Smartsalary Manages its Resources Better with Clarizen; Appreciates Clarizen’s Support and “Being Heard”

Smartsalary is an outsource salary provider based out of Australia. The company operates primarily in beneficiary institutions including benevolent societies, hospitals, and government organizations. Smartsalary employs over 200 employees and was ranked by Business Review Weekly Fast 100 as one of the fastest growing small-to-medium sized firms in Australia from 2004 to 2006. Smartsalary handles the salary packages for over 80,000 customers.

Andrew Ross, a certified project manager, is a member of Smartsalary’s Business Improvement team. He describes projects handled by his unit as relatively small with modest implementation activities, but diverse in range and scope. Examples of project scope include risk management, IT development and website/user interface development.

Previously, Andrew worked at a number of large organizations such as Sun Microsystems and has experience working with a variety of project management solutions including MS Project, Primavera, and a few internally developed applications. When Andrew first joined Smartsalary just a few months ago, the company was already using Clarizen.

"It was very easy for me to jump right in and start using the platform, even though I wasn’t familiar with it previously. I found Clarizen to be not only user-friendl,y but also a robust solution that gives me the depth of functionality required when managing my products." says Andrew.

Smartsalary’s key Clarizen users are the members of the Business Improvement team and the IT Development team who drive all the projects on a day-to-day basis. Having years of project management experience, Andrew has worked with a number of project management solutions. However, when comparing Clarizen’s reporting capabilities to the other solutions such as MS Project, he feels that Clarizen does a much better job:

"MS Project’s reporting features are very limited. With Project, we would always end up exporting data into spreadsheets and then importing the spreadsheets into a reporting tool. With Clarizen, viewing all the data in a simple report is much easier." says Andrew.

Andrew also found Clarizen to be especially helpful as a resource management tool. He uses Clarizen to manage teams of people involved in various projects across the business units. The ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and notify team members of their tasks is another added value that Andrew finds useful in his work:

"With automated alerts and notifications, Clarizen lessens the burden of micromanaging people involved with the project. As the project lead to a number of projects at any given time, I find Clarizen especially invaluable in notifying, following up, and touching base with project team members, in relation to their individual tasks and deadlines." explains Andrew.

Andrew has also been very satisfied with the support he has received from the webinars, Clarizen’s community and Clarizen’s support team.

"A great thing about Clarizen is the fact that Smartsalary is able to give direct feedback and actually be heard – it’s not like you can call up Microsoft and ask about a requested feature. Clarizen’s support has been superb, they have always been there for us and that is really fantastic." says Andrew.

Currently, Smartsalary is handling all of its projects through Clarizen. In the future the company hopes to expand its feature usage to include overseeing resource costs within each project.

"Clarizen fits quite well into what we want to do as a company and we’re working towards the ability to dashboard all our projects managed with Clarizen."