Clarizen Helps Digitalcore Improve Productivity and Manage Interdependencies among Team-Members

Founded in 2009 in Australia, Digitalcore provides core analysis services to the oil and gas industry. With fifteen employees, the company serves a niche market providing digital core testing and analysis on geological samples. Digitalcore is an international company serving clients located across the globe, including the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas. Using advanced x-ray technology, Digitalcore constructs 3-dimensional images of samples and works on predicting physical parameters that are of interest to its clients. Clients make decisions of whether to invest millions of dollars on a project or not based on analysis provided by Digitalcore.

Robert Sok is a Program Manager at Digitalcore. Robert explains that the typical Digitalcore projects involve receiving a collection of samples anywhere between 2-40 millimeters in diameter each, and then conducting tests on the sample. Every project is primarily composed of two components: a technical component for creating the 3D imaging; and a software component for analyzing the 3D data. The company’s analysts work in-house on the software component while the company’s technical staff work off-site in laboratories, running the physical experiments.

Before Clarizen, Robert and his team members weren’t using a professional project management solution. They relied mostly on excel spreadsheets, frequent meetings, and ongoing emails to handle the project workload. As the company continued to grow and the projects became more complex, Robert and a fellow Digitalcore colleague were assigned with the task of finding a professional project management solution that would serve Digitalcore’s needs, while staying within reasonable budget constraints. Initially, when Robert began the search, he discovered a considerable amount of options.

"There were quite a few solutions out there and many different options, but when we conducted some trials and compared the outcomes we saw that many of the solutions out there just didn’t really deliver”, says Robert.

Robert was looking for a robust solution that could handle multiple projects and cross-resource dependencies. After closer inspection of the solutions available, Robert narrowed down the search to two possibilities: Project Insight and Clarizen.

"We considered both very seriously, and found that Clarizen was just more intuitive. Now after using Clarizen, I still believe it was the right choice for us” says Robert.

After presenting the solution to the company’s COO and receiving approval, Digitalcore acquired ten licenses. Adoption of Clarizen among the team members was mixed: project transparency and resource allocation usage were naturally absorbed by the team; however, Digitalcore required some customization features to optimally work with Clarizen. Robert explains:

"Because most of our computational efforts are run on a super computer we needed to log CPU hours and next to that we needed to schedule and report on x-ray imaging time and so on. We requested assistance from Clarizen to provide us with the customization abilities to include this data in our projects. Clarizen was sincere and listened to our needs, responding positively by scheduling our request for development,” says Robert.

Digitalcore projects run between six weeks to a few months and at any given time at least five projects are running in parallel. Projects involve many different steps which are interdependent on other tasks occurring simultaneously. Also, in some cases a project lies dormant for a while because it is waiting for results from an experiment to come in. Because of the interdependencies between teams, and especially since not all team members sit in the same office, it is very important for Digitalcore team members to keep track of what is going on.

"We use Clarizen to help us figure out what one group has done so that the other group is completely informed and can continue the work process. Clarizen builds a formal structure for all the components and as a result, everybody gets a clear understanding of the project’s progress.”

Robert also expresses Digitalcore’s satisfaction with Clarizen’s positive impact on the company’s productivity.

"Before using Clarizen, when we reached a project’s deadline we would usually look back and realize that certain tasks were overlooked or incomplete. Now that doesn’t happen: the amount of errors, double-work, the amount of things that haven’t been done, has been drastically reduced”says Robert.

In the future, Robert hopes that the teams will integrate more Clarizen features including cost tracking and more detailed project scheduling. That, along with the anticipated customization features will help Digitalcore improve project efficiency and reap the full benefits offered by Clarizen.