Broadcom Clarity Room for Improvement

Lowell Wetzel - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Cambia Health Solutions

One of the things that have always been a bit painful is the integration with reporting utilities. The current integration is with Jaspersoft, and there are a number of difficulties with that. If you're using out-of-the-box fields and everything, it is a bit slow and clunky. It has a drag-and-drop interface for the users. On the backend side, there is a report designer. They haven't given or allowed me any training on it yet. So, it has been a bit limited in its features. On one of the earlier report utilities, they had one called Actuate, which had VBA as its base programming language, and you could do quite dynamic things behind the scenes, whereas the Jaspersoft interface seems rather locked. So, you're limited in your options. Being a programmer, you like to have room to be able to invent and create rather than just being limited to a few selection boxes.

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Gaurav Datar - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Architect at Infosys

One of the major pain points for me when it comes to Broadcom Clarity PPM is the new UI. The new UI is very good in terms of functionality and the drag and draw features, but it's not very responsive. When I say that it's not very responsive, what I mean is that sometimes, the tool is not very user-friendly. For example, a user saves a value on the form, but the tool doesn't give any indication to the user that the value has been saved. Some users are moving from the classic UI to the new UI, and end up getting confused because on the classic UI, when you click "Save", it'll save the information and you'll get an indication that it was saved. With the new UI, it auto saves the information, but it doesn't give an indication in the form of a popup box that "this form has been saved", or any type of message indicating that the information was successfully saved. It's been confusing for users who move to the new UI because of that. The users don't understand when the values are being saved or not being saved, even if there's an auto-save feature in the new UI.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom Clarity PPM is fine-grained security control on the new UI, because currently there's free level security, but it's based on the group, and I would like to have access to the individual phase and the users to lock a specific phase. For that type of security, higher level security is required, which is available on the classic UI, but not available on the new UI. The new UI interface should also be a little bit more responsive. Currently, it's responsive and it's fast, but whenever it saves information, it doesn't show any notification, and that can be very confusing for users.

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MohammadJarrar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Clarity PPM Technical Consultant at Al Rajhi Bank

Broadcom Clarity PPM has some areas for improvement, particularly its dashboard, because it's too slow. The look and feel of the platform need to be enhanced. The UX or user experience of Broadcom Clarity PPM also needs to be improved, e.g. sometimes when you need to do something on it, you need to click three or four times for the action to go through, instead of clicking just once.

An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom Clarity PPM is being able to communicate through the dashboard. If the dashboard enables us to communicate and shoot the message there, that would be amazing.

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Buyer's Guide
Broadcom Clarity
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Broadcom Clarity . Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Kiran  Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Head - Retail & CPG at Infosys

Mostly, the collaboration could be improved as well as a little bit on the data analytics part. This is based on feedback coming from the customers. I don't have any issues with the tool, but these are the use cases where clients will probably want to see some more advanced features, and the feedback has actually gone back to Broadcom also. We work closely with them, so I think they are aware of it. Broadcom is working on those features, but compared to other PPM tools, those are some of the areas that PCR can definitely be improved upon.

In the next release, I would like to have a little bit more functionality on chatbots in Clarity PPM, especially for support requests, such as for the most commonly used support tickets that people could resolve themselves. That's an area customers ask the most about. That's the common feedback, based on questions from them.

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Nishant Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Practice Head - Wipro Digital - PPMS at Wipro Limited

Broadcom Clarity PPM could improve by adding advanced reporting in the tool. There are a lot of out-of-the-box reports, but I would like to see more advanced reporting.

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AD
IT Consultant at Abinvest Swiss Fiduciaria Switzerland

Among things to be improved, Clarity can really work on its SAP interface. The current interface lacks out-of-the-box connectors for different applicators in the system. Therefore, this requires external support, which is beyond our expertise. In-house development is done for the interface, but as the system becomes complex, there is a building need to maintain the necessity of updates. If the updates aren’t maintained, then the system might be compatible. Additionally, the report generation process using a different software poses difficulties, leading to the need for external consultancy to create specific reports. Certain features, also face compatibility issues with our existing system. Despite these limitations, we find the system satisfactory overall, although a learning curve exists, especially for those unfamiliar with its particularities. 

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it_user778710 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT Project Portfolio at Owens-Illinois, Inc.

Ultimately, I would like to see them keep moving in the direction that they are, and get everything over into the new UX, to modernized portfolio management; To get all of the project management capabilities moved over into the new UX. 

Also, they should continue to listen to their customers for influence and feedback.

I wish patches would be quicker since we're a SaaS customer, and just be a non-event, so we don't have to go through a whole - essentially - upgrade cycle, just to do a patch. As a SaaS customer, I'd like the patch to just happen.

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it_user779232 - PeerSpot reviewer
PPM Product Owner at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are still on 14.3. We have not used the new UX. I did laugh at Kurt's presentation yesterday, because he said, "You know what? Three years ago, we were up here, and I was standing in front of a bunch of PowerPoint slides. Now we actually have the functionality behind it," because that was my observation. Two years ago, they were basically just screen mocks, and it all looked great, but what do you do?

My concern with the new UX is that my core users, the folks who are in Clarity day in and day out, are not going to get the full benefit of the new UX until we have OBSS and all of the other functionality available. I understand the need to tailor the new UX to make time tracking easier, make resource management easier, and do those kinds of things. I get that, but folks are going to track their time anyway, because they want to get paid.

The most vocal folks in my stakeholder community are those day-in day-out PMO analysts and resource managers. I struggle also from a maintenance and support perspective. Now, I am going to be maintaining both new UX screens, which the blueprints make look like it is going to be really easy, but we would still have to be maintaining new UX screens as well as classic views for those functionalities that are not yet available in the new UX.

I have this idea. We currently have the ability to allocate from assignments. Something that we are doing in our organization is we have created a report which we give back to the resource managers, "Hey, based on the last three months of actuals, here is what your work projection looks like." 

I would love to see that go the next step forward and just allocate from actuals. If you can look at it and say, "Okay, based on actuals for the last six months, here is what we think this is going to look like." That at least gives the resource manager a place to start, and a way to have a conversation. Particularly, as we get into agile teams, those teams are working on the same thing for extended period of time. It is not like they're on and off. It is more of the agile approach, where it is ongoing, continuous improvement, and deployment. That is something that I think would be interesting, and I do not know if it is something that CA has looked at before.

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it_user779034 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We are so configured and so not out-of-the-box that we have not been able to utilize a lot of the functionality because we are so customized. It does not work like we would like for it to work, but we know that we are mostly responsible for that. We want to move away from this and move back to industry standards.

If you want to transform to agile, these are the roles that should be in agile: 

  • You need your scrum master.
  • You need your team. 
  • These are the ways it should be mapped into PPM.
  • This is the data you will want. 

It is almost like giving us those little details that we all kind of scratch our head and go alright, how would we do that? They have tested this. They have gone through lessons learned with other companies. Share that, so we are not making the same mistake.

They should say, "Hey, we have companies that did this. It did not work. You might want to consider doing this." Almost like a little cheat sheet on how to bring the systems together and things to think about. Because, like our company, we didn't know what we didn't know yet, so we are taking very infant steps and we are getting stuck on some really simple questions that I am sure that CA has resolved. 

However, we want to know. Share them with us!

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it_user558096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project IT Leader - Project Management at Honeywell Aerospace

We're pretty new so I don't know all the capability that the tool has. From what I'm hearing here, I see there's a lot more capabilities. We are running with version 14.3, straight out of the box. I don't think I've explored everything it can do. I think one of the things that I would like to see is more workflow. I would like to see more ability to send out communications from the tool, feedback to remind people, and let them know the things that they need to do. That would be very helpful. There are a lot of fields in the tool. When people first see it, they are overwhelmed by the magnitude of it. It probably could be more customized and configurable to the site so that we don't throw the stuff out there and people get overwhelmed by it. At the same time, I know it gives flexibility. I think it probably can be managed. I just don't have the technical side of it to see if we can do that.

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it_user778968 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're looking at adding the Agile piece to it. I want to make sure that that integration is very smooth. And I'm here this week, at CA World, to see how that's going to play out for us. So, it's understanding, when we have multiple customers using both Waterfall and Agile, how that can come together, because we are still supporting HR, finance, and business planning for their outputs. Regardless of your methodology, we're going to be giving them streamline information.

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RR
Experienced Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Whenever that second instance of Clarity came about, it was overwhelming even to people who were accustomed to working with program management tools. There were so many data fields that could potentially be leveraged, so many kinds of internal metrics. They actually brought in an outside consulting team.

I can't recall the name of the team, and where they were from. I remember they were from down South. They were actually on-premises for a week or so. Then, they came back periodically just to fine-tune things. I interacted with them on some occasions, as they wanted to pick my brain on how I was leveraging it to track applications and to run high level reporting for management on just basic metrics and also initially on just program management.

Overall, I found the tool to be fairly straightforward. That said, for people who did want to create their own reports, whatever instance we had, a lot of people found it difficult, and what they typically ended up doing is getting training.

They're very, very smart, certainly smarter than me, where they would come to me as a resource and say, "Hey, you seem to have a knack for this tool. Can you create a report that kind of sort of does this?" I would say, "Sure." Then, I would knock it out and they would say, "Great." Then, they would have a customized report that met their needs, where they could kind of fire at will and run the report whenever they wanted it to. However, many people didn't find it as easy as I did.

Many roles that I've had was the role of a financial analyst. There's been a number of sales organizations, sales organizations that I've supported over time. These are organizations that'll have anywhere from a couple hundred to as many as almost several thousand salespeople, the people who support them, et cetera. One of the organizations that I supported was the main sales force. These are like your rank and file sales representatives who go out and just sell equipment, that sells services, et cetera. It's everything from your entry-level sales reps, all the way to your highest-performing sales reps, all the supervisory management, and all the industry VPs and sales VPs, et cetera, right up to the highest levels of the sales organization for the United States. They had a variety of almost competing tools that were used to consolidate their prospects, and with their pipelines, et cetera. Salesforce had already been installed in Europe with great success.

There, you have, obviously, different languages, you have different management styles, organizational structures, et cetera, and yet they were able to install and make use of, Salesforce quite successfully. They actually did it fairly quickly. For us, Europe included Eastern Europe, Russia, all of North Africa, and the Middle East - they all installed Salesforce and did so fairly quickly and successfully. However, there was great resistance in North America. The primary reason was that Salesforce was a cloud-based technology. There was tremendous resistance in both the Canadian and the US communities to have anything other than something that was internal inside of our firewall.

The Salesforce people were saying, "We work with governments. We work with everything from defense contractors, to military organizations, to intelligence organizations. There's nothing to fear. This is the future." Yet there was tremendous resistance. It wasn't until someone at the highest levels of the corporation said, "We’ve got Europe covered. We got developing markets covered. North America, get together and get on board with Salesforce. That way, we have unified technology worldwide." Meanwhile, I was actually taking these two competing systems, where the sales reps focused on equipment and then secondarily services, as opposed to another sales organization that would focus on services and then would periodically think about selling equipment.

There were competing philosophies and their prospects resided in two different systems. What I would do is developed a knack for taking these two data sets, exporting them out of the two systems, smashing them together, removing the overlapping or duplicate records, then being able to present to management, "You have anywhere between an $8 to $9 billion pipeline for the next nine months. Assuming that you close 20% to 25% of your deals, this is what this might be. You're in striking distance of achieving these types kinds of services, signings, or equipment signings." Management got really, really excited about this. Then, what I did after that was that became the basis, the underlying data, that smashed together data, became the data that we ultimately fed into Salesforce.

The reason why I'm giving this background is one of the things that Salesforce did that was very, very clever, is allowed just four people to take data and create a shell. What they did is they said, when they were doing the introduction to our team, they said, "There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data fields that are used by our clients all over the globe, but what we're going to do, based upon the data set that you have in the present, we're only going to create this shell or this instance of Salesforce, and we're only going to use 75 data fields." That, to me, was very, very powerful. Even if they were data fields that were using different nomenclature, it was considered a standard naming convention that Salesforce was familiar with. As time went by, we began expanding, making use of a greater and greater quantity of data fields, and being able to slice and dice, if you will, data in greater levels of detail and complexity. It was easier for rank and file, whether you were finance, or information technology people, or salespeople, sales reps, management, whatever, everybody was able to get their heads around a tool that was becoming more and more sophisticated as the months went by as opposed to starting off with saying, "There are 300 possible data fields, and metrics, and calculations, or whatever, but we're only going to use 35 of them, or 50 of them, or whatever." The fact that everybody can see them is very, very intimidating. That was one of the reasons for the pushback in our organization when Clarity was rolled out. People could see all these data fields. Either the implementation wasn't good or the consultants that we were dealing with weren't very thoughtful. However, when people saw all the possible data fields that they had, it was overwhelming.

That was consistent feedback that I heard through a variety of channels and there was resistance due to that. If there's any feedback that I would give is that it's one thing to say, "Here are all the possibilities." However, then, when the salespeople marry up with the folks who are going to do the implementation, they need to be able to say, "So what are your immediate needs? Maybe we'll throw some additional data fields in there to kind of spice things up." Then, as time goes by, reveal additional data entry options, either for people who are making the actual entries or what have you. That's something that I observed firsthand.

I have seen interfaces that are much hipper, and much more intuitive. The layouts might have a more modern or current touch and feel. With the instance that we had, it seemed like it was just a little outdated. When you were clicking on hypertext links, as opposed to a button. Now, these are nuanced differences, however, having a menu where you'd see a header, underneath the header, you would see a blue font that was a hypertext link. Then, depending on whether you wanted to look at application data, whether you wanted to enter your time, or you wanted to look up specific projects and dig into those projects, into the sub-elements that make up all the different views within a given project, or you wanted to get to a data export function, or whatever, it was all a function of finding your overall category and then find underneath that the appropriate link.

I don't know how old that interface was. Maybe it's still like that now, or a bit more modern, however, from my experience, a more modern interface would be a bonus. 

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it_user558186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see the ability to connect with other kinds of reporting engines like Tableau, or other kinds of BI tools. That would be crucial for us. We use those tools anyway, so we end up exporting data from PPM, and then importing it into those tools. It would be better if we could do it directly.

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it_user481104 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Program Manager IV at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

A huge pain-point is the Jaspersoft reporting. This is a new functionality that recently replaced the Business Objects reporting. Jaspersoft is extremely cumbersome and our end users dislike it, and are frustrated when using the criteria filter because many times the results returned do not match the results in the main system when using the inbuilt searches. It's a very frustrating function.

Another issue which almost became the deal breaker in choosing this system is scheduling. If you require scheduling resources across multiple projects for specific days dependent on the task, PPM is not designed for that. It allows you to see just the allocation across projects but not tasks. This becomes a real problem for a professional services group when resources are working on multiple projects at one time, and need to be onsite for different tasks so you need to be able to view across projects, and for multiple resources at one time. PPM has no calendar view for all the resources and what project tasks that are working on. We had to spend a lot of money customizing an add-on solution that could give us this calendar view.

A few other items that could improve, the time-tracking functionality is locked down and not very customizable. PPM gives you the ability to configure two attributes to help categorize the time, but that is all. It would be good to be able to add more flexibility to this module. Lessons learned module is only for lessons within a project. It is not possible to have this lesson be outside a project as a general lesson across the board. Also, there is no “template” that you can select for budget, there is only the ability to populate it from staffing so if that differs and in some cases it has to when you sell an engagement to a customer for one price but will not be changing that “budget” because it is a fixed contract, but you need to staff more hours.

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MartinQuiroga - PeerSpot reviewer
Value Stream Management specialist & Solution Leader at Tricise at OdPe Business Solutions

Setup could be made easier.

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it_user797940 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of EPMO at Telstra

I think the new road mapping feature that's coming out shortly - and available now, but obviously continues to progress - I think the product moving more to that grid base, so that Excel look and feel is how it's going. The app style of the new UI is absolutely fantastic. It's the right way to go. Our users will love it, so I think they should continue along that journey.

I think there's still a little bit of opportunity that we can do some stuff better in relation to the financial part of it; just that easier integration, that look and feel. Our project managers, and obviously finance people, love to interface and use of Excel. The more we can get CA PPM to behave in a similar way, which we're already starting to gain in that path, will be absolutely fantastic.

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it_user779199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead with 1,001-5,000 employees

I want to see the mobile product. And, if possible, integration for SMS functionality.

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it_user779187 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think a lot of things that you'd want to see were touched upon in the roadmap yesterday, which we attended here at the CA World conference, yesterday. With the new UI, the Sub-Object part which they plan to bring into the new UI, I think a lot of customers would be happy to implement the new UI for their companies.

Maybe they could improve the mobile app. I think right now it only offers time sheet. If they can integrate a lot of other components into it - and not only CA PPM, a lot of other companies are now focusing on the mobile apps - I think that would be helpful for the users.

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it_user373071 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Development Manager at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Ease of use, the user experience has been our biggest obstacle to overcome. I've seen some of the things that they're coming out with next year, and I applaud all of those. It's been long overdue to get that type of user experience into place. I'm going to say user experience, not to sound like a broken record, scalability, we have a constantly growing, we probably grow organically 10% to 15% a year in our user base, so we've got to be able to scale. Stability and ease of support, I'm an application development manager, so we've got to be able to put in some changes, upgradability and things of that nature. All of that kind of comes together for my perspective, that's what I look for.

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Fabio Nicida - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Agila Tecnologia

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. 

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it_user93960 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, IT at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

They've got to come up to the year 2015 on user interface. It's really just not there. We've recently been looking at other products, wondering if we want to make a move. We don't really think that's the right answer, but at the same time we're hoping to see something here to help us with what we're doing.

They've really failed to innovate on the user-interface perspective. The complexities of the product are it's strength and it's weakness. We have a poor level of user adoption right now, just because it's so hard for people who who go in just once a week to do something. It's difficult for project managers to go in and remember how to do it, get through things in the user interface. We're kind of hoping to see something here at this conference, future road maps for user interface improvements, HTML5, whatever, to lessen some of those qualms.

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it_user779022 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO Principal at GAF Materials / Building Materials

A little bit better financial management. Right now it is more accountant-related, the financial management - of course, it's finance, it has to be financial. But it should be a little bit easier for project managers.

To give an example, if you have a non-labor cost that you're tracking, let's say a software expenditure or license subscription, tracking that you need to manage as a resource in the project plan, that adds a lot of effort for product managers to maintain. If they can come with ways of simplifying the cost and financial management, that would be one thing that we would really like.

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it_user558252 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Programmer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are in a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. If in some way, we could access the database through that, it would be great.

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it_user558120 - PeerSpot reviewer
PPM Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are some challenges that we are facing in terms of Jaspersoft software. I talked to the product team and they are seriously working on that. I am hoping that another 6 months from now, there will be improvements in the reporting and performance areas that will be very helpful for the user community.

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AK
Information Systems Engineer at Masarat Technologies

The architecture must be improved.

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SC
Service Delivery Manager at Syntech

The solution could improve the way the workflow is developed. I think they could be more dynamic because they are in a way static. They're very powerful, but they don't have any interaction with end-users.

In a future release, I'd like to see more stable chargeback procedures, because they are not as synchronized as they should be. Sometimes they do not provide real-time information. We have to use another solution to receive this information.

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SC
Service Delivery Manager at Syntech

In terms of what could be improved, the end user interface could be improved to be more intuitive, because we sometimes have issues with customization. Sometimes we are not able to customize everything for the end user's interface, and they require more customization. We should be able to perform a deeper customization here.

Additionally, I'd like to see more compatibility with the Active REST connection because we have worked with SOAP and WSDL but we need more compatibility with the Active REST connection.

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it_user779019 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director Project Delivery Office at McKesson

CA PPM is a mature product. We have used it for years, but we have had some challenges. Maybe it was the way we implemented it. 

I do not think I can add anything to Agile Central, because we are new to it. I think we are really just trying to learn and leverage the functionality that is there, so I do not know yet.

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it_user558264 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Architect at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

We're on a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. It would be great if we could somehow, some way access the database through that.

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it_user558060 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Ppm at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

I recently went to a conference to see what upcoming features are going to be. I want to see what the trade offs are. With any change, you're always dropping some type of feature or capability. The key is knowing, in advance, what that new feature is so you can make the proper plans, address those changes, and communicate them to ensure good collaboration. If we do that, we'll be successful.

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it_user558243 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Information Technology at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

I don't know what I need right now, but we're implementing a lot of tools and we need to make sure that we can integrate. So, I’d like to see more APIs and maybe some improved UI with the Jaspersoft Business Objects Reporting side of it, to increase customer adoption.

I have not given it a perfect rating because of the UI of the reporting in Jaspersoft; just some UI issues, I guess.

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it_user558315 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think for us, we're still pretty immature from an organization standpoint in rolling it out. What we need is assistance from CA to help us roll out other features of the product that we already have and to utilize them to get the full value.

CA PPM is not easy to use. I'm a project manager and I have to use it every single week. Navigating around the menus to find what you're looking for is quite difficult. It takes several clicks to get to where you want to go.

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GG
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees

I would love the ability to add my own functionality to the UI. Right now, I have to play with HTML portlets and have to pick the system out. I can't add a button on the UI to go do some work, so I am always working really hard around it to get extra feature sets.

They get a nine out of 10 rating, because they won't let me put a button on the UI.

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it_user778965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user572901 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager / Management Consultant at Edmonton Police Service

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.

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it_user558147 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Portfolio Manager/CA PPM Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user348435 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Clarity PPM Consultant at Rego Consulting

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.

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VS
Practice Manager & Solution architect at Wipro Technologies

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

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it_user462963 - PeerSpot reviewer
Client Project Manager/Coordinator II at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user558135 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at Guardian life insurance

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.

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it_user558339 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Enginer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user558411 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Systems Delivery at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user348348 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Program Management at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user345678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT Business Office at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user779148 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user779004 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual

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. 

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it_user778566 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Premier Health

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.

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it_user779049 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT Service Transition at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user778569 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'm interested in something that would give you flexibility in loading the data to PPM. We have some other utilities, which CA is providing, but sometimes it takes time for users to enter the data into Clarity, the resource management piece. 

They need something so that if we, say, send some sheets to users, or for the scenario where not everybody has access to Clarity, but are part of planning; those people should be able to upload data directly to Clarity. 

We are using another tool to do reporting, or load data inside Clarity. If CA provided that, that would be great. 

The reporting piece is really slow right now, with Jaspersoft. CA is doing a lot on that. They have opened a port that we can connect from an outside tool to the Clarity data warehouse, database. But it would be great if they could do something on Jaspersoft because sometimes it takes 20 minutes to for a report to show up; not all, but some do.

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it_user558129 - PeerSpot reviewer
Portfolio Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I don't know if it's missing or not, but I'm anxious to learn more about Agile and using the tool with Agile. We're starting to use that methodology more and more within our organization. So how do we use the tool more effectively for that?

Also I'm looking for some more enhanced portfolio management capabilities.

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MS
IT Governance & Performance Management Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Up to version 12.x the GUI was still Web 1.0, and although it has been redesigned with release 13.x-14.x it is bit behind other solutions. (Based on the evaluation of 15.1 release I can confirm that UX has really improved). Replacement of Business Objects with Jaspersoft BI and its full integration within CA PPM is still not finalized but gets better with every release.

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it_user558042 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

It needs to provide a more mobile-friendly user experience. There could maybe be a little bit more around Jaspersoft reporting. I know Jaspersoft is kind of decoupled from PPM, but reporting is one of the big draws for us. It would be nice to be able to do all our project management, and then report on it, using the same tool. If they could keep building out Jaspersoft, that would be great.

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it_user558249 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Management IS Analyst at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see some of the automations that I've implemented included as part of the tool. For example, prior to a couple weeks ago, our administrator would have to go in every week and manually open next week's time sheet and close an old time sheet. We got some code that automated that process for us. I don't see why that couldn't be something that was just a part of the tool.

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it_user558168 - PeerSpot reviewer
Clarity PPM Developer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see a continued focus on the Data Warehouse and the reporting tool. There is a big opportunity there and some things are still not quite there when you compare it to other solutions that have turned out well.

Currently the Data Warehouse does not store/archive historical data. Anytime you run the Full Load to load it with data, the table is truncated and reloaded with a specific time interval of data. It would be really useful if that data stayed in there and did not need to be truncated so, over time, you would build a system with historical data that you could purge from the transactional tables.

Regarding Jaspersoft, the tool itself is lacking from a user community, especially when compared to BOXI and more mature tools. Our users already use BOXI and can do so much more when it comes to building reports on their own.

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it_user558348 - PeerSpot reviewer
Strategy Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see the advent of personas and making the tool more customer-centric. My needs are different than the next person's needs and the tool should know that and adjust the content that it shows me. That flexibility in the tool, that marginalization, would be very important. It meets our needs, but we're changing and evolving and the tool is coming along but it's kind of playing catch up.

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it_user558600 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Excers

So the only thing that’s missing is that the dashboards do not go into enough detail. The user interface and the user experience can be improved.

One of the things they're doing now is they're putting that new user experience in, a new user interface which is very simple and easy to use. It's something that people can understand easily without training, but it's still very limited. It only covers a little bit of the product. It covers just very basic project and task management. You cannot go as deep into it into the more detailed task management, or more projects, or in idea management, and so on. I'd like to extend that user experience into other areas and deeper.

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it_user498396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Planning Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user383805 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Software and Support Services at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user778998 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user778614 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at Statpathfinder Consulting

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

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it_user558366 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Solution Expert (CA PPM) at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user558366 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Solution Expert (CA PPM) at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user383811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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GJ
Consultant at Ericsson

The application memory management and responsiveness of this JAVA product can be improved, especially in the peak usage times. A better way to track, analyze and tweak the heap memory would be a great addition to this PPM tool

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RU
Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The solution is lacking in certain integrations but that's generally the way because each organization has different preferences. I feel like they could be using more updated technology, like EPA and things like that. I think those are the aspects that they might improve because we need to keep up with the times in order to be relevant with the current technology, and with what is happening in the world of technology. The standards are there and it takes a lot of time for every organization to move their core base to newer technology. I understand that aspect as well, but they could look into it.

There are many technologies that leverage JavaScript, for example, such as NodeJS and AngularJS and all of that and JSON as well. We're not using any of them which is understandable because they use Java. I'm younger, so in college I dealt with newer technologies like the NodeJS which I like. These are technologies that they may implement in the future.

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KF
Process Manager

It would be good for them to work on the user interface to make it more interactive. They started with on something, but the functionality is not yet in a state where I would say, "Oh wow, use that one." 

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it_user778902 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at IBERIABANK

The only real improvement from my side - I'm spoiled by things like Trello, with the very easy user interface, things like Basecamp - it's very much a static software project. If I was to focus on something it would be that user interface; making that something that is a joy to use, instead of something that feels like data entry.

If there was more drag and drop type functionality that would be fun, but it works well for what it's supposed to do.

The second thing - and this is specific to our company - integrate it with CA Service Desk Manager so that, when you have time for a ticket or when someone gets assigned a ticket, in PPM it automatically shows that they have to account for that: they would both enter time in the past and, also, that this is going to take them time in the future.

As far as a tool that communicates with resources, with individuals - what they're supposed to do next or what action items came out of what meeting - it's not really used that way. Probably I could envision a way that it would be used that way. Until it's as easy as sending an email, it probably won't be utilized by the resources in that manner.

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it_user779088 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Blueprints. I'd also like to see the user interface simplified, and to have a lot of templates available on each blueprint.

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it_user558462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director - Territory Manager at Netready CCA

I don't have a deep knowledge of the product, so I am probably not the best person to give you feedback on that. That would be more the function of our PMO head.

I know that there is a kind of normal evolution in the PPM roadmap. So there should be more analytics, some small improvements in terms of usability, and things like that. But I think the platform is very stable and very reliable. It's scalable; and it complies with any expectation that a company, at least a company of our size, might need.

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it_user558393 - PeerSpot reviewer
Clarity Architect and Functional Specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

There are always things that can be improved. There are always opportunities to make it do more things than it does, and it seems like CA does that. Every time they bring out a release, we’ve got improved features and new features. The sky is the limit on what they could do, really.

They have a different product for Agile management, for example. They could merge these two together, and come up with one product. That would be awesome. Even though they integrate, it would be even better if it was just the same product.

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it_user481119 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO - Logistics at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

Now, I have more knowledge about it, but in the beginning it was a little bit difficult to get used to its navigability, and end-users needs more help to get used to it. I miss the lack of integration between data, for exemple, between projects and portfolio information, but I think it was a problem of the implementation instead the solution.

Business Analytics information (a BI solution) with KPIs and dashboards and the possibility to expand these with custom data. It would be good to have more intuitive navigation.

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it_user356061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I don’t know at this point what could be improved as we are trying to evolve our systems to work and streamline with PPM. I do, however, want to see more outputs and technical details. Also, they should improve reporting so that it's more in-depth.

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it_user778920 - PeerSpot reviewer
Clarity Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am not sure what features they could add but, personally, what I have seen is that last year when I came to CA World, PPM was on version 15.2 and this year, after 365 days I am here at CA World again and CA is still on 15.3. Within a year only a point release. It looks like CA itself is driving it slowly and they should do something. It says something, that after the whole company worked hard they are still only coming up with a point release. It is something doubtful.

I think CA is already doing the work, probably, by going to the new UI. I think they are on the path. But they need to take a risk and go. Their initiative started, I think, two years back about going to a new UI. It's showing progress but not at a pace that I would like to see.

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it_user572865 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We're really looking forward to the integration of Agile Central into PPM. Obviously, we now have a solution that services the needs of our project managers and our portfolio directors. Being able to integrate Agile Central into our solution base here, obviously allows us to extend the reach of PPM from the project management and portfolio managers all the way down to the actual development teams. Obviously, bringing everybody under a consolidated umbrella will help unify the beginning-to-end lifecycle of our projects.

The big improvement for us would be timesheet management. We have a legacy timesheet management solution that we're moving off of into PPM. It goes down to the activity level for the recording of time. In the current PPM solution, while they handle the reporting of time to the individual task and your project plans really nicely, breaking it down to the individual activity level such as requirements, design, different support activities, the tool doesn't necessarily play in that space really nicely. Certainly, we'd like to see them do a little bit more with regards to taking that time recording down to a lower level of detail. Of course, for us it's all about analytics and, of course, project management thrives on analytics.

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it_user558225 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Mckesson

I would like to see better dashboards within the tool and better integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

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it_user558048 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Portfolio Management, Capacity Planning & Delivery Effectiveness at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Some of the things I was planning to look into while I was at a recent CA conference is how other people would implement features like portfolio management, resource capacity planning, financial management. That is what I went to learn more about.

There is some room for improvement in the UI. Some of the folks that use the tool, sometimes they feel it is cumbersome navigating around it.

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DM
Project Manager

Work Breakdown Structure in the Tasks: be able to drag and drop to a level three instead of just stuck at level two.

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it_user778914 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Of Engineer at Daktronics

More team-based management, and less people-based management; as far as the resource management goes, to do it per team and not per person.

I personally believe that for software development, management at the person level is not the right level to manage. Managing at the team level is a better level.

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it_user779154 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Geha

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.

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it_user651855 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • 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.
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it_user572835 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Delivery Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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it_user474588 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solutions Consultant at Ericsson Global Limited

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.

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it_user345618 - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance Administrator at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user779223 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user778725 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at AmerisourceBergen

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.

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it_user558390 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at Excers

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.

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it_user351639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'd like to see improvement in broader portfolio management. It still seems to kind of be a specifically separate module from the project management and we really are aggregating a lot of data to make higher-level strategic decisions. Now that we're in that space, our executives want more. Specifically, they want to see high-level reports. They want to see the underlying data that supports it so that we can build that trust. So combining the portfolio and project management aspects would go a long way towards that.

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JA
Project Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

Intake and demand management functionality could be better.

In the future, I would like to see integrated Agile features and better integration with Agile tools. There are a lot of different teams that are using Agile tools and there is a demand for that.

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it_user797979 - PeerSpot reviewer
Projects and Planning at a government with 201-500 employees

We have not migrated to 15.3. We are still on 14.4 and the look and the feel is a bit antiquated, but seeing some of the improvements that are in 15.3, it is catching up with the times.

The features, they are slowly rolling out. I like the collaboration aspects of what I am seeing with 15.3 to where your team can go in and have conversations that are captured versus going to some other field, clicking on a tab, and typing in your information there, then hoping others migrate to that area. It is improving.

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it_user779058 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Advisor at Mary Kay

We use a product called TFS and we would definitely like to see integration with that. It's not there right now. Agile Central is the one that is integrated with, however, I don't think we are leaving TFS. 

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it_user778572 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at Daktroniks

We've only been users for about a month, so I can't really say what is there and what isn't there. 

Some people have expressed interest in how are we doing the time tracking stuff because we have a separate time tracking system. And then within TFS we also track hours and our effort levels there. It seems like that is maybe a direction we could go, unifying all that under one system.

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it_user348177 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Contracts and External Programs at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Anything that enhances portfolio management will help us out, but we’re still struggling internally to fully utilize that capability.

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it_user346476 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Management Coordinator & Quality Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I want to see trends and how things change over time. Now, you only see what’s live in the system, and there's no way currently to see what yesterday’s project was and how it's changed. They don’t have snapshots in time.

Also, I'd like flexible reporting that can be done quickly. Right now, we pull everything into Excel, and the length of time for reporting can be long.

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it_user778947 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Moving more to an agile state. It is very difficult. There is not a good way to have a team member manage tasks. So, a project manager can update assignments and can say, "I'm going to move this work to this person," but when you are going to a more collaborative based approach, PPM does not support that. 

It is hard for them to say, "I have a person on my team who is going to be available, I am going to move that task to them." That requires a project management license, it doesn't require a team member license, so the licensing model does not sometimes support the way the business world is going. I think they need to reexamine having some of the capabilities of a project manager be available to team members. 

It still lacks some key features and we had to do some custom stuff. It has some deficiencies, but we also have not optimized everything. 

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it_user779238 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Senior Manager

It was very interesting, because we did get to see the newest version. There are a lot features that I really can't wait to actually get my hands on. 

When we upgrade into the cloud, we are still going to be a version behind. So it is hard to say what I would want in it, because I have seen a lot of the things that I would want in it. They are going to be in it once we actually do the upgrade.

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it_user779076 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Resource Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are not currently using the existing version. I think we have a need for more portfolio management and intuitive resource management, which are met with that next version. We are just not there yet. 

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it_user687165 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Look and feel of the user experience.

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it_user558321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Member, Technical Services at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I'm really excited about seeing a simplified user interface. We've starting looking at the new UI with version 15. I'm somewhat disappointed in the limitation of functionality there. We'd like to see that expanded much more. As I understand it, you can't use custom attributes in the new UI. That limits what we do, because we have a number of customizations that we've made. I would like to see better performance, as always.

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it_user558183 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Having everything in one solution. Right now I don't really have to bounce back and forth between the new UX and CA PPM, so that's a good thing. But, improve Resource Planning. 

To be honest, I'd like to see having it work internally. Catch up to the features that are available in the solution. I think it's more on our side than on the CA side.

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it_user779283 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin Manager

User-friendliness, I think that's the key. Right now it's really clunky. We're also looking to upgrade, but an upgrade is not going to fix everything. The new UX is good, but there are still a lot of limitations. Once they work through those kinks and get those limitations removed, we'll be able to upgrade.

One of the things we use is timesheets. In the timesheet UX, you can't do things like splitting time, managing overtime versus regular time, very easily. That would be helpful. 

Financials are okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement in financials.Financial plans, if those could be made so that you're not always grouping your financial data by predefined attributes, that would be helpful for us.

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it_user778911 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Coordinator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

What I do is just keep things running as much as I can on our end, so I think that would be something that our project managers would better answer, because they are the ones that use it. I just keep it running. 

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it_user738354 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA PPM Architect / Project Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Reporting is not good as they keep on changing reporting environment.

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it_user10272 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The forms (e.g., project properties page) need to be more attractive, colorful, and field more flexibility for validations.

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it_user558234 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Business Architecture at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Not sure which release we are in right now, but we're going to use the next release with Jaspersoft integration. I'd like to see their collaboration.

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it_user558111 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are not with the current release, and I do not think that there is anything really glaringly wrong about it. Some of the issues we've had as far as project integration issues, for example, are probably addressed in the current version.

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it_user558114 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Controls at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We would like to see compatibility with more than just one scheduling tool. Primavera P6 is our tool and it drives our projects.

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it_user558324 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA PPM (Clarity) Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
  • Considering that agile is a big buzzword these days, I don't really like that PPM is so strictly tied to CA Agile Central. There are a lot of other tools out there that people use.
  • We're a JIRA shop. There's not a whole lot right now. Everything as far as a PPM JIRA solution is homegrown, and all over the place. I'd like to see some more industry standards applied to the tool.
  • I really hate Jaspersoft, so I would like to see a better reporting solution, or perhaps some improvement around Jaspersoft.
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it_user350013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, PMO Project Management with 10,001+ employees

We have not deployed the latest version, but a problem we are seeing is the inability to get data out of the system and into Excel. This is a feature we want and need.

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it_user779262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project And Portfolio Analyst at a security firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

While I know it is coming in the roadmap, the risks issues and changes on the new UX would be amazing. However, the risks issues and changes are not in the new UX yet. 

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it_user653565 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA PPM Expert at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The interface needs improvement. The new UI/UX (from version 15.1) is modern and more intuitive, but it only covers a small piece of the solution. The rest is the classic UI.

A new UX in CA PPM is the answer to the problem with complexity and the huge options in classic UI, which is the cause of problems using the solution for a beginner. The new UX is quite easy to use, but only covers time sheet management and part of project management. Switching between new and old interface is tiring. I understand that to develop a new UX needs time, but integration between the new and the old UI/UX should be better.

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it_user351285 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Trainer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The tool itself is comprehensive, but it's missing input from people like me. People need to be taught how to use it. Users are trying to teach themselves instead of learning effectively. So the education and training are what it’s missing.

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it_user350085 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think the user interface could be more user friendly. For people who don't use it as part of their daily routine, it can be challenging at first. You get used to it, but it could definitely use some improvement.

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it_user481143 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

They need to improve it's mobile compatibility.

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it_user356073 - PeerSpot reviewer
Development Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think it needs better reporting. The reports should be more user-friendly as they're currently hard to understand. 

Also, the UI is pretty logical, but it's hard to extract the data I'd like to see from the reports.

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LR
Solution Architect

Additional enhancements to portfolios with the new user experience. Because, while portfolios deliver a lot of the value-driven information, the new user experience really takes the view of the information to the next level, and it takes it from being a tired-looking feel to a new design approach.

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it_user778782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technological Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

One major thing that is super relevant to me, and my role in handling it, would be having more published API access, so we could integrate with all of our other tools that we are using.  

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it_user778686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant

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.

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it_user488790 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA PPM Consultant with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user346677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Software Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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MF
Director of Operations at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user351282 - PeerSpot reviewer
Advisor at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user660021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Portfolio Management Office Jr at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

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.

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it_user345717 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director & Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user501972 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer & Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user391806 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The product doesn't have a way to simulate different kinds of plans. When you have a new plan with a high priority, there isn't a way to simulate the impact of the new plan

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it_user507966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Compared to other PPM tools, there is some room for improvement in:

  • The UI
  • Customization
  • Financial management: I would like to see a powerful end-to-end, user-friendly mechanism where the organization can maintain labor and non-labor expenses effectively and generate final invoices out of it.
  • Portfolio management: It has limits around the number of investments.

Many of our clients were not using some of these features, because of complexity and less customization facility, and I would like to see OOTB portlets on this product.

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it_user351312 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead project manager at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There were some bugs in the old version that were supposed to be fixed but are not. Some features that needed to be added have never been added.

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it_user778752 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Needs Gantt to MS Project link.

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it_user778758 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  1. I would really like a modern UI. I do not want to get on a user interface and feel like I am in the 1990's. Today, at least prior to 15.3, that's the case. Even 15.3 does not really do it for me. When you look at the new UI, where they are looking at light project management and resource allocation, those are very compelling and modern interfaces.  
  2. It would be just seamless to integrate with some of the industry standard tools that are out there. I know they are making some headway with Power BI, Tableau, ServiceNow. JIRA, and others, but it just seems like they are just getting started. I would have thought that being 30 plus years in the industry, that they would have figured this out long ago.
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it_user350313 - PeerSpot reviewer
Voice and Data Network Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The user interface is a little outdated. But nothing is perfect, though it has all components that we need.

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it_user309312 - PeerSpot reviewer
ERP Project Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Make transitions easier to implement, e.g. if a new portfolio comes along, it should be easy to integrate to the existing portfolios.

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it_user593280 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA Clarity PPM consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The user interface seems a bit outdated in some modules, while the most frequent modules have already been updated to a modern look and feel.

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Buyer's Guide
Broadcom Clarity
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Broadcom Clarity . Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.