Clikthrough Saves $20,000 Annually by Adopting Clarizen to Manage their Development Process

Clikthrough is a 2.5 year old start-up in the Silicon Valley that builds and markets leading interactive video software for major media companies. Clikthrough’s platform enables consumers to interact with video, creating a more compelling user experience that allows their customers to monetize their content more effectively.

When initially launching their product platform, they used MS Project and then Daptiv to simultaneously manage the 5 different products lines, 6 internal employees and about 15 external resources it took to go live. As a small start-up company, cost, efficiency and productivity were of the utmost importance. Efficiency is very big portion of the business and figuring out how to manage margins while delivering on client expectations is critical to their success.

Clikthrough quickly realized that MS Project’s lack of web accessibility did not suit their business structure and although Daptiv is a solid solution, it was too expensive and didn’t give them the collaboration tools they needed to juggle all the internal and external resources.

In a potentially risky move, Clikthrough decided to move to Clarizen even though deadlines and budget were tight and moving to a new platform mid-project could potentially upset the workflow.

"The midstream move to Clarizen was super easy," said Abe McCallum, Founder and CEO of Clikthrough. "We were up and running in no time with no implementation lag at all. The platform is so easy to use and the regularly emailed status updates made it simple to get the entire team committed and loving the platform."

Using Clarizen, Clikthrough is now able to manage their timeline and resources in one application assessing the timelines to implement projects before they start and then measuring the actual performance against the planned timeline. The lead project manager on the project manages the milestones for active development cycle and can then view the overall status and how that relates to other tasks that come up on a daily basis.

"I feel comfortable that I have a bird’s eye view as well as a detailed perspective of everything going on in the project at all times," said Scott Gilbert. "The ability to prioritize ongoing and unexpected tasks allows me to keep up with timelines and properly manage client’s expectations. In our business, happy customers are our bread and butter and Clarizen makes sure we keep them happy."

Recently, Clikthrough launched a new interactive and custom video player solution for Sony that supported the launch of Sony’s new Playstation game, MAG. The original project scope included a customized video player with support of 12 interactive videos. After the project started, they were asked to also support 15 languages and closed-captioning as well. Using Clarizen, Scott Gilbert was able to take these additional tasks and integrate them into the original project plan. Immediately he was able to understand the scope changes and how the new tasks affected the project timeline and resources and also other projects and customers as well.

"Clarizen helps us not only manage client expectation but also our own internal expectations,"said Abe McCallum. "Using Clarizen gives a level of accountability to the performance of development and gives us insight to where we need to make the necessary changes to keep everything running smoothly and according to deadline."

"The bottom line is that we are saving at least $20,000 a year by cutting down on extra communication, efficiently managing our resources and understanding our timeline and pipeline at all times," said Abe. "For a small business like ours looking to save as much as possible, saving time means saving money and creating opportunity elsewhere. Using Clarizen gives us the confidence that we are always running at peak efficiency."