With Help from Clarizen, iFNC Pty Ltd. Expands Offering to Some of Australia's Leading Telecom Companies 

Founded in 2005, iFNC Pty Ltd. is based in Perth Australia and provides the Telecommunications industry with consultancy, design, support and project management services. With a small but dedicated team of in-house employees and   external subcontractors, iFNC supports a range of telecommunication companies in Australia.

Sam Dawe is the operations manager for iFNC. His role is versatile, given the size of the company and the scope of projects which it handles. iFNC’s projects are mostly divided into two main categories: designs for network extensions and augmentation of fiber networks

Initially, iFNC was offering design services and using Access databases to help team members create tasks, report on their status and monitor the overall work flow. This solution met the company’s needs until iFNC decided to expand its offering to also include project management services which involved the management and construction of iFNC’s designs.

"We diversified our offering to also take on the responsibility of managing our projects in the field. This meant that we needed a project management solution that was robust, something that would be more inclusive of all the activities we were involved in”, explains Sam.

The decision for finding a new project management solution came from Sam and iFNC’s Director Chris Gibbons. The two decided that the company’s growth needed to be supported by the right project management solution. With iFNC’s change in offering, they also changed their compensation model to include not only fixed rates for design, but also hourly rates for managing projects. So in addition to finding a suitable project management solution to support growing activities, Sam needed to find the right solution with effective time-tracking capabilities.

Sam began to explore his options, but discovered early on that besides Clarizen, many of the software solutions were managed and sold through resellers who charged around $20,000 to set up the solution. Such restrictions raised a red flag for Sam and his team:

"I thought to myself, if I can’t set up the solution on my own then what happens in the future if my requirement needs change? I felt that if these solutions don’t offer a user-friendly method for independent set up, then they probably won’t allow me the independence to make future changes on my own. One thing that we really liked with Clarizen is that we could start using it straight away”, says Sam.

Finally, Sam narrowed down the options to Clarizen and Tenrox. Sam went with Clarizen not for one specific reason, but for the overall Clarizen offering, including its user experience:

"Sometimes things can come down to how a program feels. We liked Clarizen because it just feels easy to use, which means that it’s not intimidating and people are more inclined to use it”,explains Sam.

Although it’s still early to quantify the benefits, by providing support in scheduling tasks and linking interdependencies Clarizen has already significantly freed up a lot of Sam’s time to focus more on productivity.

"Clarizen has really freed me up to just get on with the job rather than trying to gain a grasp of the progress all the time”, says Sam.

With Clarizen’s recent release of its iPhone application, iFNC’s employees have also adopted usage of Clarizen from their mobile phones.

"We absolutely love the Clarizen iPhone application, especially the time-tracking feature. Most of our employees have iPhones and they easily log in their hours through their phones” says Sam.

Today, iFNC’s in-house team uses Clarizen, and in the future Sam hopes to also expand usage to the external subcontractors. In terms of usage, Sam also intends to incorporate more Clarizen components in iFNC’s work flow including adding financial aspects to better quantify the level of productivity.