Broadcom Clarity Reviews

• Project list: exporting in excel for dashboard and other reports
• Advanced reporting: new feature used for simple reports and dashboards that can be scheduled, which has made project data much more accessible and timely
• Ideas: input and tracking of ideas
• Task list (within the project functionality): used by us to track project stages and deliverables

The near-immediate benefit was having all projects in one place. It has allowed for standardisation of reporting and statuses, and improved visibility across the organisation - particularly to senior management. The aggregate reporting that this enabled elevated our position in the eyes of senior management, as it has allowed us to provide more-informed, data-driven recommendations.

Their agile solution is separate from their PPM solution, and really should be available together. Also, integration capability with larger financial and resource management systems would allow more organisations to benefit from their portfolio functionality much earlier.

I have used it for five years.

Ironically, since going to the on-demand solution, we have had some inexplicable data and behaviour on our projects. The performance improvement that was promised was not as evident.

We took their 'on-demand' solution earlier this year. While it has been useful to just 'get to the problem' without having to get our SI involved, we are finding the amount of effort with their help desk trying.

We did not previously use a different solution. We were collecting singular project status reports on MS PPT, with little to no aggregate reporting.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward.

It was implemented by a vendor team. A huge lesson for us is to have our processes well defined - and preferably in use - before implementation. Because our PPM capabilities were so immature at the time, our team made many assumptions about how we would use the various functionalities and had those all implemented from the start. We have had a three-year journey of trying to roll this back.

• Make sure that you have clear and defined processes prior to implementation.
• Insist on an experienced and knowledgeable SI from CA PPM. They are worth spending the money on, and their advice, particularly on best practices, is invaluable.

There is a lot of potential for portfolio management functionality. However, integration functionality with other financial and resource management tools would go a long way, as it would allow for the input of the required information needed for portfolio management. For large(r) companies with established / preferred financial and resource management systems, it is unrealistic to expect them to move (quickly) to a new tool. For us, this has meant not using the portfolio management functionality at all.

The most valuable feature is work flow management. We really work with the business to make sure that we have an end-to-end reporting of the work flow tool for delivery for implementation and design for our customers.

We've been live now for three years, so now we're just really starting to get some really good data, which is helping drive head count, budgets, and cycle time. That data is probably the most important thing to us right now. It took us a while to get to the user adoption phase and get that data in there, but I would say that the output of it and then managing it to drive the business direction from this point forward is probably the most important aspect for us.

From an admin perspective on the business side, one thing I'd like to have is a drag-and-drop feature. I think that anytime you can maximize your effort and try to automate it, it definitely makes the admin user perspective a little bit better. 

Also, I would say the intuitiveness needs to grow even more exponentially than it has, and I think with the project hopper and things like that, you're going to see that type of vision grow. 

From an admin perspective, it needs to be more predictive. It's not as predictive as I would like to see.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We just upgraded to 14.2, and when we went from 13.1 to 13.3, we were very buggy. There were a lot of browser issues, performance issues, lag time, but this upgrade has been virtually seamless. A couple little tweaks here and there, but not in this version.

We started with a very small pilot in the central area. We expanded to the continental United States, and then we just brought on Canada, and also then looking to expand to Latin America. Within that, we have different groups that are using the tool in different ways, but still trying to report on a holistic view. I would say the scalability is definitely growing in an upward fashion.

I wasn't involved in the original setup, but the upgrade was much more simplistic than the first round. From a business perspective, it wasn't difficult.

I would look at ROI and really try to assess what type of information is going to drive the success of your company. If PPM could assist in doing that by either reducing cycle times or giving you real data in order to drive the direction of your business, then go with PPM.

The primary usage is for coastal location and project management. The performance is really good. 

I think with the solution that we have enough functionality out-of-the-box. We also try to use all of that functionality because it is aligned to our methodology and the way we use it for financial purposes. 

However, now we are turning to my next project with a giant framework, and maybe we need some agile functionality related to that.

For us, in Latin America, we use bookkeeping record because we have enough out-of-the-box functionality. 

Maybe we need to bring some financial executive reports to our directors and executives. Maybe we can improve the use of Jaspersoft.

We did have some trouble a couple months ago, but I do not know why because normally it is very stable. 

We did do an upgrade in the past couple of months to 15.1.

Yes, it scales well. In Latin America, we use just it alone. However, in Canada, we have another instance and they use it integrated with other solutions. 

The Latin American support could be better due to the language barrier. It is also a little bureaucratic. I know we have to put in a ticket, but we need immediate support sometimes; not in two weeks time, immediate support.

Not install, but I was involved in configuration of the limitations. It is a little complicated. A lot of fills. 

We were support by the CA team in Toronto, Canada.

We started evaluated some tools related to PPM. CA PPM accomplished our necessities, especially for Latin America.

We looked at HPE PPM. I can't remember why we did not chose them though.

Try the solution according to your necessities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Big name brand
• Proven solutions
• Theories
• Implementations
• Especially the functionality in their solutions. 

I don't specifically have a use case, I'm more on the sales end, of going to the federal government. For the federal government of Canada, this has been selected as the tool of choice for PPM solutions.

We find specifically in the federal government space, absolutely, the visibility is the number one thing. They can see where the bottlenecks are, they can see what their project statuses are, why are things being held up, etc.

I think specifically, with a couple of government departments, visibility - when they bill their clients back, when they do a cost recovery - from the financial specifics they can have something tangible and real to say. "Okay, this is how we spend most of this time, this was a net new requirement, this was maintenance, etc. So they can bill back appropriately and when the client questions them on it, they have that information available to them.

Reporting visibility for projects and on the resource management side as well.

We're just helping them start to roll out 15, so no comment here.

Stability is good. In the federal government of Canada there's a central hosted instance of the solution. It's been very good as far as maintenance and outages, there's nothing really negative to report.

Scalability has been good. The federal government of Canada is not enormous. We'll see use cases here this week, at the CA World conference, of JP Morgan, Chase, or huge organizations. We've worked with organizations with IT shops as low as 200 people, all the way up to probably 10,000 people so it's worked out very well.

I wasn't involved on the technical side of setup, but as far as assisting my clients with getting service base, making sure we had all of their organizational structure ready to go into the system, I was involved.

We're the consulting arm, so if it was complex or straightforward, we're either doing good or we're doing bad on our end. So I'd like to say it's good feedback. Straightforward.

I give it a ten. Like I said, the scalability is great. It has a small amount of competition in the space but for me it's an easy sale because it's been the selected software for that space in the federal government of Canada.

It's performing how it is. And I think the more they come out with new versions, they're closing those gaps on anything that does exist.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the quality of the database; the online database is transactional and we are able to get real-time data.

It has helped our organization in regards to the portfolio feature. We are now able to pull all the information together and have a consistent product across all the portfolios. We have various domains and different groups aiding our infrastructure, marketing and sales. Thus, being able to have all the information in one place helps us with the analytics, reporting and decision-making aspects. 

Our business area doesn't really use the system. It's just the IT department that uses the system that we're using. We collaborate with them by giving them some access so there is visibility for the projects that their business might want and then the IT team supports it.

As far as the performance is concerned, I haven't seen any issues.

Currently, we are using version 14.2. It's hard to say at this point but we have been able to get most of what we need out of the system; there is a list.

Cost and speed are important factors when selecting a vendor.

You should do your homework. Make sure that you understand what you're getting. This would be relevant for any solution. You should then talk to other companies or entities that are using this solution.

We are not using the SaaS version of the product, i.e., our specific company is not using the latest version but we do have a global company that's using it.

PPM provides the ability for staff (employees and contractors) in the entire IT organization to track time against specific investments and other work. And we can extract the data to analyze what our resources are working on. It also allows us to perform high-level resource planning.

By using PPM, we centralize where IT resources are tracking their time and eliminate the use of other tools such as spreadsheets.This enables us to gather data on what our resources are working on.

Reporting could be improved. Both the user interface and administration of Jaspersoft is very confusing and not user-friendly.

In my current organization, we have been using it for about two years.

We are on SaaS and system availability is close to 99%.

We have not had scalability issues with the application itself. However, we ran into issues with interface using XML Open Gateway (XOG) when we are injecting mass data into the application (such as resource assignment).

We use CA support and the support engineers are very knowledgeable about PPM. They have experts with deep knowledge in area where we have issues.

We did not have a previous solution.

We are on SaaS and the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do not deal with pricing or licensing.

I was not part of the evaluation process in this organization.

I strongly recommend to using CA Service for their expertise. Also, minimize the configuration as much as possible (stay out-of-the-box). Although PPM is highly configurable, getting to know how various functions work together in the tool is much more important than changing a label on a screen to meet a specific requirement!

It's an integrated product. We can do project management, strategic management, and resource management all in the same place. We don’t have to get sources from everywhere. This helps us make decisions faster.

The main benefits of using the SaaS version are its availability, and that we don't have to think about maintaining the systems.

We are just starting our implementation. We deployed it about a year ago, so we're still waiting to see what the benefit will be. Now that everybody is using a single tool, we'll hopefully get some data that will help us manage our resources better.

We could use expanded reporting capabilities because right now that is fairly limited in what it does. I just heard that in 15.2, they have more reporting capabilities; so that will be great.

It has been good so far in terms of stability.

It is highly scalable.

We use CA tech support all the time. They are very accessible. When I need them, they are available to address any issues that I have.

We had about 5 or 6 different ways to record time for work that we do. That is reason enough to move to a single solution.

The most important criteria when we select a vendor are their reputation and their strategic direction. I think we chose CA primarily because of their reputation.

I wasn't involved in the original set up. I think it's pretty simple because we're on SaaS.

Do your research. Make sure you understand what the business requirements are before deciding on a tool because a tool itself is just a tool.

For us, its most valuable features are about resource management, resource assignment, and time tracking.

It puts the right resource at the right place at the right time. Previously, what we were doing was kind of a manual process where it was based on relationships, and the sales rep would reach out to their specific technical person in order to talk to the customer. Now, since we have such a large pool and we're seen as being much more efficient to actually get the right resource with the right skill, not necessarily the one with the sales rep relationship, but who would actually know the most about it and possibly who was closest to the customer. It's one of our parameters that we have.

Improvement to the project hopper would be great. It's a feature that we could really benefit from.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We initially had some performance issues with some system down-time, but nothing recent. When they moved data centers, it gave us a lot more bandwidth and memory.

It's very scalable. We've been growing with it. We now have four different organizations on it.

They're very responsive. The call you back. They actually bother you if you're not as attentive as you should be, so that's actually really helpful. People are always knowledgeable. They'll walk you through the whole thing.

It was a long process. It took an awful lot of requirements, and I think the tendency of our company was to make it exactly what we wanted instead of looking to best practices.

You have to figure out your biggest need and pick the software based on it. A lot of times I think it's that one glamorous feature that people love that they want to go with, but I think you have to look across all the different requirements, weigh them, and take it from there.