Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We are in the business management office. We use it for our portfolio and project management and planning activities.

We are using an older version. Therefore, it is fairly limited, but I think what we are seeing in the newest version addresses a lot of the concerns that we are having.

We are still in the older version. We still have a ways to go. With the new UI, I think we will get through some of our adoption problems.

That in and of itself will help drive adoption, because the problems that we are having right now are that we do not have a great level of adoption or voluntary adoption. It seems very much as a top down enforcement type of thing. If people are not using it in the day-to-day, then your data quality is not very high. If your data quality is not very high, then you can't really leverage the tool for much more than the bare minimum.

In the new solution: It is good for us. 

• We can have a centralized view that we can have in our delivery and business organizations.
• Collaborate on certain levels.
• On priorities, investments, and those kinds of things, it is very helpful. With some of the things that they are rolling out with a bit more of the collaboration and social aspects, that that will help drive that even more.
• I love the new UX. The problem that we have had around adoption has been pretty much around the clunkiness of the old interface. So, we were encouraged by what they started doing with project management and personas a year or so ago. Now, seeing it flow through the rest of the tool is very encouraging.

I like what they are doing with the UI. I am interested to see, with the purchase of Rally, what they are doing with agile and integrating some of that.

I am greatly encouraged by some of the integration with the third-party BI tools. We have not been a Jaspersoft adopter. For us, the value in this data is unifying it with our other corporate data.

Jaspersoft really does not enable us to do that. I would like to see a more flexible user-friendly way for users to do some of their own visualizations, not having to understand Jaspersoft. We are looking at a tiered reporting architecture, where if I have a project manager in the tool to do their project management, it is not just an out-of-the-box status report. Can they do some sort of Jaspersoft customizations and do that all on the tool rather than having them go to a back office reporting solution? 

Our back-end business management, finance teams, and program owners probably will live more in the back-end reporting solution because it has our other data elements, our corporate workforce plans, and those kinds of things in it. Therefore, they can do the bigger picture reporting that we need for executives.

Putting a little bit more ad hoc reporting in the tool for the boots on the ground type people would be good, and they are doing more of that, essentially with the task boards and some of those things. I think to take those additional capabilities and turn those into things we can status, report, or leverage outside the tool would be good. 

With this next release, they are simplifying the connection to the back-end data warehouse stuff. This is good for me, but they are putting a lot of things now in the tool with task boards and the social things that it would be nice to see if you are doing a status report. You could pull up your out-of-the-box status report and pull in some of those comments from the task board or something else to illustrate where you were at the project. Pointing to what is going on with your dev lead saying this is the problem here rather than having everybody retype things.

To build more capability and unification into the reporting. They will get there. They are just building the capabilities now.

We have not had too many problems. We are getting ready to transition to a SaaS solution. I think we have got some concerns there, because we are all used to owning our own things, touching them ourselves, fixing them, and monitoring them. However, I have been doing some networking around it and I have not heard too many concerns about it.

In the end, we are not necessarily mission critical. So, we do not have to be 24/7.

We have had some issues in the older version on-prem with some of the back-end database stuff. That has all been addressed and we will be doing some changes going to SaaS. 

I think we will be fine. Plus, we hold onto everything all the time. So, it is partly our own issue/downfall. We are sort of our own worst enemy at times. I am fully acknowledging that.

I have not used technical support. I am on the business owner side, but I know my development manager has used them quite a bit.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have not looked at the competitors lately, but it seems to me that CA has made some significant advances. They were already sort of in the top tier in the industry anyway. So, it is good to see the investment that they have put in the last couple years. It seems to be just accelerating the feature sets.

Understand your business processes first, in great detail. Then, understand your data structures and you will be home free.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

Since we are a global, multinational company, we require all of the following:

1. They have got to be on our preferred vendor list, before we are allowed to talk to them.
2. Relationship
3. Price
4. Support.

We look at how can we leverage the product and how can we get pricing and scalability across the whole enterprise.

It's about integrating the allocation of resources, assignment, into the investment management, so we can actually look at not only how well we're doing, but if we have enough resources, if we're using them appropriately.

We don't need on-premise hardware. The expense of the hardware is not a big issue, but it's the administration of the hardware, the administration of the backup solution. SaaS provides us more freedom.

Transparency is one improvement to the organization. The solution we provide not only to our technical staff and for IT project management. We're starting to integrate it into the other areas, like HR for HRIS, and the business is now doing projects through it, so transparency's one of the big key factors. Because we now use it for that piece, it provides the main topic and the main context for our strategy committee sessions with the department leaders.

From a transparency perspective, we're now showing all we're doing. From an overall perspective, we're able to help enable the business by showing where we're spending the money, how we're spending the money, how the investments are moving, what's the benefit and the value. Every department, even within IT, be it the application development, the infrastructure guys, they were all doing their own thing. We really didn't see, not necessarily how they're spending, but how they're utilizing the resources. Now, because we're not siloed, because we're all utilizing one single application, one source of truth, we've provided some really good collaboration now and lessons learned from all these other projects that we didn't really have before.

I would like to see more simplified interfaces for reporting development. The Jaspersoft function is very cool, but it requires a bit of skill. More object-orientated, less database management, I think would help for report writing. That would be the most helpful.

The solution is fairly stable, a bit slow, especially from a SaaS perspective. We have heavy security where I come from, so that slows it down even more, but from a stability perspective, it's quite exceptional.

It's very scalable, not only for the product itself, but integrating service management and other functions of CA. The more we get comfortable with it, you move from project management to portfolio management. You're not just doing asset allocation, you're also doing, and so on and so forth.

I would say technical support is excellent, and I use them daily.

We knew it was time to invest in a new solution because of all the silos. We had to integrate everybody into one centralized point. It's just good governance.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are years of experience, accuracy of calculation, scalability, SQL back end, interoperability with our existing applications, and familiarity.

From an asset management perspective, from time sheet management, project management, from a summary nature, we wanted to move towards portfolio, and that’s where we saw CA PPM really shine. You start with your asset allocation, your resource administration; you move into your project management. Now you can see portfolio management, because you have that good initial data. You know: Garbage in, garbage out. Now that we have good stuff in, we're getting great stuff out.

From a user perspective, user experience, when we first put CA PPM in place, we found it very difficult, not very intuitive, a very uncomfortable user experience. Moving towards the next version, which is now 51 – which we're just utilizing now, we just started about two months ago – the end user experience is much better, facilitating adoption.

We had a few solutions on our shortlist. One was the Microsoft Project Server solution.

We chose CA because it was simplified with the SaaS and the company we hired for integration, it just made better sense.

From my perspective, usability, you get exactly what you put into it. With that comes issues, but the functionality and being able to display holistically to our executives and our department leaders, I think, was the key feature of why we chose CA.

Start slowly. Look at it from a module perspective. Do your resource utilization piece first. Go to project management. Go to portfolio management after that.

The financial portfolio management portion is valuable. It's really valuable for our executive leadership in order to make decisions on projects and portfolio funding.

It has provided visibility to finances. Where they are, how they're spent, as far as projects are related.

The solution is limited in terms of project management, collaboration, and things like connectivity to other applications. It's very limited in that functionality, unfortunately. We would love to see a better set of collaboration tools. We would love to be able to integrate more easily. I am very technical, as is my co-worker, and we can configure it as long as the availability is there. We would like to be able to connect more easily with SharePoint, maybe JIRA, and other collaboration tool such as Microsoft Project. We would love to be able to have that kind of platform so that we can do that inter-connectivity between all those applications.

It's a very stable product and a good solution. It’s limited in what it can do but for what it does, for what we need, it does just fine.

We're hosted, so as far as scalability goes for us, it's just a matter of user licenses. The user licensing itself could use a little bit of a revamp. Instead of giving everyone the same license, we should have read-only licenses and things of that nature.

I think the previous solution was homegrown. I don't think they had a solution, but rather they had a lot of little solutions. It is the same now, but at least we've consolidated the finances into one.

I wasn’t involved in the setup. From what I gather, it wasn't that complex because it was pretty base. It was all hosted and it was relatively turn-key.

Take a good hard look at what you need as well as where you may see your product needing to be in five more years. Then take a look around you at the market and see where things are moving. Even if you are not going there now, it doesn't take much to turn on a dime. You might need that expanded capability package later.

The competitiveness of the product in terms of functionality is the most valuable feature. It has all the features that we and the people we work with need to do their jobs. The core features are PM management, resource management, portfolio management. Those are invaluable tools for anyone who needs to do IT governance.

The principal benefit is the ability to forecast demand and balance it against the capacity of the organization. That means the efficient use of personnel, minimal downtime, and maximum productivity.

There’s always room for improvement as business needs change. We give considerable feedback through the years to CA for product improvement, which should guide future development of the product. The needs of the end users are extremely important.

I have been a Clarity/PPM user for probably 15 years, since before it was called Clarity.

Extremely stable. It’s been out for many years, and although the version has changed, the core product is fundamentally stable. The code is configurable – you can configure it to make sense to the end user.

We have used CA Clarity/PPM from less than 500 to more than 100,000 and it scales perfectly.

They’re good at the fundamentals.

Out-of-the-box, it is straightforward, but every time you implement a new instance you want to change and configure it to meet the needs of your audience. It’s a strength of the tool that it can be configured that way – you don’t have to do things the way the developers want you to do it. You can design your own workflows and processes which makes it much more effective to use.

There are three things that are important when dealing with any vendor: support, support, support. There are lots of products out there that have similar features and functionality and wonderful interfaces, but if a software vendor is going to throw a bunch of CDs at you and leave you alone now that they’ve got your money, it’s no good. It’s how they support the product after you buy it.

I’ve evaluated the other PPM tools and competitors and found that CA PPM is heads and shoulders above the rest. The functionality is robust because of the partnership – CA partners with their user community to support the product.

It provides the functions you need to do governance in the organization which makes it best in class, in my opinion. It does a lot very well, but there’s always room for improvement. If you hit 10/10, the competition is going to leapfrog you and you’re done.

Talk to companies in their industry that are using PPM tools and find out what they like. If I’m in the banking industry looking for a PPM tool, I'd ask other banks.

Clarity PPM's strongest features are project and resource management.

Clarity PPM would be improved by developing better support for the Agile framework.

I've been working with Clarity PPM for around seventeen years.

Clarity PPM is very stable across different purposes.

Clarity PPM scales very well.

Broadcom's technical support is good - you raise a ticket with the support team, and they immediately assign a consultant to you.

The initial setup is very simple, and Broadcom provides you with an installation guide.

I evaluated Planisware, but Clarity PPM is more scalable, its focus is built across resource management, project management, and time sheets, and it can be integrated with Microsoft Project.

Clarity PPM is an open design tool that you can design the way you want. I would give Clarity PPM a rating of nine out of ten.

CA PPM has given our organization a way to collect, share, and store data in one place as opposed to many. Prior to the install of CA PPM, we had to pull data from many different sources to compile even a standard executive status report. Since the implementation of CA PPM, we can now ad-hoc a report or dashboard that has all information (allocated project hours, resource lists, risks and issues, and other data, for example) in a matter of minutes.

The Gantt chart is very well built and easy to use. The tool comes out-of-the-box with an MS Project clone called Workbench, and for the most part it is useful, but there is an interface that can also be utilized to connect directly with MS Project. The best feature in my opinion is the Jaspersoft reporting suite as this is well crafted and, not only contains many useful reports out of the box, but creating ad-hoc reports is as simple as drag-and-drop. It is a very powerful tool and ad-hoc reports can be turned into a standard report that shows up in all user libraries. The export of the reports or dashboards can be done in several formats, including MS Excel, MS Word, PDF, and XML. I have to say that exporting into Excel is the best I have ever seen as the resultant spreadsheet is very clean and well laid out. There is little to no adjusting that has to be done on the spreadsheet.

Scheduling and resource allocations are very clunky at best. Being able to have a standard calendar that a resource could access that would give them a schedule by day would be very helpful, but to date there is no solution (including third party vendors) to make this happen. For a resource to review his or her schedule, the process involves several steps and is not user-friendly. Getting CA to work on issues, even directly after the install, was and remains very difficult and slow. As one of the administrators of the system, it frustrates me greatly when we discover a bug in the system or need customizations done (which we pay for) and they take an unacceptable amount of time to complete the task. They are very sales-driven, but once the product is in-place, the support seems to dry up a bit.

Tech support and customer service on the part of CA is very lacking. Even at the CA World user conference that they hold every year, it seems that the third-party vendors offer much more support and education than CA does, anf that does not speak well for a technology company. They have been very slow to address bugs or other issues with our system. The best help I seem to get when I need information or assistance, comes from the CA Community boards on their website. I tend to get much quicker answers from other users than I do when I call the CA support line.

Our company previously used a home-grown project solution. It worked very well and was very user-friendly, but unfortunately did not have the capability to disseminate data from different regions or parts of our organization. Reporting in the system was very minimal and we utilized several solutions (including MS SharePoint) to share deliverables and other collaborative data to complete projects. We did evaluate other solutions (such as Oracle) but based on our organization’s needs, and promises made by the CA sales team on the system capabilities, we found that CA PPM was the best option for us.

The initial set-up and configuration was very time-consuming and complex. Over a year after the initial install we are still fighting through some issues. Building the user database can be very daunting, but the worst is getting the projects migrated over from our old system. There was a lot of heartburn from that process, even though CA system architects promised us a smooth migration. Setting up Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and Organizational Business Structures (OBS) are also very complex and sometimes confusing tasks. Cross-over from divisions within the organization can be very difficult.

Our implementation was completed by CA Systems Architects in collaboration with our in-house team responsible for the system health and performance. The best advice I can give to anyone thinking of utilizing this tool is to create a rock-solid requirements document and make sure that you stick to your guns on what you want out of the system. If the System Architect that they provide you is not giving good customer service or is not willing to step back and explain the configurations that are being done on the system, stop the person and contact your sales representative immediately. Do not proceed with the configuration until you get the answers you are looking for, or your go-live can be pushed back quite a bit.

Licensing can be quite expensive, depending on the size of the organization. Even though there are many types of licenses (full, restricted and limited to name a few), the full licenses are the only way to utilize the system as intended and the cost per user is very high.

For many of the project creation and lifecycle functionalities, it is quite useful, but the overall user feel and agility is lacking. In the gaming industry, project lifecycles are very short compared to a standard PMP model (typically a 16-18 week cycle for larger projects and as few as two days on some of the smaller projects). Because there can be many changes to the project team, schedule, project scope and other factors, we needed a system that could be agile. While CA PPM has many tools and reports, being able to make changes quickly or being able to pull specific data out of the system requires a large effort for a small amount of information. A specific issue I have with the tool is the fact that there is no true project schedule in the system (calendar view). The Gantt chart is very helpful and well built, but there is no resource schedule that can be pulled out of the system for an employee who wants to know when they are traveling, how long they will be on a customer site, or whether or not there is a double-booking or other conflict. This can be very frustrating to our teams, schedulers, and managers.

The best advice I can give anyone looking at this tool for their organizational Portfolio/Program and Project Management needs is ask for very specific details from your sales representative. If they say that the system can do something, make them prove it in a demo. Many of the functions that they sold us on don’t exist or are much more challenging than they lead on. When it comes time to install, make sure the System Architect they send is comfortable with walking clients through the system processes and configurations. Our architect was not friendly and was clearly uncomfortable in front of an “audience”. He was also very confrontational in many instances. If you start to see this in your architect, halt all proceedings and get a replacement ASAP. If not, you can be looking at a lengthy delay in deployment.

We are currently using the Idea feature for project intake. We actually locked (CA PPM) Clarity down, so people can't open projects. In order to initiate a project, they come through the Idea feature. That helps us because for resource management, we get more applications and all the required fields are populated at that time. That feature is very valuable for us.

We are using the SaaS version of this tool. It works the same as the non-SaaS version, but I know that our responsibility on the back end is different. We don't have that responsibility anymore, and that's a benefit to us.

The project management expertise varies across the organization. This tool works for the people who are advanced as well for the new people.

With every pre-launch process, we want to be transparent in what's going on for the organization. We want people to know up front what's expected and when they're going to be needed on a project. This tool helps us get that transparency.

I'm looking forward to the addition of the Jaspersoft reporting feature. We don't have that right now. This feature is going to make things easier to measure. I do a lot of metrics and recording, and this feature will help.

The stability of this solution is fine. I've never even seen it go down. It's very, very good. We're always notified when there is scheduled downtime.

This tool is scalable. It’s big enough for us and the right size for our organization.

We have a consultant who we use for our technical problems.

We had Primavera before we moved over to (CA PPM) Clarity. I wasn't involved in that decision, so I don't know the reason behind that transition.

To offer advice to colleagues researching this solution, I would need to know what they were looking for first, and then I could see what wasn't working for them. Nonetheless, (CA PPM) Clarity is a very robust tool and you can really do a lot with it. It has a lot of features and a lot of capabilities that we don’t even use yet. For our needs, it works.

For us, it's the ability to feed payroll with accurate timesheets and capitalize project hours.

It provides accurate reporting for our investors who are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So we must have absolutely accurate financial statements.

They just introduced Jaspersoft in 14 and some of the security around Jaspersoft is very difficult to use. You cannot really assign security group permissions for specific reports. It's very difficult to do, so I would really like to see them work on the security aspect of Jaspersoft reports.

I think it's very stable for the most part. We run into periodic issues, especially with Microsoft Project and its integration; but it’s always difficult integrating with a third party app.

I think it's very scalable. We just acquired another company. My company primarily does the lottery, and the company we acquired primarily does gaming. It is the same industry, but with very different practices. I think it really fits both because it's very flexible.

I love technical support. I love them. They're awesome.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I think it was fairly complex. We'd never done anything like that before. There was another team that did the initial setup. It is just that through attrition, we lost them all; so I became the technical support.

Technical support is your friend. Technical support is wonderful. They're very helpful. They're very knowledgeable; and they can get you through most anything unless, of course, it’s a bug. In this case, they have to report it to their people.

I think the most important thing when you select a vendor is that it fits the business need. If the business isn't happy, it doesn't matter how much or how little you spend.