Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We are mandated by law to rigorously manage change to our systems and to ensure zero or very minimal impact to our customers. Given the systems that we had in place -- and we've got thousands of users and thousands of projects in major systems, comprising a large part of the economy -- we could no longer use disparate systems to govern all of those things. So we implemented Clarity PPM to enforce a standard change management protocol.

However, what we have found is we are leveraging the data behind it to do more portfolio management, which really boils down to, are we working on the right things? Are we using the right people? Are we getting return on investment? Are we utilizing our resources and it has opened up a level of transparency into our change delivery efforts and costs that we've never had before?

The answers are, yes. It's an amazing solution.

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.

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.

I'm more of a super user on the business side of adoption. We are constantly in contact with our sales rep about challenges we have in maturity adoption and what pieces of the tool will support what types of strategic adoptions. I know that we had a technical resource on site to help us configure. I'm very happy with the level of support we've got from CA.

I'm actually leading adoption efforts and was part of the team that reviewed and implemented the tool. Adoption is always difficult. Change is hard and it's never really a technology-type thing. It's more of a human behavior-type exercise. We were challenged. We were absolutely challenged. We found our champions early. We set some minimum baselines and adoption. We reported on adoption and quality of data to motivate people to clean their stuff up. We let people innovate and go farther ahead and as they they pioneered some of the functionality. That's the hardest part of the whole thing, is getting people to adopt.

The thing with software is it can do anything but you can't adopt anything. Know your audience, know your internal customers. Start small. Keep it simple. Get the blocking and tackling and the basics down pat. You will see change. You'll see lasting change but you've got to stick with basics and build upon them.

I am a consultant and I recommend and implement specific solutions for my clients. I am currently working on behalf of a company that implements this product for its customers.

Clarity PPM is a product that I have worked with personally. It is primarily used for project management, project portfolio management, and for reporting services.

The interfaces for project management, portfolio management, and reporting services are always helpful.

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.

I have worked with Broadcom Clarity PPM for more than five years.

Scalability is great, especially with cloud-based solutions. It makes the product very portable and users can access it on tablets, smartphones, and whatever device they have. This model makes it scalable.

The implementation is not complete and it is expected to take between four and eight months.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

What has been valuable are the workflows that are there today in order to keep our executive staff informed as well as our program managers and department managers.

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.

We are in the SaaS environment. Within the SaaS environment (since CA is supporting it), it has been extremely stable and reliable.

It is serving our needs today, but there is certainly a lot more that we can be utilizing. As an organization, we are in an infancy stage of implementation. So, I see over the next few years ramping up and improving how we can utilize the tool.

They are extremely responsive. They can be very technical, whereas for my needs, I'd prefer if they scale down to layman's terms and explain things in other terms. We do work through the issues, and I know that they are well qualified and highly technical.

I would probably rate it about an eight out of 10, because there is always room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is more about the product and what it can provide for us as well as the professionalism of the organization and the staff. We rely quite heavily on their expertise and on their thoughts as well as their best practices.

It's project and portfolio management. We just rolled out phase one, but the primary use case for us right now is to make sure that all our project managers are able to put their resource plans and cost plans into a centralized system, so that our finance team can roll those numbers up and do forecasting.

In terms of evaluating it performance, we just started about two months ago, so it's hard to say right now. Numbers are rolling up but folks are still getting used to the process and are slowly working towards that.

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.

Right now it is the resource planning, because I know not all of the project managers really did resource planning before. This has set up an expectation for them to do that necessary step, going forward.

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. 

I think stability is good so far, except the test environment is not as good. We're using the SaaS solution, so we do see errors quite a bit in the QA environment, but the production environment seems to be more stable.

We don't know yet, we don't have a lot of people in there yet.

I feel that the Professional Services team is reacting better than the support team, in terms of how quickly we get the feedback; also in terms of how careful they are with our environment. The support team actually broke our QA environment without telling us. We were wondering what's going on for something like a day.

So far it's straightforward, but we haven't really done a lot of customization. We just try to use what is out of the box. 

Regarding the new UX, we haven't used it yet.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, although I wasn't involved in the selection, what I heard my boss say was that there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies using it, and if all of them trust it, that's probably a good indication that it's a good product.

Just focus on what there truly is, because there is a lot of functionality in the tool, and probably nobody is going to use all of it. So just focus on what you think are the most important things for you right now and just look at those particular features.

Our primary use case is for doing portfolio and project management. Our engineering group serves a lot of different markets. We have a live events market, we have commercial market, we have transportation market that we serve. There are all these different requests coming in and hitting engineering, and it really becomes a question of, "What's the most important thing for engineering to be working on?"

We really needed a good way to prioritize that work and make it visible so that, not just our management, but also our engineering group can look at that and say, "Yes. This is the most important thing. This is what we're supposed to be working on."

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.

I think the most value that I have seen is the the team management, the resource management. We have flexible scrum teams, we have developers that will serve on one scrum team for a few sprints or for a project, and they'll switch around. Being able to track where people go, and making sure that our teams are fully staffed, and well staffed, so that we can be successful on the projects we're trying to do.

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.

I've not had any complaints or heard of anything, so it seems to be perfectly stable from what I can tell.

Scalability is great. We've got literally hundreds of engineers. We've got a lot of teams working on a lot of different projects. It seems very scalable to me.

The step from spreadsheet to this... We knew we were in a bad spot with the spreadsheet. We said,"Okay, let's take a good first step and get off of that and then we'll go from there." It's really exciting. I'm hoping to see the tool mature and see how it really benefits organization in the future.

The initial set up was handled by a couple of their engineers but someone came from WinMill and did a training with us and a bunch of our engineers. That was really helpful to get introduced to the system: This is what we can do. This is what we can't do.

I wasn't involved in the setup but I keep hearing the term "configured", like we did some of our own configurations, not customizations, but certainly the platform seems very configurable to suit our needs, and that was very helpful for us.

In terms of the new UX, we've only been on the one version. That is the UX. We've never seen anything else. I just came out of the 15.3 session though, here at the CA World conference, so I'm curious to see what happens. I don't think we're on that version yet. I'll be curious to see what my organizational feedback is once that goes live.

It's still pretty early, like I said, we've only been users for a month, but I would give it an eight out of 10 overall.

The most valuable features are resource management and portfolio management. We have too many projects in our organization and not enough resources, which PPM allows us to manage.

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.

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

Pretty good. There are some hiccups in terms of our understanding of how the product works, and CA support understanding the problems as well. We didn’t understand that there are two components to PPM – in terms of the PPM solution and then the reporting is handled out of business objects. In our situation in on-demand if you run a report and then leave it up in business objects the time-out on the BO side is not the same as the time-out on the PPM side and it doesn’t synchronize and come across.

How that manifests- when it times out it makes my reports unavailable and can’t report anymore. We have a workaround for the moment. It took one or two months to even understand what the problem was, and CA didn’t understand either. CA provided a solution that was for on-premise versus our situation which is on-demand (cloud-based).

Not seeing any issues, but we’re only at 150 users. It could handle many more if we needed it to.

There were some misunderstandings when we set up our account in terms organizational differences within our business units, which we still need to straighten out with CA.

CA directed us to a systems integrator who may not have been completely skilled in the product, or maybe our timelines were too tight. Our product knowledge is still incomplete in some of the areas.

It’s a big robust application that does lots of things that we don’t use or need to use. Because it’s so configurable, in that way it is very complex.

Reporting has been an issue for us, so what I would consider a fundamental report that links financials to actuals. Do due diligence around time entry and allocations because that’s really the engine that drives resource scheduling and management. In order to get the tool to work there has to be a lot of underlying data that have to be good. Getting resources to put in their allocations, getting resources to make sure their time sheets are completed, and getting PMs to allocate and assign resources are all key.

The most valuable part is the ability to report efficiently across the globe how the company is doing. This is the biggest advantage to me.

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.

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.

We've been using it for 11 years. I joined five years ago and they had already had it for six years by then.

There's been no issues. There are occasional problems, but these are quickly resolved either internally or with the help of CA.

It scales well, but the problem is cost.

I haven't used it internally as our in-house IT team deals with them.

I wasn’t involved in the setup.

Buying in large quantities is more cost effective than a one-to-one basis. Periodically, we try to figure out how much we need to avoid buying one-to-one.

Look at the support as that's important, not what's in situ. However, things like trend analysis and flexible reporting are missing, which are weaknesses.

Take advantage of out-of-the-box functionalities. We made the mistake of doing a lot of customization when we set up 10 years ago, and it doesn’t play well with certain newer abilities or other output. So use as much out-of-the-box features that are already there as possible, as you never know what you want.

Our primary use case has been for supply and demand management and resource management. So far, it has been okay. We do two levels of resource management. 

Our first level is at the project overallocation, then we also have to do resource checking at the key date and event management. 

On the event management side, we had to do some custom steps. Our research managers and our booking managers have to go through multiple steps to go through that process. It is still efficient, but it is not as efficient as it could be if we had to do some custom stuff.

There are some tool limitations. We had to create some of our own summary competencies to create more of an agile tool concept, or an agile team concept, that they did not really have.

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. 

• Having information altogether in one single source.
• Being able to look at the data across team members, resources, projects and coming up with the algorithms and resources. 

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. 

Stability has been okay. We have had some performance problems. I do not think it is necessarily related to CA. I think it is the way we deployed it. We need to optimize it. 

I do not think that stability has been a problem. I think we just need to do some indexing. 

We have not, CTS has, which is our IT partner. We also have worked primarily with Rigo Consulting to do our implementation services. Since we are just now getting live those are the ones. 

Microsoft Project focused more on resource management, schedule management, not necessarily on demand management, integrations, agile, etc. We switched due to scalability.  

We had a lot of problems with Microsoft Project. We had to abandon using Microsoft Project because it was not working. We kind of had egg on our face. That is one thing that CA can do better. Give us a better scheduling tool. 

It was about a four year journey for Cerner. We know that our resources were not being deployed. We were spending a lot of time trying to find the right resources. IP uses it. CTS is going to be using it. It was an enterprise decision to invest in a new solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We worked primarily with Rego Consulting to do our implementation services, since we are just now getting live. We just rolled out about four weeks ago.

Talk to other clients.

The depths of tools and technologies that you have available for all clients has surprised me. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Willingness to do partnerships
• Willingness to be transparent
• Credentials and references from other people.