Clarizen’s External Collaborator solution provides a framework for communicating, collaborating and delivering results throughout the service delivery life-cycle. This enabled consistent engagement and secure discussions with your team members, customers and partners in the context of the work you are doing with them.

Customers can leverage a portal to access their projects, files, conversations, and requests. Additionally, public discussions that take place here provide transparency, while remaining separate from your internal teams’ private discussions.

PS organizations are able to focus on the customer 360 with effective and efficient execution as well as collaboration.

Search:

• How can I provide project visibility to my clients/customers?

• Can I post discussions and files to share with external users?

• Is it possible to designate parts of my project plan that are only visible to internal users?

DATA SHEET:

Clarizen External Collaborator Solution from Clarizen Vimeo on Vimeo.

Intended Role: Customer Collaborator

Customer requests represent a common part of any professional services project. Whether they are scope changes, resource-related or any other type of request Clarizen’s External Collaborator solution allows your customer contact to submit and track requests.

Additionally, external collaborators can submit non-project related requests through the same portal. As a result, they can view all requests holistically and keep track of any movement as you work to resolve them.

Submit a New Request

Through the portal, your customer collaborators can create a new request that will automatically be routed and prioritized accordingly.

Admin Steps:

Work with a Clarizen account representative to set up External Collaborator. If the customer collaborator user is not able to log in or see the SUBMIT REQUESTS panel, check the following:

1. In Customer Details, the user is added as a contact with the correct Email
2. In Customer Details, the Invite to portal field is checked
3. Search for the collaborator user and confirm that they are assigned to the Customer profile
4. Update custom action on the portal to match your required intake fields. 

End User Steps:

1. Log in to Clarizen
2. Click SUBMIT REQUEST
3. Fill out the pop-form and click OK

Screenshot:

Request Tracking

Through the portal, your customer collaborators can track current as well as completed requests along with the state, priority and who is assigned to each.

Admin Steps:

Work with a Clarizen account representative to set up External Collaborator. If the customer collaborator user is not able to log in or see the Cases panel, check the following:

1. In Customer Details, the user is added as a contact with the correct Email
2. In Customer Details, the Invite to portal field is checked
3. Search for the collaborator user and confirm that they are assigned to the Customer profile
4. For the assigned view, configure the columns to match your critical dat. 

End User Steps:

1. Log in to Clarizen
2. Confirm that the Cases panel is displayed
3. Click into a single request
4. Confirm that the Request Details view is displayed

Screenshot:

Intended Role: Customer Collaborator

From the External Collaborator portal, customers can view a stream of current and past discussions. These involve conversations within the context of projects, tasks, requests as well as those that do not related to any ongoing work.

External collaborators also have the ability to upload relevant files to the portal. These include SOWs, Service Agreements and any other document that the professional services team and customer may need to discuss and collaborate upon..

Discussions

Discussions are located on the portal home upon logging into Clarizen (after the Requests and Projects panels). From here, customer collaborators can view current and past conversations as well as start a new one.

Admin Steps:

Work with a Clarizen account representative to set up External Collaborator. If the customer collaborator user is not able to log in or see the Discussions panel, ensure the following in Customer Details:

1. The user is added as a contact with the correct Email
2. The Invite to portal field is checked

End User Steps:

1. Log in to Clarizen
2. Scroll to the bottom of the portal until the Discussions panel is displayed.
3. Respond to a Discussion post
4. Start a new Discussion post

Screenshot:

File Sharing

Description:

The External Collaborator portal allows for sharing of files between you and the customer. Customers can upload files right from the portal page. The files can then be viewed by both the Professional Services team as well as other customer collaborators.

Admin Steps:

Work with a Clarizen account representative to set up External Collaborator. If the customer collaborator user is not able to log in or see the Discussions panel, ensure the following in Customer Details:

1. The user is added as a contact with the correct Email
2. The Invite to portal field is checked

 End User Steps:

1. Log in to Clarizen
2. Click UPLOAD A FILE
3. Select from one of the available options to upload a file 

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Intended Role: Customer Collaborator

Once project tasks have been assigned to an external collaborator, they will be able to log into Clarizen and view as well as update the status these tasks. This ensures that project execution continues to move along at an efficient pace, without the need for multiple emails to communicate the status.

View and Update Projects

Projects where the customer collaborator has been explicitly assigned tasks will be visible in their portal upon logging into Clarizen. From here, customer collaborators can view and update status of tasks.

Admin Steps:

The External Collaborator application includes an External Collaborator View at both the Project module and item level. Customer collaborators are automatically assigned to the Customer profile where these views are defaulted for projects. If the customer collaborator user is not able to log in or see the Projects panel and/or access these views, check the following:

1. In Customer Details, the user is added as a contact with the correct Email
2. In Customer Details, the Invite to portal field is checked
3. Search for the collaborator user and confirm that they are assigned to the Customer profile
4. In the Customer profile, check that the External Collaborator View is assigned at both the Project module and item level.

End User Steps:

1. Log in to Clarizen
2. In the Projects panel, find and click on a single project
3. In the Projects Details view, update % Complete on assigned task (customer collaborator tasks are color-coded as green).

Screenshots:

Intended Role: Project Manager

New Projects

Various aspects of a project, be it a particular task or milestone, may require collaboration from your customer. Clarizen’s External Collaborator solution provides an easy way to control what parts of the project plan are visible to your customer and what fields of data are accessible to them.

Customers with external collaborator access can log into their portal and see a list of the projects they are active participants in and even drill down to see the work breakdown. Furthermore, privacy is maintained in regards to internal tasks and milestones, which will not be visible or searchable.

Once a project has been created, the project manager should control visibility to certain tasks and milestones by leveraging the Visible to customers toggle.

Admin Steps:

The External Collaborator application includes a custom field at the work item level named Visible to customers. A Work Plan View should be created that exposes this field so that the project manager can explicitly choose which items should be visible to the customer.

1. Ensure to restrict this view to only the Profiles that should be allowed to modify the project plan (as dictated by your organization)
2. In Manage Columns, add the Visible to customers field to the list of selected columns.

End User Steps:

1. Click on or find your newly created project.
2. Switch the the appropriate Work Plan View as set up by your administrator
3. In the Visible to customers column, toggle the checkbox to true for items that should be visible to your customer collaborator.
4. Assign your customer collaborator as a resource in the Resources field.

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Saving Templates

Over time, as your organization’s project managers begin to leverage External Collaborator to execute various parts of a project plan with customers, it may be valuable to define professional services templates that have the flags automatically set so your team doesn’t have to apply the same settings over and over. These templates ensure consistency in regards to the tasks and milestones that need to be executed.