Vet Solutions Prescribes a Dose of Clarizen

Vet Solutions is a leading provider of practice management systems to veterinary clinics in the UK with installations at over 400 clinics across 1,000 sites throughout the country.  Vet Solutions provides end-to-end solutions which includes on-site installation of hardware, networking gear and their practice management software. In addition, they assist clinics with the migration of legacy data to new systems, going-live, training and support.

With over fifteen concurrent active projects at any given time and with each project staffed by 3 to 7 members, it was very important for Vet Solutions to ensure that each project was managed well for on-time and on-budget completion. However, until recently projects were managed using MS Excel spreadsheets and email, making it easy for things to fall between the cracks, especially as the business started to rapidly grow.  As a result, projects were running behind schedule, team communication was breaking down and members did not have clear visibility into their tasks and dependencies.  “We knew this issue needed to be addressed immediately and decided to create a framework for a more disciplined project execution across the company”, said Glen Douglas, Project Manager at Vet Solutions.  There was a lot of commonality across various projects.  As a result, this framework would also allow them to re-use knowledge and best practices across projects, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness.  Vet Solutions knew that they needed to implement a project management and execution system to attain this framework.

Vet Solutions already owned copies of Microsoft Project, but decided not to use it because it would not enable them to keep the project team on the same page and ensure solid execution.  Key reasons for rejecting Microsoft project were:

• MS Project provides a way for a project manager to record the projected timeline, but requires them to chase team members and do a lot of legwork to get the status update for every task in a project and keeping the timeline current – a completely non value-added activity.
• In order to provide each team member with a complete picture of their tasks, schedule and dependencies, project managers would have had to email project files to each team member.  In an environment with multiple projects being run simultaneously and members working on more than one project, it was recipe for disaster.
• Project documents would have ended up being stored in a separate place such as shared drives or personal emails or laptops.  With documents and timelines in different places, risk of things being duplicated and then falling between the cracks would have significantly increased.

As a result, Vet Solutions started evaluating other project management solutions. A Google keyword search brought them to Clarizen.  After a free trial, they decided to use Clarizen for managing and executing their projects.  “We liked the intuitive user interface and its ability to easily get the project teams working together and on the same page in terms of schedule, dependencies, assumptions, requirements and scope”, added Glen. Project status is updated by team members, enabling the project manager to stay on top of their projects, while eliminating the need for 1:1 meetings with their team to get project status. With the project manager now getting alerts from Clarizen any time a task is expected to be late, they can proactively address issues to bring the project back on course.  As a result, Vet Solutions has significantly improved on-time delivery of its projects.  “Despite so many projects being worked on at the same time, thanks to Clarizen nothing falls between the cracks and we avoid unpleasant surprises, as we did before”, said Glen.