SaaS sneaks by project management's big barrier

Gil Heiman says, while he's impressed with the SaaS-based LiquidPlanner's advanced scheduling technology, "It's the wrong medication for the wrong problem." Heiman, who is the director of communities for Clarizen Inc. a competing online project management service based in Kfar Saba, Israel, claims the most crucial problem that besets project management software and services is user adoption.

CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski contends that the best way to get people to use project management tools is, in effect, to trick them into it. That is, integrate the tools into applications people are already using daily. Currently, the company has tied the Clarizen service via plug-ins with Microsoft Outlook's e-mail client and the AutoCAD and SolidWorks computer-aided design applications. Nowogrodski says LotusNotes support is in the works.

The Clarizen notion is that no one wants to learn, let alone use, new software, especially if they are only peripherally involved with a given project. So they just don't, making passive aggressive behavior the primary culprit behind most fail projects, I suppose.

However, with Clarizen there's no need for end users to act out their unhealthy aggressions since they can get all of their tasks and report their progress through applications they already use. Clarizen is role-based so users only get requests and updates for their parts of a project.

"The main challenge for project management is team participation," Nowogrodski argues. "People reject the new tools."

The fanciest project management software bells and whistles won't change that, he says. But if you sneak it into their daily routine, maybe they'll use it.

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