As a Project and Portfolio management tool, it allows the company to allocate costs based on projects, goals, or strategies. You can break down costs a lot easier because of the amount of detail you can put into the project. Being able to provide metrics and being able to break down costs is very important. It allows people to easily categorize costs.

The benefits are that it creates visibility across our whole organization. People that were often left in the dark wondering what was happening with projects. Now have an easy solution to see all the information they want to see across the whole portfolio.

It's definitely improving our ability to make better decisions, and improving the quality of data that we have, to make the decisions for the strategic good of the company.

It is shifting as we go through our agile transformation. In terms of being able to do quarterly status reports, board reporting, resource reporting, and that kind of thing, that has been ongoing at Schwab for a number of years. As we are shifting into the agile space, and having some differences of opinion between our card carrying PMPs and our card carrying agileists about what level of detail needs to be where, our agile community wants to manage things in terms of stories and sprints, but upper leadership still wants to see the status reports that we have always done. So, how do we make both camps happy? That is not a tool specific issue. It is really an industry issue right now.

It is easier to use than most other products that are out there. It will provide us the transparency we need in our organization to see how work is being managed and moving along.

We are also trying to do an integration with Agile Central because we are moving into that transformation. For us, it will be interesting to find out how we use both systems: Who is in what system, who is in the other system, and how all that data will flow.

We are still early on. For the leadership, they see it as, perhaps, a more accurate way of gathering information for their decision making and as a single source. They don't have to go to every site and ask questions, try to gather and compile data from different sources or different Excel spreadsheets. We can collaborate with various teams running projects or portfolios around the company and we can gather data in different ways. We are using fields such as master programs. If we have major programs for the entire corporation, then we can compile and see what everybody is doing that is actually effecting, or not effecting, those programs. We make sure that we leverage resources and that we're not doing redundant work. If we have people working on the same things, why do we have different teams working on similar items? Maybe we could just put them together or maybe we can reapply those resources.

It helps us align to the overall business IT strategy. We had a bit of a restructuring and reorganization. We also try and demonstrate to the business the added value that IT has. I think this is a good way of being able to manage our own resources, and show that we are adding value to the organization.

I think the biggest benefit right now is the reporting. It gives that quick visibility and it's consistent data; versus everybody just trying to go out there and look at their own individual pieces, looking at it as a whole.

Sometimes you get applications where there might only be one user, or five users, or a very, very small group. Maybe we could migrate them from a little-used application to something that we could bring to the attention that might be better suited for them. There was a variety of things, why we gathered information and collected it inside Clarity. The more important and heavier use of the tool was program management.

We were so disjointed previously because the project budgeted hours from our finance manager did not match the scheduled hours from our booking manager and that did not match the task hours from our project manager. Consolidating all the project hours into one location really improved the way we manage and budget project hours and helped get all these key people in alignment. This is critical for project success so we can execute on what is planned and if more hours are needed, a project change request can be done directly in PPM.

Additionally, being able to report on the data has been a real improvement. With everything in one place, running a report is real time and efficient. It really beats spending a lot of time manual time gathering the data and putting it into a PPT. PPM has provided a lot of visibility into our projects and the management has found the reports useful and insightful on project status and issues.

For us, it's about getting more information into CA PPM, which then allows us to drive more insights and provide that information to our leadership team and our executives to make a better informed decision as far as how they're investing, and how we're tracking towards our strategic objectives.

I see the benefits for the organization in the Resource Management. No more Excel sheets for resource management, no more Excel sheets for financial management, no more data retention for reporting purposes. It is pretty quick in calculations for the managers and financial teams, and getting them the data.

It helps all the portfolio managers and the program managers to take stock of the financial situation at the program and portfolio level, because it rolls up all the financials at the product level.

We also have integration with CA Agile Central. So we get all the project-related data and the user stories-related data into Clarity and we report on to that: How much funding is there, and how much are the actuals between these two tools?

The resource management, the program management, financial management. It combines a lot of things, all of them are of benefit to our end users.

We're a private company, so we do a lot around CapEx from the perspective of revenue and how all that is driven from a financial perspective, so by having a broad overview of bringing things in through ideation and portfolio management and approvals for money spent, we're able to keep a pretty good control over that from a holistic, enterprise-wide perspective.

Particularly in our technology department, we get approvals for projects, expenditure for each project, and when the projects are approved, we're able to track them on the portfolio down to the project-level.

This is from a global-perspective too, as we're headquartered in Nashville but we have heavy usage over in Asia, Hong Kong, and our Tokyo office. CA PPM is pretty good in getting a really granular, line-item overview of where we're at, pretty much almost real-time from expenditures.

It has benefited us as we can prioritize which products or projects we need to focus on throughout the calendar year and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

It has definitely improved the working of our organization. Now we have a controlled PPMO that is handling or managing the projects. They have proper guidelines and can apply proper SOX compliance. We have governance for PMs and RMs. Monthly, they review this stuff and they can report on that.

In terms of how Broadcom Clarity PPM has improved our clients' organizations, our users are working better with the solution because the first level of attention is now in charge of our configuration in Service Management. So we don't have any analyzed work with the first level of attention. With the second level, yes, the experts are working with the solution, but we were able to optimize the first level for this kind of attention. The first attention for the end user is now in charge of the solution.

Just being able to have everybody to see the work that needs to be done, provide the detail level for the teams, and show the roll-up level for those at the management level. 

The benefit is to prioritize which projects we need to really focus on throughout the calendar year, and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

It provides visibility into what we're working on and the amount of time we're spending. It helps us validate our forecast for labor resources and milestones for delivery. That's our primary use now. We're moving more into areas of resource management and forecasting for one and two years out. That's our next area that we're ramping up in. It provides the product management and the high-level portfolio management visibility we need today.

Cost and agility; it helps with that.

We use the SaaS version. It is really good because we don't have to be responsible for the platform; the hardware, upgrading hardware, upgrading the software, or any of those things. It enables us to have fewer developer hours supporting the product.

It has helped to facilitate weekly program meetings. We can quickly review all our projects together and collaborate regarding where we need to work together and which projects need some help that we can rally around.

Basically, it keeps us on track financially. Again, we are federal, DOD. We budget two years ago, and the world changes. We have to keep track of where that money was acquired, where it got shifted to, what is been spent against it, and when we are running out of money. It is tracking that whole, what contracts have been issued against which projects, and when they are coming due. Again, it is managing the lifecycle, multi-year programs, and the people who do the work and the funding associated with that work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get rid of Excels, that's the main point. We are so used to, in the old days, capturing data in Excel; people are really use to doing that. In general we were working in Excel workbooks. We were doing things like ETC assignment, how much they will be, how many hours you're assigning, what the cost will be at the end of the day. With CA PPM we have really gotten rid of those Excels and are utilizing the resource managem

ent and Project Management pieces.

It has improved things very much so. They're just starting to full-fledged adopt it right now. Gives them better visibility across the organization.

• Ensures a consistent approach to project management and approvals of the project gates.
• Provides an integrated view on the planned and active investments. (Ideas and Programs/Projects)
• Enables us to measure performance of the project portfolio

When you look at it, it saves us a ton of money. Fewer FTEs to manage the different products or tools. As I've mentioned, it's a one-stop shop. As a project manager, I can go in and do all the administrative work that I need to do; instead of doing it manually over spreadsheets, uploading it to SharePoint, and so on. It's just a lot more straightforward and convenient.

We're actually releasing two different funding portfolios. Right now, I think we have between 10 and 13 in the company. As we're going through each of the funding portfolios, we're evaluating what they're doing today. We're not only just making them use PPM, but we're streamlining some of their processes and weeding out some of those things that we used to do solely because they are used to doing it that way. The funding portfolios are becoming much more efficient. We're re-evaluating what the value is of everything that we do today. As we streamline it, we put it in the PPM.

Previously, we used a different tool that didn’t have very good reporting. Clarity PPM came with reports out of the box, and we can make more, as we need. That was a really good thing.

It doesn’t help us collaborate more so than before. We're trying to open it up to other areas of the company. Right now it's just used within IT.

For a lot of people, it's just a place to put your buckets for your time. I'm not on the team supporting the tool; I'm on the technical side. Whereas we have a team of people that support the PPM and deals with business strategy.

The main benefit of the SaaS version is the cost. Also, I'm not responsible for any server maintenance, which is nice. If their servers go down, it's somebody else that gets a call at 3 a.m., not me. I like that.

We use it for time tracking and that is a big aspect that we use it for. It's a very useful tool to track all those hours against all the project work that we do and to get the metrics to understand where our resources are going.

The PPM tool has allowed us to move from project management to product management without upgrading or changing the tool. That means cost savings. Just working with the vendor and being able to use the tool in different ways as we grow and scale has been beneficial.

It gives us a better sense of what people are working on and where we're spending our money. It also lets us know what things are actually costing. So sometimes projects that aren't valuable are costing a lot of money. It gives us that information. It lets us know if we have enough people to take on additional projects, or if we don't have enough people, and we've got to make some hard decisions about those projects.

It's a single database, so all the information goes in one single place, and there are common workflows and processes, common forms and pages to fill out. We have the same information on these projects across business units and business divisions, and then within given teams, and we have that same common repository to view information.

Resource management is the key, so making sure we have the right people working on the right projects, and we have enough people to manage those projects. It gives the ability to add some prioritization and ranking of those projects as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The health report and all metrics of any project including KPIs are now available in a central location under the clarity project or project dashboard, replacing all those excel spreadsheets.

The project management from CA PPM has been improving a lot. Also, we have been reviewing, once a year, the functionality to see how we can make adjustments to the IT configurations and improve our system.

With that goal of gathering time from resources, and being able to predict out whether or not they'll have some capacity, it's a great improvement over what was there before, which was essentially an embedded spreadsheet within a SharePoint sight.

In addition, the reporting tools are superior to what was there before, which was someone crunching through an Excel spreadsheet. I've been able to do status reports through the projects, which has given visibility to my manager, and that's an improvement.

It has improved communication vertically, with some amount of data to be able to show that more resources are necessary, or why projects aren't moving as fast as management would like. That sort of communication makes my job a lot easier.

Previously it was complicated. We had to do the costing, everything manually, after doing the integration of a couple applications. Now, because of CA, it's going to be one application as a whole.

It will be one application for the whole PPM department: portfolio, project, and reporting in one tool.

It will improve things because it's already integrated into one. Before, there were something like three applications, and you had to integrate, and sometimes there were a lot of errors coming out. Sometimes the old system would crash.

It was a big improvement because we did not previously have a formal tool to manage projects. So, we went from nothing to using the “best of breeds”; so we are very satisfied with how everything turned out.

The biggest benefit really is that we can easily find out the status of all project work in terms of the lifecycle of the project, how well it’s going, and who’s involved in any of the projects that we have going on across the company. It’s in one place. It’s easy. It’s simple to get all that good information. We need that every day, so we’re not chasing it around all the time.

There is a collaboration feature on each project. All participants in the project can share documents and share discussions. They can communicate with each other through actions items that they can get, emails, and so on, directly from the product. That’s the one-stop-shop we have for all of our collaboration on our projects.

We set up portfolio plans, and we create scenarios for our portfolios. We can determine if we decide to move this project out, or bring this project up, what the overall picture is going to look like in terms demand on resources and everything else. That’s all there. It’s all in one spot. We don’t have to gather a bunch of information from different places, and then try to compile it all. CA PPM does that for us.

In the past we had to deal with a lot of spreadsheets and power point presentations with different formats and with no vision if it was real project information. Nowadays, we have all managerial projects information into CA PPM solution, managed and administrated by planners and PMO roles. We can now report projects to all stakeholders in the same format with good information, besides having a unique and trustworthy repository.

This product definitely has strong service, which, along with the features mentioned above, has improved the way our organization functions.

It gives us all the projects in one view where we can drill down into our portfolio and see the potential benefits at the end of the day.

Probably the biggest reason for going with SaaS is the thin footprint. Obviously, not having to engage our internal resources to basically support the infrastructure for PPM was a big selling point. The ability to essentially upgrade without a lot of involvement from our staff was another big selling point for us. Obviously, the vision is essentially to have transparent upgrades for the tool with minimal effort on our side. Certainly, going with the SaaS solution has allowed us to basically upgrade the application in a matter of weeks rather than spending months planning for the upgrade.

The major benefit is, with our legacy applications, right now, we have approximately 600 IT projects, spanning 12 different portfolios. In our old world, we had essentially a number of different solutions supporting the 600 projects and 12 portfolios. The vision that PPM has allowed us to take advantage of is, now, we have consolidated all our portfolios and projects under one tool, instead of a multitude of solutions.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and business strategy because we all now talk the same language, if you will. In the past, with everybody having their own spreadsheet-based solution, when you essentially try to talk about project status, you really had to understand what their solutions were for managing their portfolios and their projects. By having everything consolidated under PPM, now everybody has a unified way of looking into their projects. When you talk about what's red, yellow and green for your project status, it isn't essentially this grab bag of, “Well, that depends on how you measure it.” We're all now being measured by the same tool, being PPM. When we talk about our status being red, yellow or green, we all know exactly what that means because, essentially, it's all PPM speak and not essentially some homegrown solution supporting the various portfolios.

The organization is not benefiting as much as we would like it to. That is not necessarily a tool shortcoming but an adoption shortcoming. Basically, we need to shift and mature some of our business processes to leverage the tool's capability more. We are having some challenges for people in our organization to adopt this tool. The reason being that people get grounded in a comfort zone as to how they do things today or how they handle things outside of a tool. It could be inertia or people are just comfortable doing things the way they are doing them now, so change is hard.

In terms of projects, this solution has helped us to have one place where project statuses are kept. We have done some work with the standard status report format, so that helps in terms of everybody being familiar with how things are going to be reported. For timekeeping standards, we have one tool and do things one way.

A direction we are heading in, as we are not using the tool, is to do portfolio management or even to do some of our strategic planning; that is the direction we want to head in next.

It's pretty much the source of "the truth." Everything is together, everyone can see all the resources, financial projects, how long a project's going to take. Anybody can go in there and see any information they need about the organization as a whole.

It makes it easier to compare different opportunities, and to track the metrics though the process. It helps us make better choices of which opportunities to go after and not go after. Then, we can balance that with what we have for staffing, to know what we can actually staff.

It makes it easier to function.

It has highlighted areas in our company that were deficient in resources. It has allowed us to hire, then realize more benefits regarding the number of projects we can get done.

CA PPM provides an integrated view of the total set of projects in the organization. It also has the ability to see data by multiple slices: by department, project type, objective, resource type, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Since it is all in a common database, there are no longer questions about the data sources, or how current the information is.

It's really helping us with our resource management; being able to pull people where they need to go; get additional help where help is needed. It helps us collaborate with our project management teams, our PMO, all across the company, shared services.

For an organization where doing projects is the one of the major sources of revenue, it helps PMs sees each and every small thing in their projects in a very easy manner.

It helps us to track costs, and so it's also helpful when we’re planning to see the projected costs so that the company can make decisions and prioritize what projects to take on, and see the "what-if's."

Across strategic initiatives, it's improved what we do, as we did not use to have cost tracking across the company. It used to be based just on going with our gut, so the business didn’t used to track projects. Everything used to be dispersed across departments. Now it’s centralized so it adds to our consistency.

You can't manage what you can't measure. It helps us measure things like time compliance, as people are putting all their time into project costs. 

The benefit is using the Capacity Demand Model. We can use it to forecast and see the future trends for resource allocations and demands. 

CA PPM lets you forecast cost, effort, and identify capacity risks. It essentially tells you where your flaws are, and where you need to improve. You can manage your pipeline, your backlog can be groomed using portfolios, and you can use the waterline feature to do your annual planning.

It shows me my pipeline, my backlog, what my customers needs, where the demand is. It shows me where I have capacity, and what's my risk. I can rank my investments to deliver maximum benefit to the organization based on all these different controls. It usually provides a very good forecast: what you want to execute the next fiscal year based on your available capacity, demand, funds, and everything else. Also from a strategic alignment point of view, it can show you what kind of roadmap you have as an organization. What do we have committed? and things like that.

We are using the SaaS version of CA PPM aka on-demand. With SaaS, we are always current with the versions and everything else. We’ve given our heartache to somebody else for managing the server, uptime, SLAs, and everything else. We don't have an internal team that's always on call to make sure your mission-critical application is online. The SaaS version has a unique SLA established by the OEM to the customer to ensure it is up 24/7, and provides the highest quality of service.

It has been severely disruptive in a good way, which is exactly what I had hoped for. Although we manage projects well, our practices were immature. But we didn't manage portfolios well. There was a lot of room for improvement and now that we're migrating to be a more data-driven organization with strategic alignment and execution and quality and performance and those kind of measures, it's changing the paradigm of project management in our organization.

Typically, a portfolio management tool or project management tool is bought by people that need to govern the process, but it is used by people who have to get the work done. It's nice to actually see a transition to the governance space to the user base because you will enable teams to collaborate, giving you better performance and better quality if you focus on the end users rather than a strict governance command and control model.

Even using basic functionality, capturing all the data, and standardizing simple practices has literally in the last 12 months lead to the behavior change that we wanted to see. It helped us accomplish our goals. It did that for us. We would not have been able to do it without this tool and/or the support.

The communication aspects have greatly improved. Before it was a lot of just relying upon hallway conversations or picking up the phone, maybe sending out emails, and they may or may not get answered. Knowing that we have these workflows in place and that they are going through, and that our executive leaders have to take an action as well as our department managers and program leaders, that has been beneficial.

We just put all the data in one place and hopefully, after we have accurate data, we can make more decisions based on real data rather than gut feeling.

We were doing all this in a spreadsheet. We were in Excel and it was a nightmare. It was really just, "Get off of the spreadsheet and get something centrally located and available to everyone." 

We are planning on integrating that with our work item management system. We currently use TFS but we're looking at VSTS. So we're looking at doing integration there and tying that portfolio and project management into our work Item management system as well.

Right now, it’s supporting project prioritization. That’s why we brought it in. It lets us get a holistic view of what the projects are and whether there are deficiencies in a given area and whether we are short on something. We’re not quite there yet in utilizing its capabilities, but it’s getting better.

Standardization across large company standard operating procedures. The biggest are financial reporting, task management, work breakdown structures, risk and issue reporting. As all of this can be done from one place. We can manage it all with change management.

We are hoping for:

• Better resource management
• Reducing the time it takes to get resources identified. 
• Demand
• Putting all of our projects together in one project. 

We used to have where one department would have their own plan, another department would have their own plan, and these were all different plans for the same client. Now, we are smashing them together so there is a little bit of a learning curve of working together, which is more of us; organizational change management. 

In general, we hope to reduce our time to finding resources to backfill resources and also reduce admin time to get a project setup and running. 

This is a hard one, because some people just see it as overhead. Everybody is used to just doing it within their Excel spreadsheets within their teams. Some of it is just kind of a roll up of data, such as, what is our milestone for when we are going to get the BSD done? What is our milestone for code drops? 

So, there is definitely a mixed view, even from myself. I can see the benefits of it, and I can get the data out to be able to report on it. However, I also feel like it is a lot of overhead.

Our organization, being a utility organization, does a lot of projects in two different methodologies. Being able to track all of the projects with all of the details of those projects, and being able to move projects along from a process perspective, that is really beneficial. Off-sheet would be much more difficult.

Capacity and demand of the resources, optimize the response times of my requirements, detect the control points of the process of attention to our clients, a collaborative environment, notes, remember agreements, efficiency in the times.

This solution has brought our groups a lot closer together and allowed them to communicate much easier rather than using emails and spreadsheets. Data is now in a central location. It's simplified the funnel process from our business partners, particularly into the IT and the network areas.

It has facilitated a much better ranking process, so that we can focus on what's most important for the business partners. It has helped us align our projects and portfolios to the overall business or IT strategy. It enabled proper management of the funnel and proper ranking and priority setting.

Visibility to where we are on projects. It tells someone where we are; if we're in trouble or not. I do look forward to getting more Risks/Issues functionality. I think that will help it even further. But pretty well, it's visability.

It brings visibility and one central source of truth, as opposed to a bunch of different processes and tools. It helps us effectively enable our processes.

Project managers have insight into everything regarding their projects. They can do anything they want, such as update and edit their projects within Clarity. They use it every single day, in every way that they can, to keep it updated and to track their project features. It has made project-tracking much simpler and easier.

Detailed schedule makes estimation of resources, and resource forecasting, easy and meaningful.

For an insurance company, all the project management activities, approvals and processes were offline.

CA PPM gave them the ability to automate approval processes, managing project life-cycle in a central tool, filling time-sheets against the projects and providing the reports to executives.

It helped them reduce their effort in the terms of cost and time involved.

Just the ability to capture the project scope and the cost associated with it. It adds to the business value.

It definitely gives us a way to group and manage our projects across the entire organization, as well as track time of resources so we can use that within our capitalization efforts.

We're actually trying to evolve our portfolio management practice within the tool, but from a project perspective, it's done well. I guess we're still trying to see how we can maximize and use it across the portfolio.

It has consistent delivery of reports and all project-related information housed in one place.

The way we're structured, we support a lot of different organizations. If marketing wants to see the status of all things marketing, along with their impacts on other organizations, we're able to whip that together pretty quickly. In all our previous tools, that was always a black box.

It changed the way our departments talked to each other. Particularly, IT became a delivery organization along with everyone else. They didn't talk before, and now they do; so all the data is front and center. They're starting to tear down some of those walls. They're sharing data now, as opposed to just hoping everything's OK.

It comes down to the shared space aspect of it, particularly when you start talking about code releases, alignments, and things like that. It seems to be that everybody is on the same page. There are a lot of things that get exposed because they're now sharing data. Some of those risks can now be mitigated ahead of time, as opposed to last minute. That was a problem we had back before PPM.

The whole business transformation thing that all industries are going through is very big right now. Those are the higher priority projects that we're able to dedicate money, resources, time, everything to those key initiatives, as opposed before when everyone had their own priority.

It’s driven global consistency and the management of our projects. We have used it a long time and are seeing great benefits by sticking with the product.

We just started using PPM in my department, which is an engineering department. What I do for it, is I actually support it as from an IT-end, so I get it installed, configured, and running, and then go on to the next feature that takes IT work.

It gives us a view of where our project-management pain points are. Do we have enough resources? Where are our costs going? Are we spending too much internally, or should we be outsourcing?

We upgraded from a previous version, and the reporting feature has made that aspect of our work easier. Other than that, I wouldn't say that it's changed the organization too much.

In our organization we are very siloed, so our executive management doesn't always see the value in sharing data across the enterprise. We feel that the business isn’t using it to its fullest extent, although it does give visibility as enterprise projects are moving through different regions.

It allows us to collect all of the projects for which people want visibility across different lines of business, but we have a lot of leaders who don’t understand a lot of the value of the information and what we could be doing with it, which is a business problem – that has hindered out ability to leverage the functionality with the tool and therefore some of our project managers aren’t fully engaged with the solution. It’s a top-down problem, but the tool is fine.

I have worked as a developer and Clarity consultant with multiple companies and found that using CA PPM made the organization’s daily work easy. Project Managers and the resources of companies can use the project and timesheet part as there are lots of reports available to use for management. Also, it is a customizable tool.

We're able to allocate resources from various parties -- business analysts, developers, etc. -- as they work off a single platform.

The key benefit that most of our clients see is the ability to ensure they have the right resources, working on the right work. It also provides the opportunity to pivot to meet new demands.

It helps a lot with the automation and manual processes to go faster.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect for centralized planning and viewing the capacity of work of each group which is developing applications

I worked for one of the major manufacturing organizations, where they need to manage employees across geographical locations and minimize turnaround time for finding employees to assign work. With PPM’s Location OBS, they are able to find the nearest available employees for the work. This significantly reduces turnaround time.

We used an old, in-house system and we configured CA PPM to look and feel like the old one. This didn’t benefit us and we should have probably used PPM as it came.

For projects, having all of the relevant data in one location is helpful.

It is about bringing about that transparency. Once you bring about that transparency, what happens is, you can use data to encourage people to pivot in a certain direction. If I just go with a gut-feel, I do not get anywhere. If I have data and I have our investments captured, and I have my resources captured, I can let the data speak for itself.

The data should be able to make decisions. Use the data as the catalyst, if you will, and I am just the messenger.

In our company, we have several projects for which PPM really helps us. It mainly helps us track dates and deadline, and makes sure we're within budget with project costs. All this is very important as we deliver projects for our customers. We're also able to track projects for out customers.

Right now, we're also seeking CMMAI certification, and PPM is helping us with that.

It forced the organization to implement standard project management practices.

Centralization of all projects into one tool using a standardized way of prioritization improved the visibility of current and planned spending against company’s goals and strategies in the portfolio.

Standardized status reporting and dependency management improved the awareness of business stakeholders and enabled comparisons across the whole organization.

Resource planning based on actual project performance improved the forecasting accuracy and sped up the project delivery by highlighting the potential resource shortages early enough to take corrective actions.