Broadcom Clarity Reviews

The most valuable solutions for us are being able to share data across the organization to help use technology to drive our processes. We are trying to use it as our system of record for reporting, integrating with Salesforce and SAP so all of our reporting will come out of the system. That's the plan.

I love the grid-like portlet.

It allows us to share data because that's the whole point of having a solution like this. You can run a business out of Excel, but you can't share that information. So this is the best way to do upward reporting to executive management, and to have an integrated platform with both project management and resource management.

I think it's helped us become a little bit more standard globally.

We're looking at using it as a forecasting tool but we're still making steps in that direction, we are not fully using that capability.

I would love to see skills-based capacity planning. We're pretty mature in our resource management. We decreased the number of roles that we are using, but this actually hurt our perspective for forecasting capacity planning. Now, we can’t drill down to the levels of proficiencies within a role. There’s no way to incorporate that into the portfolio, so it doesn't really help us. We would like to be able to drill down to the skills level better.

We would like to see skills built into the Portfolios. This way we could do accurate resource and capacity factoring in the skills of our resources. Not all resources are alike in terms of ability and we do not want to over burden ourselves with multiple roles to distinguish skill level.

Scheduling needs improvement. If we look at our demand and capacity in Portfolios, all we have to go off of are roles which do not accurately tell us how many resources we have to do the work.

Stability is fairly good.

I think it’s scalable. We're looking to expand, bringing on several new groups, so we'll likely go from 300 users to 800 users pretty soon. We've been cleaning up things as we go along. We ended up removing multiple financial entities to merge them into a single entity. This was a big project for us, but I think it's going to help us scale.

I was involved in one aspect of the setup, but not the entire deployment. I think it was fairly complex, but what I did was more on the business side, not the technical side.

We did not consider any other vendors.

Understand how your business works, and know that the PPM tool can only do so much. You have to develop your processes to go along with the technology.

The most valuable features are project management, resource management, and idea management.

I run a PMO with a portfolio of initiatives, and we have to report on those to upper management to keep them abreast of the health of the products, critical issues, things that need to be escalated. To get the reporting, I need to ensure that the tool is easy to use for project managers.

It's really improved our organizational transparency. It gives us visibility into all of the projects and programs people are working on. That covers the health of the projects, financial health, resource allocation, etc.

The biggest area of improvement is reporting, though that’s going to be fixed in v14.3, which we’ll move to. There aren’t enough out-of-the-box, standard reports. The tools weren’t there for end users to write or create their own reports.

The user interface isn’t very intuitive for someone who’s not living in the product day in and day out.

Very stable, probably the most stable of any company where I’ve used it. It’s never gone down.

It’s very scalable – probably the most scalable for an enterprise that really wants to manage their portfolio of projects across the enterprise.

I’ve been working with it for about 15 years since it was Niku, then Clarity, then PPM.

We use our own technology team to support the solution, and if they can’t solve the issue they go to CA support.

I wasn't involved in the implementation.

It’s a very robust tool and really does everything we need it to do as a PPM tool, but the reporting has held back its adopting, as has the user interface. People tend to find folks who use it because they’re forced to be compliant and not because it’s their tool of choice.

Most obvious piece of advice is, don’t underestimate the effort in implementing a tool like this. Understand the maturity of the people in your organization relative to project management and discipline. The more mature they are, the easier it will be to sell. Make sure you’ve got the process down before you try to implement the CA PPM solution.

Capacity and demand management allows me to know if I have enough resources for all the projects that I have to do. It helps to drive the whole budget of the department.

It allows me to easily keep track of and report costs for the company in order to reach our profit and loss objectives. It’s a good tool to manage capacity and demand which ultimately impacts the profit and loss.

This is the first time I’m using a partition (one installation for the holding company which includes a partition for my company and our sister company). It would be nice to have more configuration options at the partition level. Resources are at the system level and for an administrator, which can become confusing when troubleshooting issues.

We started the implementation last year, and are still doing this.

I have used CA PPM in three separate companies. I have never had an issue with stability. However, I have always used on premise and not SaaS. In general, I’m not a fan of SaaS. If there are stability issues, I know it’s on our end.

I do not have any scalability issues.

Currently, my implementation partner (R2) has only used technical support when we ran into an issue during implementation.

I've always been using this and I wanted to continue. I implemented a Microsoft Project Server at a prior company, and it was not as good. Where I am now, I got to pick so I chose this.

I am currently using a CA Partner (R2) to assist with the implementation.

I look at usability. As a resource, I want to do the least amount of clicks and streamline processes. I have looked at other products, however, CA PPM is the only solution that will keep a managed service provider plan in sync with timesheets when a Project Manager deletes a task that has actuals on it. This was the best feature and a huge selling point for me.

Let your employees understand the benefits of CA PPM and show them how much it will help them to do their work. A tool should be used to make their lives easier and not treated as an annoyance.

We have some deployments of Broadcom Clarity PPM on the cloud and others on-premise.

We have many use cases for Broadcom Clarity PPM. We have some customers that are in government, they use it to manage IT projects. We have other customers that are from the petrochemical industry, they use the solution for investment management and capital management.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is robust and flexible, and all the functionality sets are in one place.

Reports generated through Jaspersoft could be more integrated into the solution. Today, by default, users must navigate out of their context to run a report or a consultant must create a special portlet to bring reports into context. This could be an OOTB functionality. 

There should be support for contract management. Clarity manages all kinds of investments very well, but there is no native functionalities to manage contracts between the companies regarding these investments. 

I have been using Broadcom Clarity PPM for 17 years.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is stable.

The scalability of Broadcom Clarity PPM is good.

We have approximately 10,000 people using this solution.

I rate the technical support from Broadcom Clarity PPM a four out of five.

The initial setup of Broadcom Clarity PPM is complex.

There are different licensing models with Broadcom Clarity PPM. With the software as a service model, you pay as you go, and if you are on-premises, you can buy a perpetual license and an annual fee for maintenance.

I rate the price of Broadcom Clarity PPM a three out of five.

For people new to the solution, I would advise them to keep it simple and start using default functionality.

I rate Broadcom Clarity PPM a nine out of ten because it has a lot of functionality, is very flexible, and is highly stable.

We're using it for project and for portfolio planning, and we're continuing to use it for financial investment planning in the future.

We've got four different instances on it, but we've only rolled it out in my area, corporate IT, and for 150 users. 

It performs well.

We've been lacking a project management system that we could easily pull data out of, as leads were putting it in. So the users were not updating the systems, whatever system they were using, as much.

It allows me to keep track of the projects, residual location, it gives me the ease of getting status reports out, and checking risks and issues.

I don't have anything specific to note right now. We're not using all the features, functionality yet.

It's stable.

Technical support is typically on par, gives you quick answers, and gets back with you relatively quickly.

There's always an issue or two that hangs out there, that does not get resolved, but for the most part we get good service.

We were using Artemis. We switched because it was not meeting our needs. They weren't using it in the way that they wanted to be using it. It didn't have the functionality.

We are using software service, so it's been pretty straightforward.

Oracle Primavera was on the shortlist as was Attask. But CA PPM is a more comprehensive enterprise type of solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is longevity.

I give CA PPM a nine out of 10 because there's always room for improvement, but they gave a good quality solution.

I would recommend it.

We manage projects, financials, labor actuals, timesheet entry, and cost plans for the entire company.

It makes the whole lifecycle of project management a lot easier than using legacy systems, which we are retiring every few months because of PPM. We have taken archaic reporting, Excel reporting systems, and are replacing them with PPM functionality in old timesheet entry systems with PPM timesheet entry and labor actuals, which are being calculated directly in PPM.

• Timesheet entry
• Cost plans
• Calculating labor actuals and financials
• Forecasting

I really like this roadmapping, which is huge. It is like the future of cost plans, making it all Excel-like, grouping and all that fancy stuff. 

It is getting better. Once in awhile, PPM will go down. It does not go down very much at all, and now that we have over close to 7,000 users logging in, it has only gone down once in several months. So, it is pretty good.

CA Communities need a lot of improvement. I like the support desk. They try and answer our questions quickly and efficiently, and usually they do a pretty good job. I would give them a B. 

I think CA Communities could be greatly improved. I would give them a C minus. 

We are On Demand, so CA does the setup.

Go for it. I like PPM. I love the fact that it is very flexible. I am the lead engineer with enhancements, development, developing new portlets, anything that has to be added on, and integrating data, such as ETL processing.

The primary use case for our product is definitely the project management and portfolio management part of the tool, in that we have never really had anything like this before at our company. Previously, it was a lot of shoot from the hip, not a ton of follow-up on major projects, or at least proper follow-up. It has just been a way to prioritize for us, if adding project x, what does that do to projects a, b, and c at the front-end. 

We are still learning a lot with it. It is definitely a big culture change for our company in that we have never really had to do this before. I would say it is the accountability piece. There are just a lot of the pieces that we have tried to do and we have tried to do unsuccessfully, so we are using this product and so far it has been a success, but we still have not really pushed it out very hard yet. So, more to come.

We are still learning what it is going to do and how it is going to help. We have goals for how it is going to help. It has a lot of the lookback and a lot of the analysis of where our funding going, is it going there properly, and are we stretching our people too thin? 

There is still a lot to be determined but it brings everything back full circle to make sure we are properly managing everything from the finance side to the people side.

The new UX is very user-friendly and simple. The new user interface has been great, I think it has been easier. It will be an easier way to get the product out and used more frequently and more real-time, whereas mainly a lot of only the IT people were able to use the old interface well, just from their background. With the new user interface, it will help a lot.

I am still wrapping my head around the whole process. This is still a newer aspect for me compared to what I have done in the past. I really can't comment on this, because I am still learning all the features that are available within this and using them well and efficiently. I think once I get my head around it and how it will work for our organization, I would probably be able to give a better comment.

Still to be determined. I would say so far so good. I do not really have any complaints about it, but I probably can't give a very detailed answer.

Scalability is massive. It is awesome. It is definitely something we have never done at our organization. It is just steering the ship that way. If the product is a 10, we're probably only using it at a one or a two right now with everything that is available. So, it is still to be determined.

Our old solution was pretty much Excel, and we really did not have it. For a health system, we are now facing a lot more cost pressures, and needing to spend our dollars way more efficiently than we ever had to. Other organizations or sectors have already cut a lot of their costs. Healthcare has lagged behind in this, mainly because we did not have to in the past, and now we are at that point. In looking at that, and really analyzing what we do and how we spend, we need to be more on our forefront now. That is why we ending up investing.

It seemed pretty straightforward.

It was based on our enterprise manager's recommendation from another system that we had talked to. I do not really know all of the background that went behind that, but I know this came to us. This was really one of the only products we had looked at.

It was just the next step where we as an organization needed to go. We were very impressed. It was really getting our organization to buy into the process more than the product. The product, having all of the features which are available, is the reason that we wanted to go that route.

I would absolutely recommend this product. Just the capability of it is really blowing my mind so far. It is more than anything we have ever done. We have worked with Microsoft Project and used Excel spreadsheets in my department. So, this is just blowing our minds, everything that we can pull together, and how much more efficient it is.

I am the backup for our project management office in that I assist our project manager, getting out and helping all our project managers, and everybody from IT. I am in our innovate office, which is basically, project management. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Accessibility would be my number criteria. Helping us out and getting us going.

Primarily we're using it for 

• project management
• status tracking
• resource allocation tracking
• and timesheets and resources for our project management team.

And we're just starting to actually roll it out to our legal team. Yes, that is correct. Our legal team is actually going to use the Project Object in PPM for tracking their litigation cases.

It has performed well.

It's a kind of one-stop shop repository of all of our project statuses and what everybody is doing. So we don't have multiple systems that have to track time and status, and risks and issues.

I think it's very configurable. However we want to change something with out-of-the-box configuration, it's pretty simple to do.

The expandability of the new UX for the majority of what we can do on the classic UI side.

Stability is very good.

We haven't really tested scalability yet. But we will be with this little "legal team" project, and we'll see how it scales to a completely different demographic of users using the interface.

Technical support is very good. I'm happy with the response time and they are definitely knowledgeable.

We didn't have any centralized PPM solution. Everybody was just using Microsoft Project for their own thing. We needed an overarching solution to give visibility on what everybody was doing, and what we can do as an enterprise.

Complex.

We probably should have bitten off a little bit less of the sandwich to begin with. Our implementer was more of a solutions expert and a consultant than they were a trainer. I think we were looking for more of a trainer than somebody to just tell us how we need to set it up. It was less collaborative than I would've liked.

I was not a part of that evaluation. I'm going to say "yes", we evaluated other solutions, but I don't know who they were.

I have two words regarding the new UX: Love it.

When evaluating other vendors, the most important thing is a lot of the professional services, because my organization is not inherently a technical organization. We are a restaurant company. We don't staff a lot of technical folks. So probably the number one priority is that technical professional services offered.

I give the solution an eight out of 10 because I think the classic UX is a little bit clunky. Obviously the new UI is taking over. But also obviously, everything we can do in the classic UI cannot be done yet in the new UI. So we're waiting.

In terms of advice, have your specific requirements of what you need upfront. That way, you're not going to be swayed by all of the cool little gadgets that you could use. Know what you do want to use upfront, and then all the cool gadgets can come later.