Broadcom Clarity Reviews

It allows us to manage everything, and in terms of business value, its best features are about managing money and financials. We are able to show the business how we spent money and the results we obtained. The tool recognizes this need. Simply put, we use Clarity data simply to track planned vs. actuals. Of course, it is not as simple as that. We have budget plans for labor and non-labor, and we track against that.

This product definitely has strong service, which, along with the features mentioned above, has improved the way our organization functions.

I don’t know at this point what could be improved as we are trying to evolve our systems to work and streamline with PPM. I do, however, want to see more outputs and technical details. Also, they should improve reporting so that it's more in-depth.

We've had no issues with deployment of PPM.

We've had no issues at all with stability since we implemented this solution.

It’s very scalable and it's one of the major factors of why people get this solution.

We have had absolutely no issues with the support. They are extremely knowledgeable, and I haven’t heard of a situation of any complaints related to this from my team either.

It is complex because of our company, as we are asking the tool to do some things that it shouldn’t, but we made it work.

We have a budget allocated for a project, but the project is released over multiple months so we want to answer the question, “How much business value was delivered in a release and at what cost?” We also track to answer the question, “Will we be able to get all the functionality we need in the budget we allocated?" It is important to track this over short-duration iterations for a long-term product.

You have to look at your own internal systems and processes and optimize them before you implement the tool, but PPM can do a lot of things. It’s a flexible tool. Just don’t use that flexibility too much.

Project and portfolio management.

It's performing okay, I would say. There are no issues with the performance, but I think we are not using it at capacity. 

I would say the Project and Portfolio Management, its potential. If you talk about any other tool for PPM, I think CA PPM has the most potential.

It gives us all the projects in one view where we can drill down into our portfolio and see the potential benefits at the end of the day.

I am not sure what features they could add but, personally, what I have seen is that last year when I came to CA World, PPM was on version 15.2 and this year, after 365 days I am here at CA World again and CA is still on 15.3. Within a year only a point release. It looks like CA itself is driving it slowly and they should do something. It says something, that after the whole company worked hard they are still only coming up with a point release. It is something doubtful.

I think CA is already doing the work, probably, by going to the new UI. I think they are on the path. But they need to take a risk and go. Their initiative started, I think, two years back about going to a new UI. It's showing progress but not at a pace that I would like to see.

Since we moved to version 14, we haven't seen stability issues.

We haven't had issue with the scalability yet.

At times it is good but it is not always the best.

Response time is a bit slow in some cases. In some cases it is frustrating that we have to escalate, we would prefer not having to. But at the time, if there is an urgent issue and you get frustrated, you have to escalate it. It doesn't give you a good feeling about getting support that way. After you escalate, you get support. You get everything you want but, at the end of the day, you still feel that it would have been great if CA would have helped us during our first attempt.

I was involved with PPM setup from scratch. It's not straightforward but it's not complex either, if you know the product.

We are using version 14.3 but we would love to go to 15.3. We have seen the new UX and it's looking good so we think it is a positive change.

I would say go with PPM with SaaS. I would suggest that any customers or new customers use Clarity PPM at its default values, not customize it terribly. It has a lot potential using the product out of the box rather than making your own product.

CA has been working every year to provide a product upgrade, and if you can't use the latest features immediately, or in the near future, you are missing out on a lot. Use the regular settings, or at least most of the product out of the box, and leverage or grow from there, rather than making your own changes.

Flexibility is probably the most significant feature that we take advantage of. Being a large company with a lot of customized solutions, migrating from our legacy applications into PPM obviously has been a major challenge. The flexibility of PPM, our ability to customize it and configure it to our needs has been a big selling point of the tool.

Probably the biggest reason for going with SaaS is the thin footprint. Obviously, not having to engage our internal resources to basically support the infrastructure for PPM was a big selling point. The ability to essentially upgrade without a lot of involvement from our staff was another big selling point for us. Obviously, the vision is essentially to have transparent upgrades for the tool with minimal effort on our side. Certainly, going with the SaaS solution has allowed us to basically upgrade the application in a matter of weeks rather than spending months planning for the upgrade.

The major benefit is, with our legacy applications, right now, we have approximately 600 IT projects, spanning 12 different portfolios. In our old world, we had essentially a number of different solutions supporting the 600 projects and 12 portfolios. The vision that PPM has allowed us to take advantage of is, now, we have consolidated all our portfolios and projects under one tool, instead of a multitude of solutions.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and business strategy because we all now talk the same language, if you will. In the past, with everybody having their own spreadsheet-based solution, when you essentially try to talk about project status, you really had to understand what their solutions were for managing their portfolios and their projects. By having everything consolidated under PPM, now everybody has a unified way of looking into their projects. When you talk about what's red, yellow and green for your project status, it isn't essentially this grab bag of, “Well, that depends on how you measure it.” We're all now being measured by the same tool, being PPM. When we talk about our status being red, yellow or green, we all know exactly what that means because, essentially, it's all PPM speak and not essentially some homegrown solution supporting the various portfolios.

We're really looking forward to the integration of Agile Central into PPM. Obviously, we now have a solution that services the needs of our project managers and our portfolio directors. Being able to integrate Agile Central into our solution base here, obviously allows us to extend the reach of PPM from the project management and portfolio managers all the way down to the actual development teams. Obviously, bringing everybody under a consolidated umbrella will help unify the beginning-to-end lifecycle of our projects.

The big improvement for us would be timesheet management. We have a legacy timesheet management solution that we're moving off of into PPM. It goes down to the activity level for the recording of time. In the current PPM solution, while they handle the reporting of time to the individual task and your project plans really nicely, breaking it down to the individual activity level such as requirements, design, different support activities, the tool doesn't necessarily play in that space really nicely. Certainly, we'd like to see them do a little bit more with regards to taking that time recording down to a lower level of detail. Of course, for us it's all about analytics and, of course, project management thrives on analytics.

It is very stable. We have not had a single issue with the SaaS solution for PPM since we've been on board. We came on board live in production about a year ago. We have not experienced a single outage with SaaS solutions since we've gone live. Obviously, knock on wood, we understand that, in the IT world, downtime is a fact of the way things work but, as of a year in production, we have yet to encounter an outage that has impacted our user base.

Indeed, we have used technical support, more so from a development perspective, though, not from, obviously, an issue with a production outage or issues with our production environment. Being that we're looking to configure the tool in different ways to satisfy the needs of our various portfolios, we've actually had some conversations with CA support to help us understand how we can essentially move from the vanilla PPM to something that obviously suits the needs of our business. They've been very responsive with regards to answering our questions on how exactly we can move from today's world to what we need to do in the future.

We had a plethora of solutions and, of course, they all did things a little bit differently. When we tried to take a look at the overall portfolio of all our IT projects, there was really nothing to unify everybody under one common solution. Essentially, if you talk to one portfolio, they manage things in a certain way. A different portfolio would do it completely different. Of course, when you tried to look at the overall IT budget, it got to be a very complex solution. Of course, if you try to take a holistic look – you have resources and projects, and you have your planned budgets – nothing was under the same umbrella. It was a hodge-podge, and a lot of manual time and effort went into basically having just a simple conversation on, "Hey. What do we want to do next year?"

Bringing everything into PPM, now, the conversation’s about what we want to do next year and the whole what-if scenarios that come out with regards to, "Hey, what if we do this? What if we do that?" Instead of taking weeks and months to have those discussions, we can now have them in real-time, right here and right now.

We actually employed an implementation partner. With PPM, there are a lot of consulting firms that specialize in PPM implementations. We actually picked an implementation partner who helped us through the various questions and considerations to evaluate before we went live.

Certainly, doing it ourselves would have been a little intimidating, but with the help and assistance of CA services and the implementation partner, actually, the migration from our legacy solutions to now a PPM-based solution has been relatively painless.

We did have five other vendors on our shortlist. We did take an exhaustive look at all five of them. In the end, it really came down to CA PPM’s flexibility and the ability for it to basically configure itself to meet the needs of our organization and its ability to be a SaaS solution rather than an on-premise solution. Certainly, we're looking to have a unified solution that we can essentially standardize the company but still configure it so that it's specific to our needs, and yet, obviously, have it hosted at an external site, where we don’t have to necessarily spend the time and energy to make it happen.

I definitely recommend going to CA World and talking to all the other companies that have implemented PPM solutions to see how they did it. One thing we definitely learned at a previous CA World, when we were doing our evaluation of PPM, everyone we spoke to had accolades about how they love the tool and what they are doing with it. Of course, when you hear all the stories of how they basically move from their legacy solutions to a PPM-based solution, you quickly realize that it can do everything you need to do, more and more.

It's definitely met and exceeded all our expectations with regards to the tool. We knew we'd have to make some concessions with the tool. Obviously, if you're moving from your completely customized solution to one that's more of a package-based solution, we figured we’d have to give up on some things with regards to our process, but we found with PPM, it's so flexible and so configurable that everything that we had customized for the homegrown solutions, we were able to actually port it directly into PPM. Now, essentially, we've got a standardized solution across our whole entire organization that still has all the benefits of our homegrown solutions that we had in the past.

The most valuable features are the resource management, project management, and tracking time for our employees.

I would like to see better dashboards within the tool and better integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

It is very stable.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, we just had too many spreadsheets and one-off processes.

We considered HPE, CA, and I can't remember the other one.

The most important factors when we decide on a vendor are: the quality of support, the functionality, and whether it is customizable to suit our business needs. It must be extendable.

You should know that you can customize it to suit the way that you do business. Don’t think that you need to do everything all at once.

Resource management is probably one of the most widely used features of this product and it is what we are using now.

One of the other features that we have started to step into but haven't really done yet, is portfolio management. It is a direction that we are heading in order to leverage it more deeply.

We mainly use resource management for resource forecasting which basically helps us to manage our resource capacity. In this way, we can understand our availability overallocation and that is really where we are using this tool most in our company. We definitely want to broaden our use of the features of this product.

The main benefits of using this tool as a service platform are leveraging CA to handle availability and stability of the platform. Also, they carry the load in terms of execution of any product upgrades. We need to be ready for the upgrade and help test the upgrade, but they keep us on the upgrade path. These are some of the primary advantages.

The organization is not benefiting as much as we would like it to. That is not necessarily a tool shortcoming but an adoption shortcoming. Basically, we need to shift and mature some of our business processes to leverage the tool's capability more. We are having some challenges for people in our organization to adopt this tool. The reason being that people get grounded in a comfort zone as to how they do things today or how they handle things outside of a tool. It could be inertia or people are just comfortable doing things the way they are doing them now, so change is hard.

In terms of projects, this solution has helped us to have one place where project statuses are kept. We have done some work with the standard status report format, so that helps in terms of everybody being familiar with how things are going to be reported. For timekeeping standards, we have one tool and do things one way.

A direction we are heading in, as we are not using the tool, is to do portfolio management or even to do some of our strategic planning; that is the direction we want to head in next.

Some of the things I was planning to look into while I was at a recent CA conference is how other people would implement features like portfolio management, resource capacity planning, financial management. That is what I went to learn more about.

There is some room for improvement in the UI. Some of the folks that use the tool, sometimes they feel it is cumbersome navigating around it.

We don't have any major issues with the stability of the product.

I am not aware of us having any scalability issues. As a matter of fact, I don't think our user base would be considered huge compared to other CA clients. We have around 2500 users, so it is not huge.

I haven't personally used technical support.

PPM being an industry, CA PPM is an industry-leading product and we certainly keep utilizing it. We don't have a compelling reason or business case to move away from it. In fact, we want to invest in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It happened before I joined the company.

Think about your business processes along with the tool’s capability. The tool has a lot of capability but you need to make sure your business processes are aligned to leverage that capability in order to maximize it.

The problem is leveraging the organization; it is hard to get people to adopt it. We need to shift some business processes so we can leverage it more. We have partnered with CA and they are doing what they need to do.

Manage projects, resources, and financials.

It's performing better with the new UI. The old UI is clunky and slow, but it's staring to get better.

It's pretty much the source of "the truth." Everything is together, everyone can see all the resources, financial projects, how long a project's going to take. Anybody can go in there and see any information they need about the organization as a whole.

Usability of the new UI. It's easier for people to go in there and know what to do. To train people, it's faster, more intuitive.

Also, managing resources. It's definitely the most important thing for managing your project.

Work Breakdown Structure in the Tasks: be able to drag and drop to a level three instead of just stuck at level two.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

Upgrading to 5.1 there was an issue, a syncing issue on the back end, that ending up getting fixed after about two weeks.

No issues with scalability. It seems we can have as many users as we need to. We've probably added around 50 full licenses but I haven't seen any issues with that in resources we have; a few hundred resources in there.

Tech support is good. A 10 out of 10. Everything was responded to within 24 hours, except for one issue where there was some miscommunication, but that ended up getting resolved in a few days just by sending an email to our rep.

Everything was through Microsoft Project, just the desktop version. People would get printouts or PDF's of them.

I was not involved but I think it was pretty straightforward.

Workfront was one of the vendors. We went with the CA solutions because headquarters was going with CA PPM, so we decided to move in that direction.

It has improved; 15.3 was a huge update. You have the Risks/Issues/Changes added to the new UX.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• usability
• functionality 
• making it easy for the end user to use. 

Make people want to use it. If anything's overly complex, people won't use it. People have a difficult time moving to a new solution so it just has to be easy, so a non-technical user should be able to feel comfortable, click around, and not be intimidated by the solution.

I would give it a seven out of 10, just because the classic UI is very cumbersome. It can do everything but it's hard to use. It's easy to use once you understand it, but it's intimidating at first for somebody to see the solution. With the new UI, CA is heading in the right direction, and fast. They're adding features, I would say major features, two times a year, which is fast.

I would recommend it, but are there better solutions out there for another company? Maybe. There may be easier solutions out there.

CA should go in the same direction, move forward with the UX and keep developing that. There are a lot of startups that already have the usability; it's easy for them. But they're missing features.

Portfolio management, to capture market ideas, gather criteria around those ideas, and make business choices on which ones to move forward.

We're in the early stages of implementation, but it seems better than the tool we had before, which was a spreadsheet.

It makes it easier to compare different opportunities, and to track the metrics though the process. It helps us make better choices of which opportunities to go after and not go after. Then, we can balance that with what we have for staffing, to know what we can actually staff.

It makes it easier to function.

More team-based management, and less people-based management; as far as the resource management goes, to do it per team and not per person.

I personally believe that for software development, management at the person level is not the right level to manage. Managing at the team level is a better level.

To my knowledge, the stability is fine.

Scalability seems fine.

I have not used technical support. Others have. I think we get the support we need.

Our previous solution, a spreedsheet, was complex, and it was difficult for multiple people to use. To make it easier to use, we needed a different tool.

We felt CA was a better fit for our needs.

Getting agreement on how to use the process is complex, because there are a lot of people involved. The tool is highly flexible, so it does take some effort to choose how to use it as well.

CA, Oracle, and one or two others that I don't recall.

Regarding the new UX, I don't have an opinion. I've only used it a little bit so I don't think I'm the best person to ask about the UX itself. I think it's easy to use.

When selecting a vendor functionality is the first criteria, does it do what it needs to do. Certainly trust in the vendor is in that list as well. But the first need is that the tool has to do what we need it to do.

Be clear about how you want to use the tool, what processes you intend to use as you're making your selections.