888 Adopts Clarizen to Improve Visibility into Resource Management

888 provides quality entertainment worldwide, by giving people the opportunity to do so in a safe, fun, fair, regulated and secure environment. 888casino and 888poker are just two of the 888 brands and since 1997; over 25 million people have experienced gaming action, making it the largest online gaming venue. 

Lior Bronshtein is the IT Project Manager at 888 and has been with the company for over a year. With his team, he manages Infrastructure projects such as ensuring the servers, electricity, storage, networks are always up and running. He is also responsible for the IT support for any new games or services the Products team releases.

888’s biggest challenge was to understand the current state of each resource, which can be divided into 15 projects in parallel.

The impact of this lack of visibility was difficulty in capturing work load capacity.

888 had been using MS Project to manage projects but couldn’t manage their resource issue in an effective or transparent way. Every interaction with MS Project took a significant amount of time, including daily tasks such as starting new projects and creating a new Gantt charts. Both the project managers and management felt they couldn’t make decisions without real-time and relevant resource information.

It was at that point that Lior was asked to investigate a new project management platform. The three companies that made it to the final round of testing were @Task, MSP and Clarizen. Lior talked to all three companies, had demos with all three companies and did an in depth comparison of the solutions.

Lior felt that all three of the solutions were significant improvements over MS Project but they decided to go with Clarizen because of these top 3 reasons:

• Simplicity – Clarizen’s interface and features were simply laid out and usable
• 100% SaaS Platform – 888 was looking for a solution that would match their SaaS implementation strategy
• Customer Service and Flexibility – 888 was impressed by the one on one treatment they received throughout the sales and launch process. They felt that they had someone to speak to who was responsive and receptive to their feedback.

888 was looking for a flexible solution that would suit their specific needs and they felt Clarizen had a readiness to listen and a desire to support their customers. For example, 888 wanted the ability to restrict an employee from being booked to work more than 100% of his time. The platform did not originally offer this functionality but the next Clarizen release included this request, not only for 888 specifically, but for all Clarizen customers.

Getting up and running was simple and now there are 20 full users and another 40 email only users using the platform. The majorities of the 20 full users has Clarizen open on their desktop at all times and use it as a fundamental part of their execution process. Lior noticed that once the team members understood the specific benefit to them in terms of time saved and hassle reduced, using the platform became a no-brainer.

"Using Clarizen has helped us save time when doing all of our project management tasks, from setting up a new project to assigning and juggling the more than 60 people in 5 teams," said Lior Bronshtein, IT project manager at 888. "I have never seen the team so engaged before and management is thrilled that they now have the full picture of where things stand. With the strong foundation we have set up using Clarizen, we can ramp up our project intake with full confidence that our resources can handle it."

Another area that Lior has integrated Clarizen is in his work with external suppliers and resources. When he issues a PO to a relevant supplier, he sends them a task using Clarizen’s ProjectMail functionality. The external resources can then reply via email with the status update, automatically updating the project and notifying Lior of any conflicts or slips.

"Clarizen was easy to implement and is easy even easier to use. Now I always have an up-to-date picture of current state of affairs. I know what each person on my team is doing today, and next week and the week after that," said Lior. "This lets me better reflect to management the actual costs and constrictions going on in my department and allows me, and management, make better decisions about resources, staffing and project load. We are significantly more productive since we started using Clarizen."