Clarizen is a project execution software start up that deploys its software in a SaaS model. The company is based in Silicon Valley and has operations (including product R&D) in Israel as well. Founded by Avinoam Nowogrodski (the founder of SmartTeam, a PLM company that was acquired by Dassault), it is on release 2.1 of its product. The company has several key differentiators including:
- Task execution focus
- Easy update through either the Web interface or Outlook
- Open API integration
- Simplified UI
- Personalized dashboards presenting data across single project & aggregated project portfolio
- Integration to MCAD software (currently supports Solidworks)
- Built in collaboration tools
So what makes it interesting? Historically project management software has focused on the management aspect of projects, often with limited benefit to the individual project team members. This phenomenon often has manifest itself in "management" oriented software packages that take a top down approach to controlling activities of individuals while providing management with critical project metrics. The same parallel could be drawn with sales force automation tools which require large amounts of data captured from field sales personnel to produce forecasts and other management reports but in the past have served little benefit to the end user. Project management software requires project managers to build extensive work breakdown structures to assign individual tasks. Team members must then routinely update the project tasks with time, expenses, task status, schedule changes, etc. All these activities, while very important from a management perspective, offer little value to the team member in planning and executing their daily activities. It is often difficult, for instance, to determine task interdependencies and plan for critical path changes that impact your personal schedule of work. Clarizen, with its Web 2.0 approach to projects, answers many of these complaints. Clarizen was built from the user up instead of the manager down and puts tools in the hands of those who need them to do their jobs. Tracking tasks interdependencies and status is simple and the users can update status with related notes and comments through the MS Outlook integration or directly through the Clarizen software.
