Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We use it for both portfolio and project management, as well as time tracking and resource management.

It has highlighted areas in our company that were deficient in resources. It has allowed us to hire, then realize more benefits regarding the number of projects we can get done.

• The portfolio management
• The waterline functionality
• The data that we can get out of the timesheet information.

One of the things that was highlighted that is coming was the top-down planning functionality and that looks pretty compelling. 

If there is support or guidance around how to take a more waterfall-based shop and transition it into an agile-based team framework within the tool, that would be good as well because it is definitely different in how you manage and execute projects.

The integration needs to be improved with Jaspersoft and Microsoft Project.

It seems fine. We have not had any issues.

We are a fairly small shop, so we really do not run into any scalability issues.

Their online documentation is okay. It is not great. It is hard to get to some of the answers to the things that we may be running into, such as use cases that we are trying to fix. So, frequently we have to put in tickets. 

Sometimes they are great and exceed expectations, and sometimes, they take a little longer than I would anticipate.

The one that we had at the time, Microsoft Project Server, which was pretty basic in the data that you could get out of it. It did not have near the functionality around portfolio management that this CA solution does. So, that was really one of the reasons why we were evaluating new tools.

As with any fairly complex tool, there were a lot of things that you can't solve for. You can't write a 100% of the requirements and expect to roll it out. So, we ended up with some gaps. One of the areas that we would improve upon is not necessarily with the tool, but having more tips/tricks on adoption. How to get people outside of the PMO to use the tool and get the information.

We looked at staying with our current solution, which was Project Server, and seeing how we could leverage it. We also looked at Innotas, then CA. So, those were really the three. Innotas had a great portfolio functionality, but its project management was very basic. Its resource management was kind of non-existent. So, CA had the full package. It really had everything that we wanted.

I would give them advice that the learning curve and the adoption curve for an organization, which is attempting to bite off this much functionality and complexity, is a lot longer than they will think. Put some serious energy into how to get the groups involved into driving adoption. Then, knowing that the new OData connector is now out, finding ways to quickly leverage data, so you can start telling business stories and showing the value of the tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Stability in the marketplace. We definitely wanted to go with something that was going to be around for a while, and they were constantly improving.

• The detail available in the financial costs and forecasts
• The comprehensive resource planning views
• The portfolio planning capabilities

All of these show not only the current state, but also integrated views of the impact of proposed changes across the organization in terms of resources and costs.

CA PPM provides an integrated view of the total set of projects in the organization. It also has the ability to see data by multiple slices: by department, project type, objective, resource type, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Since it is all in a common database, there are no longer questions about the data sources, or how current the information is.

• Some of the legacy configuration in the system can use some updating. In particular, providing configurability in timesheets, fiscal periods in resources, and project planning.
• The provided reporting tool is inadequate.
• Structured reports are too difficult.
• Security administration is immature.

I have been using this solution for twelve years. I began with much earlier versions.

There are no significant issues with stability. Unplanned outages are extremely rare and brief.

There are no issues at all with scalability. The system is capable of supporting tens of thousands of users globally.

Technical support is variable. The core product support is very good, typically with quick response times and very helpful engineers.

The support for the reporting tools is much less effective.

Support for infrastructure related issues, i.e., how the application is affected by the operating system, browser, and related external elements is variable. Some are quickly resolved and some drag on.

I am personally familiar with a number of other solutions, but my current organization has been using this software since I have been associated with them.

Most other organizations that I am familiar with who switched solutions, did so to take advantage of the comprehensive feature set, the ease of use, and the easy configuration.

The product itself is easy to set up and configure. Whether that is complex or not, depends on how complex the organization is.

If there are a lot of business rules that need to be incorporated, then those need to be accommodated and it will take more time.

In some cases, the real implementation timeline is around managing the change to a new system internally, and not in preparing the system itself.

Be sure about what kinds of functions you will want your users to perform on the system. That will impact the type and cost of the license based on the licensing model that CA uses.

This is an enterprise PPM solution, so it will have functional aspects that extend into many corners of the enterprise.

The focus should be on the functionality that is needed, and not on small differences in cost. There will rarely be a significant cost difference between systems that are competing at this level.

This product was in place when I joined the organization.

Take the implementation as an opportunity to simplify your business processes and not simply to try to replicate existing processes into a new tool.

The out-of-the-box functionality has a lot of power and capability and should be used wherever possible.

If you do have a few critical, must-have processes, have them demonstrated before you commit to the tool. Be sure that they are real needs and not just legacy “that’s how we have always done it” items.

I love the time tracking module. That's what I'm most familiar with, at this time: being able to go in and actually break it down; see what everybody is doing; how they're allocating their time; see who's underallocated, overallocated.

It's really helping us with our resource management; being able to pull people where they need to go; get additional help where help is needed. It helps us collaborate with our project management teams, our PMO, all across the company, shared services.

Overall portfolio management is something that we would like to improve on.

The company has been using it for several years now. Personally, I've only been using it for under a year.

In my experience, it's very stable, especially compared to other applications that we've used in the past. I have no complaints whatsoever.

At this time, it's meeting our scalability needs. We are looking to build out other areas, so we are assessing the different components to build out in.

From what I understand, from my technical person, the support is excellent.

I actually don't have a lot of experience with the initial setup; however, we are right now just beginning to upgrade. It seems to be that it's going to be fairly easy. We're going to be able to get it upgraded in less than six months; 3-6 months.

Personally, I have not evaluated other options. I come from a different area, and we have other ways of doing things that are not as streamlined.

I have a finance background so when I am selecting a vendor, I definitely want someone reliable, someone who is affordable, can answer all of our questions, who can bend and flow with the organization's growth. Or, if we sell pieces of the organization, we need to be able to flex, so I'm looking for a partner that will be able to do that.

I don't like to give anything a perfect score because I don't know enough about every aspect of it; however, from my experience, it's been a great tool.

Many features of this product are valuable to our organization, such as:

• Project Management: Managing a project for a PM is always tough if he/she has to do it without a tool. Using this tool, they have a view of availability of the resources across the organization, which they can use in their project to leverage their skills. It will reduce the load on the PM, as well as provide access to all resource data in one tool.
• Financial Management: People always get stuck or avoid the things when it comes to finance. With globalization, finance has to be managed across the world. As everyone has their own ways of creating records for accounting, this functionality brings some standardization, which in turn, makes it easier to manage.
• APIs: No organization uses a single tool for all of its requirement. Connecting those tools is always required, so that data flows between them and organizations can make the correct decisions.

For an organization where doing projects is the one of the major sources of revenue, it helps PMs sees each and every small thing in their projects in a very easy manner.

As new technologies are being developed, it has to create interfaces for new-generation tools such as R, Python, SaaS & so on.

As my industry is going through a change where we need to make decisions according to data and not on speculation, analytics is one such domain that can be utilized for this purpose.

Because CA PPM is a tool where all data related to project will be kept, (past failure or achievement), I would like to be able to connect CA PPM to some kind of analytics that would help PMs to identify what could be the next step he/she has to take in the project. For example, do we need to add more resources or not, and many other similar questions can be answered as we have data and the tool to analyse it.

The kind of functionality has to be developed where a PM can identify what to do next if he/she faces a problem.

I have used it since 2010, i.e., 6+ years.

I encountered instability with V13.1 & v13.2, in terms of performance, but it was taken care of in very upfront manner by CA in the next release, v13.3.

In order to add customization, we can add a custom object. However, there is a limit of up to three levels in which parent-child relationship can be developed.

My rating for the product reflects the scalability of this product, which is very good compared to similar products available in the market.

I want to express appreciation for the technical support or level 3 support which CA offers to their clients. Their team are experts, and also know how to handle diverse customers with ease.

I haven’t used any other similar product but I am always talking with those guys to understand the differences.

As time passes by and new versions are released, setup is getting easier and easier. Organizations just need to understand their use case and set up the product accordingly.

In terms of pricing and licensing, this product is much cheaper compared to SAP PS, which is a similar product. Others might be cheaper, but they might not be able to fulfill all of your requirements.

As an individual, I never got an opportunity to evaluate the product before choosing CA PPM, but what I heard was that this product has scalability and usability that always attracts customers.

I have only one piece of advice before implementing this product: understand what you want to achieve with this tool. Otherwise, you will be clueless once it has been set up.

We've not been using the tool for long, although we love being able to track the cost per project, initiative, portfolio, and finances.

It helps us to track costs, and so it's also helpful when we’re planning to see the projected costs so that the company can make decisions and prioritize what projects to take on, and see the "what-if's."

Across strategic initiatives, it's improved what we do, as we did not use to have cost tracking across the company. It used to be based just on going with our gut, so the business didn’t used to track projects. Everything used to be dispersed across departments. Now it’s centralized so it adds to our consistency.

We want to get to know the CR functionality. We want to get a better picture of how to incorporate CR into our regular functionality.

We've been using it for two years.

So far no issues or crashes. Once during a little upgrade we had some issues, but they were typical and resolved.

We haven't had to scale.

I've not personally used tech support. We have internal tech support and they understand it. We use Regal in-house as well.

No, I wasn’t involved in the decision. This is scalable over a home grown solution.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

I would love to see the company teach me more how to actually take advantage of the tool. Know your requirement before using something like this and how it would fit in at the company in terms of the company culture and process. This is one of our struggles – they have, for example, never had to track time.

Primary usage is to track project information, including the labor book to projects. The performance has been really good.

You can't manage what you can't measure. It helps us measure things like time compliance, as people are putting all their time into project costs. 

It is very intuitive. Even if you do not have training documents or anything, you can start feeling your way around pretty easily. I like that piece of it.

I would like to be able to do time submission and time approvals on mobile rather than have to go in the system. It would just make things much easier for everybody, being on the go, and a lot of us have an app for our email on our personal phone. Therefore, to be able to do everything there would be much more convenient, and I am sure we would get better buy in from managers, too.

Stability is very good. We have very little downtime.

We have been with a pretty consistent number of users, so we have not had to move. So, I do not know. For the little increase we have had, it has gone very smoothly.

We meet with technical support periodically. I would give them a nine out of 10. They are good.

The old one we had just did not meet our needs. We had to do too many configurations, and we wanted something that we could keep a little more vanilla. As it was and not have to worry about tweaking it for our needs. We have tweaked it, but with what we had previously, we had to do major changes.

All the complications came from our side with our users as opposed to CA.

The support and the transition from our old system to this, they made it go very smoothly. We had people onsite helping us. They were very good at letting us do a concept and run through it first, and test everything we needed to test. Those were some of the things I liked about it.

Changepoint. It pretty much came down to Changepoint and CA.

From the other ones that we looked at, this was the obvious choice for us after doing a PoC.

Contact CA. They are very good at sending up a PoC.

I do like the new UX very much. We have only turned onto a few users so far. We just upgraded to 15.3 a few months ago. The ones that have been using it do like it very much. We just have not rolled it out to everyone yet. We want to have some feedback first. So far, it has been very positive.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

• Support is a big one.
• Ease of use of the product.
• It interfaces well, and we are able to get the data out that we need.

The primary use case is to format the PPM, provide the forecasting and utilization of research utilization, and determine future trends.

The benefit is using the Capacity Demand Model. We can use it to forecast and see the future trends for resource allocations and demands. 

We are on-premise. I would like to see more features around the data warehouse analytics reporting. At the same time, I would like to see some more functionality on the UI side. They have the new user interface, but that new interface is only a portion of it. I would like to see that extended to other parts of the tool.

It is stable.

On a scale from one to 10, I would say PPM scales at a nine.

I have used the technical support. I have mixed opinion on them. I did receive very good support, sometimes. I did receive bad support, too. Most of the times, I would say it is a good support. Maybe there are a few people new to the tech support, and they may be still learning it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was not difficult for me. The documentation is good. I followed it and was able to set it up myself. It was pretty straightforward; no drawbacks.

It is a very good project portfolio tool.

CA PPM is an amazing product where you can evaluate anything, from concept to cash, all the way. It's not just project management, it's everything: enablement, managing, tracking, and controlling work.

CA PPM lets you forecast cost, effort, and identify capacity risks. It essentially tells you where your flaws are, and where you need to improve. You can manage your pipeline, your backlog can be groomed using portfolios, and you can use the waterline feature to do your annual planning.

It shows me my pipeline, my backlog, what my customers needs, where the demand is. It shows me where I have capacity, and what's my risk. I can rank my investments to deliver maximum benefit to the organization based on all these different controls. It usually provides a very good forecast: what you want to execute the next fiscal year based on your available capacity, demand, funds, and everything else. Also from a strategic alignment point of view, it can show you what kind of roadmap you have as an organization. What do we have committed? and things like that.

We are using the SaaS version of CA PPM aka on-demand. With SaaS, we are always current with the versions and everything else. We’ve given our heartache to somebody else for managing the server, uptime, SLAs, and everything else. We don't have an internal team that's always on call to make sure your mission-critical application is online. The SaaS version has a unique SLA established by the OEM to the customer to ensure it is up 24/7, and provides the highest quality of service.

There could be some additional enhancements, especially on closely integrating with CA Agile Central. Our CA Agile Central, formerly called Rally, is as an execution agent where Scrum teams are actually working on the product, which was planned and proposed in CA PPM.

We take the idealization backlog we established in CA PPM, define your features, and then take it into Rally to execute them. If I were to redo this whole thing, both of them would be one product, not two separate products. There's a lot of opportunity to merge them together to maximize the benefit to the customer.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

They're family, so they're very good, amazing.It is a collaborative effort.

Initial setup is fairly straightforward.

I'm end-to-end with Project and Portfolio Management software. I eat, breathe, and drink PPM.

Take baby steps. Go with a crawl, walk, run approach. The organization will never be ready to adopt any change, so user adoption is critical. Get a feel for your change. It should come from senior management. At the end of the day, we should show what's the value to each and every individual. What's in it for me? Then, yes, we can implement PPM anywhere without any stress.

Important things in picking a vendor are the support structure, and an orientation to reaching out and delivering value. CA Technologies always put the customer first and are factual, and deliver solutions that exceed customer expectations.