Human Factors International Drives Marketing with Clarizen

Human Factors International (HFI) is the world's largest company specializing in “User Centered Design” – helping clients design websites, software and products that are engaging and easy to use. Based in Fairfield, Iowa, HFI has 13 offices across the globe and continues to out-distance its competition. Today, HFI is the largest company in the field by a factor of more than five. In order to sustain this competitive lead, HFI continues to invest in their marketing organization and programs.

As a result, HFI’s marketing organization needed to make certain that various programs such as tradeshows, website updates, collateral, sales tools, webcasts and PR activities were executed in a way that was consistent with their brand image, while meeting aggressive time lines and staying within budgets and headcount. “I needed a project management system to ensure nothing was slipping through the cracks and our programs were meeting the schedule and the quality that we had committed to the management”, said Cindee Van Dijk, Marketing Specialist at HFI.

HFI tried Basecamp for a month, but decided to stop using it. “It was too simplistic for what we needed and did not have basic project management capabilities such as the ability to schedule tasks based on start and end dates, or to define and view milestones or status of multiple marketing programs. We also decided against Microsoft Project because it did not have team collaboration capability and its complexity would have required the marketing team to go through extensive training”, added Cindee Van Dijk. After evaluating multiple products, HFI selected Clarizen.

All marketing projects at HFI are now planned and tracked via Clarizen. Key benefits seen after deploying the system include:

• The system automatically identifies tasks that will be late and sends emails to project managers to allow them to proactively address issues and try to bring the project back on schedule.
• Using the team collaboration capabilities of the system, key marketing documents, deliverables and messages are attached to the project tasks, allowing HFI to maintain relevant context along with a project task. This is very significant for HFI, since team members work on multiple projects simultaneously and switch context multiple times in a day. This capability ensures all project team members are on the same page with any project and nothing falls through the cracks. As a result, the risk of delay or quality issues in executing the HFI marketing programs portfolio has reduced significantly.
• Using its unique project-mail capabilities, team members can update the status of their tasks via email, so the project plan is always current. Hence, project status meetings are now shorter, making the team more productive. Previously all projects were managed via Microsoft Excel, making the process of tracking project status extremely manual and subject to errors.
• The current system provides management a clear visibility into what everyone is working on in marketing, a better appreciation of the effort required to drive certain programs and introduces a system of accountability within the marketing group.

“Thanks to Clarizen, marketing programs are delivered on time with the right quality. We are better organized and don’t go through fire drills like before”, added Cindee Van Dijk.