Clarizen 101
From Clarizen
Clarizen was created with the clear vision of bringing the power of collaborative work management to every business. It empowers businesses to align efforts across the entire value chain and manage projects to success.
Clarizen is a dynamic collaboration environment that incorporates enterprise grade project management tools and unique knowledge preservation capabilities.
The solution addresses the complete project lifecycle from project inception through completion, captures best templates and best practices for future replication, and connects team members across departments, functions, geographies and organizations.
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The Basics of Clarizen
Before any user can start to draft a project plan, you need to understand the basics terms and conventions of project management.
This section covers all the terms and conventions used in the system. In addition, workflows and processes of how Clarizen enables you to plan your projects and acquire a clear understanding of what is needed and required in order to fulfill your project objectives.
Project Building Blocks
To start a project, you need to implement work items such as projects, milestones and tasks. The work items are structured in a hierarchical order.
- Project
- Milestone
- Task
- Sub Task
- Task
- Milestone
What is a Project?
According to standard terminology "A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result". Wikipedia
In Clarizen a project is symbolized by the 
icon.
A project is assigned to a project manager and can also be assigned to other team members, such as managers, resources, reviewers, etc.
A project may consist of milestones, tasks, or other sub-projects. Although sub-projects are created as part of a parent project, they are considered independent projects that include an independent team and represent a separate deliverable of the project.
Clarizen enables you to setup your projects to meet your needs and collaborate with other team members on initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and finalizing your project.
What is a Milestone?
According to standard terminology "A milestone is a significant event in the project, such as an event restraining future work or marking the completion of a major deliverable or phase". Wikipedia
In Clarizen, a milestone 
can consist of tasks that should be executed in order to achieve the milestone’s goals (in terms of content and dates).
This methodology enables you to acquire an immediate understanding of the status of every milestone, especially since it is reflected from the project's work items.
You can refer to a milestone as a significant hammock in your project plan, as this needs to be highlighted in your high level overview of your project.
What is a Task?
According to standard terminology "A task is a discrete scheduled component of work performed during the course of a project. A task normally has an estimated duration,start & due date as well as resources. A task can be dependent on other tasks." [Wikipedia
A project manager or other managers may create tasks 
under any work item of a project.
A task can be further detailed into other sub-tasks. At this moment, such a task becomes a container, a.k.a hammock.
What is a Hammock?
A hammock is a group of related tasks aggregated at some summary level, and displayed/reported as a single activity at that summary level.
Once creating sub-tasks under an existing task, it is treated by the system as a hammock.
In Clarizen, Milestones can be used as hammocks as well, where the milestone itself is a summary of a group of tasks that need to be completed in order to fulfill or reach a "milestone" point within a project.
To create a hammock, simply add a task into an existing milestone or task.
Your Role in Clarizen
At your organization, you might be doing different types of work in different projects. You may lead a certain project, while be assigned as a resource on a different one.
A Role in Clarizen defines your permissions or, in the other words, defines what you can view and edit during your daily activities.
You can occupy several roles. In this case a set of your permissions is a sum up from all your roles.
Project-specific Roles
Specific project related roles in Clarizen are determined dynamically on run time and depend on a user’s assignments in the project. These roles are:
System-wide Roles
Additionally, there is a set of predefined roles that are assigned to the user directly in their user properties.
Usually such roles have system-wide activities.
These roles are assigned to the user directly in the User Profile Card by the administrator of the system. These roles are:
How to Set Roles in the User Profile
Administrators can modify these roles by opening the user Profile card from the Settings User Maintenance page and checking the corresponding check boxes.
Maximizing the Benefits of Clarizen
Working in today’s ever-changing collaborative project management environment triggers several challenges that project managers did not face in the past. Just to name a few, some of the key challenges are listed as follows:
- Projects need to adapt and reflect immediate occurring changes
- Todays projects involve many participants from all over, where as once participants resided in the same building
- The need to understand that updating the status of projects on time is crucial to the success of projects
Clarizen excels the challenges that project managers face in the project management environment. The system enables you to:
- Concurrently plan and execute – enables you to plan and execute at the same time by enabling you to keep portions of your project plan in Draft state while others are already in Active state
- Working concurrently with other team members – the automatic synchronous save enables you and other team members to immediately assess each others planned updates
- Plan and execute both top-down and bottom-up – Clarizen’s Roadmap and work plan panel enables you to observe and understand the big picture of the project as your project continues to be updated
Concurrent Work and Project Lifecycle
AutoSave
In order to maximize collaboration, Clarizen enables team members to work simultaneously while data is being updated in real-time. When updates or changes are made within a project, team members are able to immediately view the effects.
"Draft" and "Active" are part of the Project Lifecycle
There could still be a case where a project manager or any other manager would like to work on the project while not alerting the team, e.g.: initial stages of project planning, what-if simulation for massive project changes. See Auto Saving for more details on notifications.
Any change(s) to a project or project element that is in draft mode is not alerted to any team members, except project manager and managers of the project. This allows all managers to conduct their changes privately and assess them well before publishing it to the rest of the team.
When creating the project, you can select the life cycle state option of draft or activate for the project:
When ready to publish the project to all team members, particularly the resources, Activate the project. All team members will receive notification on the project and will be able to drill down and perform their tasks.
