Web Development Firm The Atom Group Chooses Clarizen for its Usability, “Cutting-Edge Development”

The Atom Group is a web development firm that specializes in web and mobile applications. The company serves a wide range of clients including creative service firms that hire The Atom Group as subcontractors for specific projects. Founded in 2007 in Portsmouth New Hampshire, The Atom Group recently opened a second new office in Chicago Illinois. The Atom Group employs twenty five people with nearly 80% of them working in development and the rest in Sales & Marketing.

Tom Herer is Co-Founder of The Atom Group and manages the development side of the business. Within the scope of his responsibilities, Tom oversees the development team’s management of projects. Before The Atom Group began working with Clarizen, it was using a simple online Project Management, Task and Time Tracking software solution. The Atom Group quickly grew from a small niche agency into a full service development firm and the fast-paced growth brought with it a need for a more robust project management solution. Tom explains,

"The firm needed to look for a new solution mostly because of performance needs. The solution we were using was built in such a way that it would take a lot of time to complete pretty basic tasks, so that just killed our adoption of it. We wanted to find something that was more responsive, offered more features and was easier to use."

Tom briefly looked into “AtTask” and “Project Insight”, but felt that in both solutions the look and feel seemed old and outdated. As developers, The Atom Group was especially sensitive to the user-interface design, technological innovation and information flow.

"Both AtTask and Project Insight have the feel of a bygone era. As developers we could look at Clarizen and appreciate that the technology was modern and the development behind it was really solid; Clarizen got our respect and won us over." says Tom

Adoption of Clarizen’s core project management tools was fast. With Clarizen, once the sales and marketing teams have closed a project, they brief the development team on the project’s needs, timeline expectations and budget. Then the development team sets up the project within Clarizen and the project is launched. To some extent everyone in the organization is using Clarizen, however adoption of the Clarizen full feature set is a gradual process.

In the future, Tom intends for The Atom Group employees to broaden their Clarizen usage into budget management, resource management and roadmap usage. From a managerial perspective, Tom also plans on using Clarizen for gaining a comprehensive view of the entire organization and capacity planning. A year after choosing to work with Clarizen, Tom voices his satisfaction:

"We chose to work with Clarizen because we think it’s the most cutting- edge solution out there. I think a lot of the web 2.0 solutions that came out in the past few years have pretty and rounded edges but the features just aren’t there. Clarizen is the only project management solution that has successfully married web 2.0 usability and an enterprise feature set, and that’s why we’re with Clarizen."