Endpoint Uses Clarizen to Overcome an Unpredictable Workload And Enjoy Resource Transparency and Increased Productivity

Located in San Francisco, Endpoint is an innovative company dedicated to the development of the leading technology platform to support the life sciences industry by developing custom software solutions for companies that conduct clinical trials. Endpoint’s development efforts are divided into two main areas: Client systems which are project-based, and ongoing R&D efforts which serve the company’s continued growth. At any given time, the company runs between three to six projects in parallel. There are a few developers solely dedicated to R&D efforts, however because the company is relatively small, development efforts are mostly shared among a pool of resources.

Julie Finkelstein is the Product and Resource Manager at Endpoint. Her scope of responsibilities includes managing all the R&D projects. She describes the Client system projects as initially spanning 4-6 weeks and then a long tail of technical support that can span anywhere from a few months to a few years. The reason for the fluctuating time schedule is explained by the characteristics of the clinical trials industry: there are a lot of protocol requirements and policies that must be in place. 

"With clinical trials there can be a lot of unanticipated delays, for example if a client’s product doesn’t get FDA approval then its system won’t be built or may be put on hold”, says Julie. “We want to have our people always busy and always ready to handle an unpredictable workload. This means planning and monitoring are crucial for our success.”

Before Clarizen, Julie worked with Excel spreadsheets and a calendar. When scheduling a project she would have to check first work availability in one document, vacations and other constraints in a different document, and finally scheduling parameters with a calendar. Coordinating projects in the early stages of the company was possible; however the addition of new projects compounded the difficulty of creating functional work plans.  

"Team members would ask me to check the feasibility of scheduling a task and I would have to hold them off until I could get the work schedules in order. Just getting a high-level view was really difficult”, says Julie.

Another issue that Julie had to cope with was estimating how long a project would take in order to determine the resources needed and the appropriate price points to offer clients. Although Endpoint’s projects have a number of similarities between them, there are a number of way systems do vary. For example, inventory management for each project is very different and sometimes even the client doesn’t know exactly how long a project will take.

"We had a timesheet system but it was really only recording broad strokes and it was totally disconnected from the project itself. So what we would get is a final sum of how much time we spent on the entire project, without a breakdown per task,” says Julie.

The company was growing quickly and Julie felt that it was time to search for a project management solution that would address her specific needs. In addition to the features she was looking for, she also had a limited budget.

"A big factor for us was price. We’re a small company and devoting as much money as we do to resourcing is unusual, but we do this because we are concerned with delivering on time while making sure that our people aren’t here until midnight every night.”

With the decision made to find a better solution for managing her projects, Julie started searching online, reading reviews and trying out free trials. She considered AtTask as a viable solution, but it was too expensive. Julie also looked into Easy Projects .net but felt that it was just too complicated to get started easily.

"Easy Projects seemed more work than  I could handle. I couldn’t start using it with ease and I just didn’t have the time to sit down and try to learn how to use the tool.”

Julie also looked into Clarizen and felt that it was easy to understand and easy to use.

"Trying out Clarizen, my first impression was that it was just really easy to set up; I had a project up and running without too much work involved”, says Julie.     

Julie also found that the flexible pricing model would offered by Clarizen would make it affordable and within budget. She presented Clarizen to management and received the approval to integrate the solution within her team. Adoption of Clarizen in the organization was smooth. Julie spent approximately three days transferring projects into Clarizen and then met with the teams to show them how to work with the solution. Currently, teams are working with the time tracking module, resource management, and task management.

"With Clarizen I’ve been able to delineate tasks a bit more and monitor all the different elements that go into each project. That way, when a project is completed I can look back now and see how time was distributed and where things can be improved upon in the future”, says Julie.

Although Julie has worked with Clarizen for a short period of time, her tasks have become easier to manage; she is having a much easier time building out projects and providing ballpark figures reflecting prices points and resource dependencies. Also, with Clarizen it takes Julie considerably less time to see peoples’ status, understand their availability and gauge whether a new potential project is realistic or not.

"Now it’s just so much easier to see exactly what every single person is doing and how busy they are. If we see someone who is 60% resourced, that gives us the green light to assign more work, since there is always more work that needs to be done. Also, it helps us to see our time allocation between revenue-generating work and work that is not generating revenue like meetings or R&D”, says Julie.

In the next few days Endpoint will complete its first project entirely managed with Clarizen.  Julie and the management team are looking forward to pulling all the data and analyzing the results to be able to quantify the savings and improvements they have seen using Clarizen. Senior management is also satisfied with Clarizen and is using the project management solution to provide an accurate perspective of what’s going on with the projects and the company’s overall productivity.

"Because we can pay more attention, we are paying more attention, this translates directly into our productivity”, says Julie.