Clarizen 3.0 adds a variety of new features, including the option to manage business issues, track expenses, and view Gantt charts. The company also tweaked Clarizen's design and added more tutorials to its site to make it easier for users to learn how to use Clarizen. The two major updates in this version - Issue management and Expense management. Clarizen's Issue management pane allows project managers to highlight problems with the project, assign someone to solve the problem, and describe exactly what needs to be fixed. In the Expenses pane, you can create an expense report. You can input your own expense description or pick those created by the project manager. If the project manager created expense categories, you can choose the appropriate item from a drop-down list. If not, you can add your own.
Israeli startup Clarizen positions itself as a project management and collaboration tool specifically aimed at non-project managers. Of course, Clarizen is a latecomer to the space, but they seem to have the right ingredients: A fairly convenient interface, a smidgen of unique differentiation. Clarizen was designed as a PM tool for operational/functional managers. This is a good move because the biggest failing point in project management is probably during the set-up stage which requires the project be planned out to the “T” before it can be rolled out. This is a process that requires a high level of familiarity with such methodologies, so it’s no surprise why non-professional project managers bail on it so often.
I’ve been struggling with the learning curves inherent in adapting new project management and collaboration tools for my own company and have previously blogged about the way my own brain processes information - and a GUI - quite differently from that of my company’s project manager. The more I explore project management and collaboration options, the more clearly I see that I gravitate toward either the simpler (Basecamp) or the more visual (5pm). I have a very hard time with linear (Wrike) although I do like Wrike’s reminder lists a lot. And despite loving graphics, for some reason the visual of a Gantt Chart view just doesn’t compute with me.
When most people think online project management and collaboration tools, they automatically think of Basecamp from 37signals. As a company they have helped define online project management as a serious contender in what has traditionally been an offline, software driven enterprise utility. But markets are always richer with choice, and the Copper Project from Melbourne based Element Software, offers worthy competition.
