Project Management Meets Collaboration
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The term project by definition implies collaboration. After all, if it is not a project, than it must be a task. But a task, as we all know, is an element of a project. That sums up a lot of the thinking behind a software-as-a-service offering from Clarizen that focus on project management. As a Web-based application, Clarizen inherently supports collaboration across multiple team members. Furthermore, those team members don't even have to be in the same company. So what you get with Clarizen is a relatively easy to setup cross-company project management platform. But unlike a lot of other project management applications, Clarizen doesn't insist that every document related to the project must reside inside the application. Instead, it is built around a service-oriented architecture that allows users to either link to internal applications, such as CAD.CAM applications from SolidWorks, or other software-as-a-service application, such as GoogleApps. And finally, Clarizen doesn't even impose its own workflow system. Instead, people can, as one option, use the primary workflow management system most people already have, known commonly as Microsoft Exchange. Via a plug-in for Outlook, any e-mail written by a user can automatically be turned into a task within the Clarizen application. 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. |
Comments (2)
It does seem like what they've pulled off is technologically impressive.
I think the hardest thing about collaborating / project management has less to do with the sharing of content and docs - and more to do with getting consistent participation.
In the project I'm working on, the list of to-dos that we have continuously needs revisiting, each discreet task has layers of complexity that were previously unanticipated, and each team member has volumes of data / perspectives that are unique to our roles.
What tends to happen is that each of us are bitching about separate stuff on our Google Groups page, and assuming that the others are reading it / groking it. But when we come together for calls, it's quite often that one or more of us are not reading these correspondences.
There's a lot to be said for enabling people to share information, huge datasets and other rich files. And I don't begin to understand how complicated it must be to work with all those crazy CAD programs in really sophisticated domains. I'm just saying that a lot of time the problem is too much content to get through, and less about better access to content.
(another reason why I don't understand how all these people have TIME to do twitter and other inane info-sharing ... but that's a whole different rant)
Good luck to these guys. I'll check it out.
Posted by TravisV | July 30, 2008 3:25 PM
To respond to Travis, Clarizen is not only about integrating across applications.
Clarizen has been designed around the project team, not the Project Manager. It is role-based so that you can see and do only things that relate to projects and tasks where you are an actual member. This removes a lot of the clutter and distractions from a member (including the external contractor/client/partner)needing to focus on his/her tasks at hand.
With a Web 2.0 interface and a pure SaaS platform, Clarizen more than anything else accelerates team adoption and collaboration and by doing so removes much of the administrative (and chasing) work the project manager typically is burdened with.
Posted by Gil Heiman | July 30, 2008 11:11 PM