Clarizen and Salesforce.com – The Killer App for Professional Services Organizations
Services organizations have unique project management challenges. To be effective, they must be able to provide accurate project scoping, efficiently identify and allocate resources, quickly identify issues and measure success against a number of key performance indicators (KPIs).
Clarizen’s online project management software is an ideal solution to help services organizations improve service delivery in a number of key ways:
- Improve Project Control: Clarizen makes it easy for teams to structure projects, complete with milestones, tasks, dependencies and timelines. Team members can directly access their own dashboards to view deliverables, deadlines and update their status, giving project managers a real time view of the project’s progress.
- Better Visibility: Clarizen offers many different ‘views’ for project and portfolio status. A unique Roadmap view highlights milestones, along with their relative completion, and gives teams an interactive snapshot of whether a project is on target, at risk or off track. The Roadmap can be shared with anyone via email or a website with a few mouseclicks.
Resource Management: Identify the resources with the skillset and availability to deliver a project is a snap with Clarizen’s custom calendars and load simulation features. - Time and Expense Tracking: Keep an eye on budget status as employees or contractors submit their time and expenses. If that’s all a resource needs to do, Clarizen offers a special discounted license, making Clarizen even more cost-effective.
- Issue Management: As projects are deployed, issues inevitably arise. With Clarizen, they can be submitted, tracked and resolved within the context of a given project, ensuring these details are never lost, and precluding the need for other issue tracking software.
- Dashboards and Reporting: Clarizen tracks numerous KPIs, feeding easily customizable reports, or synchronizing with Salesforce.com dashboards to give management the feedback on performance.
Salesforce.com Integration
Clarizen has worked extensively with Salesforce.com to create an integrated package that is optimal for services organizations. The process of selling services – whether these services are consulting or software that requires implementation – has many moving parts. Sales, support, service delivery, finance and billing are all key components of a successful project. However, in most organizations, these departments leverage unconnected tools that result in a communications gap at each hand-off, creating significant overhead and inefficiency.
With Clarizen and Salesforce, this gap can be tightened by providing tight integration between sales and service delivery. Key benefits include:
- Benefits for Sales Teams: Account teams can easily initiate new projects from templates and track the progress of their delivery directly from within Salesforce, improving their ability to update their customers and reducing communication gaps between sales and service teams.
- Benefits for Service Delivery Teams: Service teams enjoy increased visibility into upcoming project pipeline, so they can better predict revenue – as well as required resources.
Benefits for Customer Helpdesks: Clarizen can also link Account teams with their support organization, allowing them to submit issues and track their resolution more efficiently. - Benefits for Financial Operations: Clarizen’s Budget Management module collects and calculates financial indicators from each task, milestone or project as a whole, and aggregates approved Time and Expense reports from the resources (employees, contractors, etc.) to generate essential KPI’s like Cost Performance Index, Actual Cost and Profitability, as well as show whether the project is on budget. Automatic synchronization of this data in Salesforce reduces manual work and enables integration with Salesforce-based finance and accounting solutions for billing by milestone.
- Benefits for Executive Management Clarizen’s Salesforce Integration includes 3 Best Practice Dashboards which display key performance indicators for Executive Management, Financial Management and Project Management teams to monitor the health of the projects being delivered and the delivery organization as a whole.