Clarizen Helps Bezeq International Engineers Manage & Deliver Projects, Freeing Up Time for Innovation

Bezeq International (Bezeqint) is Israel’s largest Internet Service Provider. The company offers communications solutions including Internet, international telephony, Organizational Inland, IT, hosting, data communications and information security.

Amir Addad is the Director of Engineering Technologies at Bezeq International and has been with the company for ten years. He is in charge of leading the technology unit which consists of five departments. The Engineering Technologies department at Bezeqint handles projects such as upgrading the network and developing new services to sell to business or residential subscribers.

About six months ago the Engineering Technologies unit experienced a technical setback that was only resolved when the team rolled-back to a previous version of the service. This incident led Amir to rethink the way the unit was handling its projects and delivering them to their clients. Amir decided that the unit needed to create a project management methodology and find the right project management solution to help avoid future technical mistakes.

At first, Amir decided to formulate his own work methodology for the team. He also tried working with solutions such as Excel or MS Project, but realized that both fell short of his requirements. Amir explains,

"Our projects had three different time sets: organization, engineering and IT. Because everything we do is interconnected across departments I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do this on an Excel sheet. Also, with MS Project the main difficulty was the gantt view; once it was set up, there just wasn’t much else we could actually do with it. We needed something more."

When looking for a project management solution, Amir had the following criteria: a web-based solution (no client installation); and something that would support the resources’ existing work methods (no additional overhead). After a brief online search, Amir found Clarizen and started to explore the free demo.

"I quickly realized that Clarizen matched our requirements perfectly: it allows resources to interact via email only and it also enables project transparency for project stakeholders without the need for licenses. Those two things caught my attention, and I thought: this is exactly what we’re looking for."

Amir had his team check Clarizen’s company standing as well as do an in depth review of the product. A lot was at stake and Amir needed to hit the ground running with a dependable and robust solution. The team members checked and came back with their recommendations saying that Clarizen is considered one of the market leaders in project management. That confirmed his initial impression of Clarizen and Amir easily convinced the management team to purchase licenses for all the project managers and Senior VPs. In addition to those who have a full license, twice as many resources are also working with the system via email-only licenses.

In many cases when people implement Clarizen within their organization, they are often replacing a failed project management system already in place. In Amir’s case, he needed to integrate not only a new project management system, but also a new project management work process; a process new for both team members and leaders alike.

"We had the challenge of rethinking our work methodology and transforming our engineers into project managers. This meant taking something that wasn’t run as a project and turning it into something that would be much more systematic."

The new project management solution was well-received and in a very short period of time. Part of the implementation process included training meetings and sessions with departments that were involved with the projects. Also, a lot of work was conducted with the engineers-turned project managers who were not used to managing a project and managing people outside of their department.

The system is still new and the managers and resources are still learning how to use all the features and tools, but with Clarizen in place Amir has committed his team to the following goals for 2011:

• Delivering projects bug-free and with zero problems.
• Cutting project time and delivery.
• Increasing capacity per project manager from 1-2 simultaneous projects to 4-5 simultaneous projects.
• Freeing up time for engineers to focus on their engineering work.

With Clarizen, Amir hopes that an optimized project management schedule will open up more time for his engineers to continue to develop.

"With Clarizen we want to get back to where we were before people began to manage their projects: we want to have it so that the project management itself is automatic and doesn’t take much overhead; so that our engineers can continue to innovate. Clarizen is the tool to help us get there."