Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Managing the work of a federal agency.

It's performed very well. We've expanded it quite a bit. There have, though, been a couple of issues. 

• The configurability
• The resource management

They're valuable because that's what the customer uses the most.

I've also seen a little of the preview of the new UX and I'm impressed.

The organization that we contract for, they have centralized visibility into a lot of the different things that they were doing manually before, or on spreadsheets. There are a lot of reports that we've written based on that, that are sent out to executives and to management. It's a lot more efficient. It's all centralized, and the reporting is a lot easier, since it is all centralized. The data entry is a lot easier as well as the reporting.

I would like to see much more advanced financial management capabilities. Particularly, both financial and contract management capabilities. Even though there are some of those built in now, our federal customers manage their finances and their contracts differently from most folks on the commercial side of the world, so we've had to configure a lot of things, specific to them. It would be nice if some of that was built in to the product.

Additionally, there are some things that come with the product that are problematic. And the biggest one and, the company certainly knows this, is the integration with Microsoft Project. That's been a real pain in the butt for us. We've actually had contract issues because of it with our customer; it's not as robust or as full-featured as it could be.

There's no downtime or lagging.

In terms of scalability, so far so good. We haven't had any issues. We're using the cloud, CA cloud.

It's good. Sometimes they don't get back to me as quickly as I would like, but they're definitely always within a day.

The factors that are important to us when selecting a vendor are

• capability
• integration points.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because there are some pieces that are just not there that we would like to see. It's not like core type features that you'd expect in a product like this, the ones I talked about earlier, the financial stuff.

I would say, take a very strong look at CA PPM, depending on if you have a couple of specific things that they were looking for. 

Administration, project management, NSQL queries and portlets, XOG data transfer, user community forum, sandboxes and documentation.

Make timesheets more user configurable and controllable, e.g. user-definable filters and user-selectable tasks as alternatives to the population algorithm.

Make the rights administration more comprehensive, covering also areas now outside it.

Add custom fields that can be populated with SQL query results.

Launch the planned lightweight GUI.

Update Open Workbench to the usability currently normal in Windows software.

Add a GUI for XOG client.

20 years.

Normally, the installation is fairly straightforward. In some versions there have been some hickups which have been cleared with support or community.

Recent versions have arrived with recommended actions to ensure a smooth upgrade, which were not needed for earlier versions. In many instances, the organizations have made configurations and customizations which make the upgrades more challenging, but they are not in the vanilla product.

Stability is usually good out of the box. If the system is not maintained, that will result in reduced performance and problems. The current 64-bit version is very scalable, bearing in mind that a clustered environment with load balancers requires knowledge in that area. The development of third-party items such as Java JDK, Tomcat and browsers is usually so fast that the versions supported by CA PPM are not the most recent ones. That can be a problem for larger organizations that have standard environments in those areas.

Standard support usually works and there is even the possibility to chat with support online.

There are some very experienced professionals with CA and also with other organizations who are active in the user community forums and their help goes very deep into the product. Further, there are office-hour chats where you can ask questions from several CA experts attending. The support is good and the supporters skilled.

The initial setup after installation is fairly straightforward. It depends on the functionality the organization wants to use, but I don't think I have seen the sequence elsewhere than the user community forum. The documentation covers installation walkthroughs, but after that, there are optional paths for proceeding.

I am a member of the implementation team. Sometimes there is vendor presentation in the team, but not always and then there must be SME's with prior experience. Plain in-house teams do not have the required expertise for an initial installation. Learning through trial and error will prolong installation and especially initial configuration.

In addition to the on-premise offering, CA offers this also as SaaS (on-demand). In my opinion, that allows a cost-effective way to implement only as much as you can utilize by having only the initial implementation team use the initial functionality. Then, if so desired, you can extend the functionality, number of users and move to on-premise. With on-demand, CA takes care of the system maintenance, but the user organization is responsible for the data maintenance.

Some organizations think that when they hire an implementation with prior experience, the implementation is straightforward, which is not the case. Unless it is just a version upgrade, the user organization does not know the product and consequently does not know the best way to use the product for their ways of working. Therefore, a development environment for the implementation team is a must, as well as a system for testing the developed solutions.

It’s deployed corporate-wide and has a heavy user-base, and we provide custom modifications to the solution. I also do all the deployments for seven different environments with each having three servers.

I’d like the install to work a lot better and to be more tailored. It also needs to support a forced functionality of the install.

It’s not bad, though we have intermittent issues with services going down. It’s a background service that runs reports, which seems to hang every so often, so we need to be pretty diligent in keeping our eye on that. When it goes down, users aren’t able to run reports so we have to bounce the reports server. But overall, it’s fairly stable.

It’s pretty easy to throw into any environment.

Usually their tech support isn’t very good. We usually end up fixing it ourselves or writing our own XML code. But, they try their best.

If I call support, I don’t like getting a middle person, which I frequently do. I try to figure it out myself before I call them. Escalations are usually very good. We had an issue with a recent upgrade so we created a P1 ticket and escalated it after day one and they were right on it. They worked well with me and they were there with me for a 17-hour day to get the system up.

They’re getting better and have been better recently than in the past.

The installs never go smoothly. You can have all your system requirements met and all your ducks in a row. The CA XMLs won’t work.

We recently did an upgrade which took over two weeks to get up and running, which was an incremental update.

The install packages are the worst I’ve ever seen.

Overall it’s a very good, powerful product. It’s one of our two or three major products. It’s used by everyone, and it’s easy to customize. It’s fairly reliable once it’s deployed, it looks nice, the reports look nice, and it’s easy to move around. The only gripe I have is the install.

With any solution, you need to be able to customize and tailor it. You need to modify and add your pipelines and any other custom attributes you need, fairly easily and fairly quickly. It needs to be able to deploy from one environment to another fairly easily, which the CA PPM solution does.

We primarily use the solution for time management, product management, resource management, and financial management. We use it for any type of governance that's needed for a project.

The solution has helped us with the finance aspects of our organization.

The solution is the best tool for portfolio and project management.

It's very good out of the box, without configurations required.

The user interface (UI) needs to be improved. Right now, it's not the best.

The usability at this point is terrible. It makes the product hard to use unnecessarily. It's not intuitive at all. I've had to force myself to learn it and it's been hard.

We use an older version, so It might have been updated in newer versions. That said, everything needs to be fixed, including the font, colors, and navigation. It's literally every aspect that needs updating.

The core of PPM is very complex.

The solution needs more documentation.

The technical support is not the best. It needs better support for Agile practices.

It's very difficult to integrate anything with the product.

I've been using the solution for five or six years at this point.

The solution is stable. There are no issues there. I don't recall having any issues with reliability.

The scalability is a bit complex. It's hard to modify things on the product, which affects the ability to expand.

I'm not sure of how many users are on the solution.

The technical support was terrible. We weren't too satisfied with their level of support.

When it came to getting help with integration, we really didn't get any support.

They also need more documentation. There's not enough to really be able to help clients.

We didn't previously use a different solution, however, Broadcom used to be CI Technologies.

The solution is not straightforward. It's complex. On top of that, the usability is bad, which makes the entire process even harder than it has to be. It requires a lot of knowledge.

With one client, with all the implementation and configurations needed, the deployment process took about a year.

I'm not sure how many employees were needed for deployment or maintenance.

I don't know of what the actual costs of the solution were.

I recommend PPM. I'd advise against changing functionality on the box, however.

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution, however, I believe it to be some aspect of version 12 - potentially 12.4. It's an older on-premises version.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

It helps with our marketing efforts, projects, timing, budgeting, and resourcing. It also gives us a one-page overview.

We're able to run our business more efficiently because the solution is cloud-based.

We use JIRA, so I'd definitely want PPM integrated with that. Also, it needs to connect better with other software so that we can simply drag items into PPM. Additionally, it would be nice if it worked with Microsoft Office.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability, and if you have sufficient storage, you shouldn't have any problems.

It is scalable, and it adapts well from the end-user point-of-view.

I don't have personal experience with CA technical support, but my point of view is that they are professional, and the sales and technical guys are also professional. We are very happy with the people at CA.

Because we're smart, we knew we had to switch, and when we saw what CA had to offer, we chose this, although we had pressure to put this in place internally.

We didn't look at any other solution.

We got too much marketing and not enough of the actual product itself during the sales process. Pay attention to the product and not the marketing.

The most valuable part is related to portfolio management in the home menu. We can add attributes in new and existing pages from the administration section.

In comparison to other PPM tools, these features are clearer in this solution. We can also make ranking rules, in order to select the right projects to put inside the portfolio.

Our organization, a consulting firm, is working with CA. Based on this, the CA PPM tool is one of the main services this company offers to the other organizations and configures it for them.

There should be the improvement in their strategy to align the organization with the Portfolio Management section. It should be visible in the application.

However, I see that most of the usage of the application is in terms of the technical parts. For example, when the customer wants to add new sections or make custom objects.

I have had experience working in the PPM field as an intern for around a year. However, I have used this solution for five months.

There were no stability related issues.

I did not encounter any problems in respect to the scalability. The capacity is good and it depends on the data that a company wants to enter.

I used Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project in other companies. My current company has the main concept/business of PPM and they use the CA PPM tool to offer their customers.

In terms of the licensing, I know that there are different types of demos and licensing available, such as studio or a normal user.

In this case, the user can try most of the modules. But for the administrator demo, I saw that the user only has accessibility rom the Admin menu

For a limited time, I tried out the Project Objects - Progressive Project Management Approach (PPMA) solution. It was also useful and user-friendly with a graphical environment that helps the user not be bored.

• Try to understand the most important parts of the system and make a relationship between the different parts of the portal.
• Try to engage in knowledge sharing, in order to boost fast learning and be more agile to use the system.
• Have specialists for the technical parts and the configuration aspects.
• Have other employees for the front-end functionalities.

Product management and time management are the most valuable features for us, as it’s far superior to Microsoft Project, and the others are worse.

It's helped us with holding the staff who use it accountable. If we are tracking time, for example, you can determine whether employees are over/under loaded, etc.

An improvement would be location tracking to see where employees are.

I’ve heard a lot of good things, and for me it’s been fine.

We're small so we've had no problems.

We've never had to use them.

We previously used Microsoft Project, but this is better because our clients are using it as well.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

We were looking for a solution that had good testing space and SOA, and compared it to Microsoft Project.

Check other CA technologies, and see if you can integrate the technologies as they work well together.

• Detailed project planning, showing the updated project status and its most useful KPIs
• Detailed project financials and cost, defining detailed budget plans and updated management and view of taxes, fees, expenses (transactions)
• Cost and financial investment hierarchy, obtaining the real aggregated cost of a service and of the whole IT investments. Possibility to show investment hierarchy aggregattions in diferent currencies.
• Apply strong workflow actions and methods, powered by scripting modules, to implement your processes
• New Data Warehouse instance and new advanced reporting provided by Jaspersoft Reports

The organization can obtain, from only one solution, a consolidated view of its project and portfolio management with the real cost of its projects and services, and the aggregation of all the IT investments.

It could be a real improvement to change the UI behavior, to work more in the foreground. This should allow implementing of input data controls, popup messages, etc. At the moment, the UI behavior works totally in the background and it’s a handicap to designing and implementing some UI and data form controls.

Summaring, UI enhancements in front-end ITSM modules, could position better CA PPM as unique IT solution

I have been using it for four years.

You could receive some error during the install/upgrade process, but the workarounds and iterations in this process in case of error are well documented

You shouldn't encounter stability issues if you have well-dimensioned environments and scheduled maintenance reboots. Without these reboots, you’re likely to have memory issues in Windows environments.

You shouldn't encounter scalability issues in well-dimensioned environments and configured with the vendor best-practices

Technical support is effective, based on a deep KB. The technical support responses are based, mostly, on KB articles.

Initial setup needs expertise level for some functionalities or modules. For some of these modules, you need previous knowledge of how the solution works, and there’s no clear step-by-step guide.

It seems obvious, but it’s strongly recommended to stay close to the standards and to use the OOTB functionalities (and to customize them if it’s the case), instead of implementing custom parallel functionalities. You will avoid future compatibility issues or complex product upgrade processes.