The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents spend between one to four hours per week just preparing for status meetings, and 59 percent said that preparing for status meetings often takes longer than the meeting itself. In addition, 57 percent of those surveyed indicated that they multitask during status meetings — so maybe there’s more work getting done than one might think!

The survey was conducted online within the United States from June 6–8, among 2,373 information workers. It was undertaken by Harris Interactive on behalf of Clarizen, the project management system that Thursday covered a few months ago. The survey defined a status meeting as one in which team members are updated on progress and completion of tasks. Brainstorming, strategy and planning meetings were not included.

If you’re finding your meetings unproductive, there are a number of tools available to help, including meetin.gs and yaM. Many of the project management apps that we cover are intended, among other things, to help keep team members updated on project status and what their colleagues are doing and so reduce the time spent in meetings. And there are some techniques, like the Google system that Imran reported on last year, for making meetings more productive.

How much time do you spend in meetings? Are they productive?

Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66

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The Roadmap Widget offers a clear benefit: you can communicate your progress easily with anyone interested in the project, not just people directly involved with the project team.

Clarizen is Using Clarizen

Clarizen isn’t just encouraging other organizations to use the Roadmap Widget to show their progress, the company is using eating its own dogfood and using the widget, too. If you want to see the progress Clarizen is making on its next release, you can see for yourself. So can Clarizen’s users, competitors and anyone else who has an interest, for that matter.

“Clarizen has realized the power of transparency throughout a company’s operations”, says Avinoam Nowogrodski, Clarizen’s Founder and CEO, “We found that by having our operations fully transparent both internally to our team and externally to our customers, partners and prospects we gain a huge competitive advantage of getting everyone’s trust and participation in what’s going on in our company. We feel that by having this transparency we increase our productivity, accountability and overall success in the market by putting out the message that we want everyone to know what we are up to in real time and have no inhibitions about communicating this to the world.”

The Value of Transparency

The fact that even Clarizen’s competitors can see what the company is up to creates questions about the value of transparency. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a competitor could find a way to use information about a project’s progress against you. Is that balanced by the fact that such transparency can also help you engage with users or clients, giving them an added reason to keep coming back to your website? Given the growing emphasis on transparency in marketing, it may not be out of the question that this level of sharing information about your organization could become the norm. At the very least, Clarizen does make it easy to show your project’s progress, which can make the overall process of encouraging transparency in your organization that much easier.

What do you think: would you be comfortable publishing live project status updates on your websites?

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Another SaaS project management system is Clarizen, and their raison d’etre is to “embrace the team” in the virtual work process. Clarizen seems to be the direct answer to the problem of a mid-level project manager hoarding control over the Microsoft Project files and not involving team members directly in more aspects of project management. Clarizen allows different levels of engagement – from the novice who only feels comfortable participating via email to the advanced users who log into the system and interact with all of the system’s tools.

Each person on a team gets their own personalized dashboard when they enter the system based on their particular role. So a project view shows only the aspects where you have a direct role. Clarizen has a robust engine for sorting content. You can drill down to view by project type and by your specific role such as just the projects for a particular client where you are the project manager.

You can drill down on tasks as well such as just the current tasks where you are responsible. The dashboard also let’s you see a progress report on each task. Color coded icons can tell you at a glance if a project is on track (green), running the risk of derailing (orance) or off track (red). Knowing the status of a project at a glance can help you prioritize your work day.

Basically, Clarizen offers centralized view of everything you need to know in any given project and allows you to break down content using powerful filtering. Your dashboard also features a What’s New section so you have an at-a-glance view of new projects, tasks, milestones, documents, notes and posts. You also get a visual timeline or “Road Map” of each project.

Email integration let’s anyone on the team report their progress without having to log into the system. Or they can log in to see how their work ties into the project timeline but they aren’t burdened with the clutter of information on tasks that don’t pertain to them directly. This is a useful feature when some of the parts of a project are outsourced to people outside the core team – they are only exposed to the areas that pertain to their work.

While Clarizen came out last October, their 2.1 version was released about two months ago. The turbo-filtering system at the dashboard level was part of the new features as was better support for Firefox, and budget calculations integrating each team member’s hourly rate. Clarizen also opened their API to developers. The company says they will roll out even more features at the end of September, alluding to a timetracking feature that will be “unique.”

Back to Reality

Despite all of these robust features, my impression overall is that Clarizen is meant for the enterprise. Priced at $24.95 per user per month, it isn’t as pricey as GroupSwim ($150 per month for 4-15 users) but isn’t as affordable as Basecamp ($24/month for 15 projects and unlimited users). Even though Web workers have multiple clients, projects and teams – and often different people on each team – an enterprise-level solution at enterprise-level prices just doesn’t cut it.

Still, for the Web worker who is part of really large projects that can support a higher-priced project management solution, Clarizen just might be a better tool than Basecamp.

How many clients/projects and team members are you managing at any given time? What are you willing to spend on your project management solution?

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