

Support - Although our setup support was great there can be a delay in resolving system bugs but no more than most software services.
Caps on custom fields - There are caps on customisation depending on the package you choose and the price hike between them can be quite significant.

Advice to Others

We reviewed a lot of solutions before deciding to use Clarizen, none seemed as flexible while also providing a comfortable user interface. It's not perfect and it has some quirks but no system is without them and it's adaptability should allow you to workaround most issues.