Broadcom Clarity Reviews

I like that it’s very flexible. If you need it to do something, you can make it do that. That's a good thing.

For example, out of the box we use the SaaS version. It's not highly customizable as if we'd installed it locally, but out of the box there's no process to load the data warehouse on any regular basis. So you have to make a job to schedule and run this process according to your schedule. They give you the tools to do all these different things.

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.

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.

It's been very stable for us. We've been using our PPM implementation as a means by which to encourage the company to get more on-demand solutions because it's been successful for us.

We haven't had any stability issues.

I have used technical support. You need to get to the right person and that can be challenging. We've had tickets open for months, and we would try to reach out and say, "Hey, what's going on with this?" "Well, we're working on it, we'll get back to you." In certain situations, that would go on for months.

Finally, I'd get a phone call or an email from another person saying, "Oh, I was just assigned this ticket, here's the two-minute thing you need to do to fix it." Once you get to the right person, it’s great. But now I know who to go to.

We used Primavera for almost ten years. People were generally unhappy with it. They felt that it was inflexible and wanted something new. We have other products from CA, and they came and offered us PPM if we got a bundle. It was a big change for us to go from an old tool to the new tool.

I was not involved in the selection process. That was much higher than me, so I don't know what they did.

I was involved in the initial setup. Just setting up the system was very easy, because they did it all and it's on demand. Trying to make it work in our world had it's moments. For many projects, we had to get the old data from the old system into our new system. That posed some interesting and unique challenges.

I would have to look at Primavera all over again, because I know they're changing and evolving.

My advice is to plan, plan, and plan. Just know what it is you want and then go for it.

The most valuable features are time compliance, capacity and demand, and resource management; knowing who is allocated to what task, what projects, what activities, and if they're on track or not. We have time compliance goals, where we have to complete time sheets and we have to have one-on-one meetings with our leadership. That's another value: making sure that we're compliant with those.

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.

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.

We've had good stability with it.

Scalability is good. It's a licensing model; you just upgrade your license when you need to add more users. That's good.

They provide good technical support. We don't have a lot of issues, but we've had success with getting feedback from them and getting resolution to our issues in a timely manner.

We were previously using Primavera.

We decided to move to CA PPM because we had an ELA with CA and we needed to get to a tool that we could integrate with other systems. Also, Primavera was legacy. We had it for a long time, so we needed to get a better tool.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is partnership, collaboration and working together to provide the best solution.

I wasn't involved with the initial setup. I wasn't responsible for the product until just before it was implemented in production. I've been supporting it since then.

From what I’ve heard, initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had some issues with resource management APIs, but I don’t think that's any different from others. It was data related.

It takes time; it's not done overnight. It takes a year or two to implement.

The most valuable features of the solution are that it's process driven and helps push our business users to follow that process.

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.

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.

The solution is quite stable. Occasionally, we might have issues on some newer features when we go through upgrades but once we get past them, we usually don't have those issues again.

Our company has about 26,000 users on it. It's been extremely good for us. There are some performance issues that we have to work through. We are testing its limits but it's quite scalable.

Support can be a hit or miss depending on the engineer. I've worked with some very smart engineers that help you get to the root of the problem easily. On the other hand, with some engineers, they go through the bread-and-butter responses and sometimes that takes a while to get to the issue at hand.

I don't know as it was set up a long time ago.

This product does a lot so it would depend on what you are doing. I would recommend to use this software.

There are some improvements that the product can make in regards to the reporting solutions and data warehousing, It should also improve with the way the screens work. Currently, it is one of the best solutions out there and it has a lot of functionality. It could be better though.

In my opinion, the most important criteria while selecting a vendor is how responsive the organization is to your needs and that plays a big part. I know a lot of people with this software who have their own personal implementations or ways to do it. You can get into some issues that are unique to your own. When an organization is always willing to communicate and is flexible, that helps a lot.

The most valuable features are its compatibility with other programs, easy to use and the report generating feature.

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

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

Currently, we are still in development and we're not in production. The few times that we've tried putting it in production, it hasn't been that stable.

From what I've seen at a recent conference, I'm quite impressed. You can do a lot with it and there is lot of room for growth.

They are very good and extremely responsive when it comes to addressing questions. They provide good suggestions for any troubleshooting.

We were using a previous solution; it was a combination of Microsoft Access, SharePoint tables and Excel. It was becoming too cumbersome and time consuming to produce reports and we needed something to manage all our projects. With the number of projects we were doing, the things we were trying to track and report on were getting more detailed; thus we needed a tool to manage all that.

The vendor’s ability to understand our current process, adapt to it while also being honest and setting guardrails for us on what their limitations are and what the product can deliver, were important criteria while choosing a vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was quite complex. We're still in the initial setup.

Make sure that the production requirements are detailed and thorough, so that the vendor can understand what is needed for successful implementation.

We're not in production. We had gone to production, but we had to go back. There was difficulty in understanding our process and expectations from the start of the project to where we are now and that hasn't been realized.

Resource management is probably one of the most widely used features of this product and it is what we are using now.

One of the other features that we have started to step into but haven't really done yet, is portfolio management. It is a direction that we are heading in order to leverage it more deeply.

We mainly use resource management for resource forecasting which basically helps us to manage our resource capacity. In this way, we can understand our availability overallocation and that is really where we are using this tool most in our company. We definitely want to broaden our use of the features of this product.

The main benefits of using this tool as a service platform are leveraging CA to handle availability and stability of the platform. Also, they carry the load in terms of execution of any product upgrades. We need to be ready for the upgrade and help test the upgrade, but they keep us on the upgrade path. These are some of the primary advantages.

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.

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.

We don't have any major issues with the stability of the product.

I am not aware of us having any scalability issues. As a matter of fact, I don't think our user base would be considered huge compared to other CA clients. We have around 2500 users, so it is not huge.

I haven't personally used technical support.

PPM being an industry, CA PPM is an industry-leading product and we certainly keep utilizing it. We don't have a compelling reason or business case to move away from it. In fact, we want to invest in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It happened before I joined the company.

Think about your business processes along with the tool’s capability. The tool has a lot of capability but you need to make sure your business processes are aligned to leverage that capability in order to maximize it.

The problem is leveraging the organization; it is hard to get people to adopt it. We need to shift some business processes so we can leverage it more. We have partnered with CA and they are doing what they need to do.

The project management part of it is definitely the most valuable part of it to us. We don't get a lot of value out of resource management or portfolio management yet. It really helps reporting on overall statuses at an aggregate level that we have going on. It's really the best part.

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.

• 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.

It's pretty stable.

It's scalable, but not great. We're a pretty large implementation. We have 120,000 active resources in the tool. We see a lot of performance impacts, particularly in the newer versions with Jaspersoft and things like that, so that part has been pretty disappointing. But, you know, it still gets the job done. It's just a little slow.

We brought in some people from Services (back when there was a Services) to do health checks and things like that. We were constantly opening up tickets, particularly with the newer versions and Jaspersoft and things like that.

We were using PTC Integrity. We outgrew it; and it didn't handle customizations very well. Of course, we overcustomized to the point where it wasn't usable. Something had to go. It was more of a workflow engine; and so, it worked for IT. But we wanted a space where we had business, IT, and other groups all in one space.

I've been there from day one. The initial setup was pretty easy. I was kind of surprised that just getting the app installed, up and running, was pretty simple. The complexities usually came with stakeholder requirements. That's where things got a little nuts; but just getting it up and running wasn't bad.

We also considered HPE. PTC was on our list early on. They had a newer version, and that just didn't do it. There were a handful, but it was six or seven years ago.

The most important factor in choosing PPM was the usability of the tool. CA was good about helping us getting it set up initially with some of the earlier requirements. We had to redo a bunch of that due to shifting business needs; but their assistance was a big factor.

Don’t overcustomize it. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. We would've been better off if we could go back in time, roll it out of the box again, and use it for a predetermined amount of time before determining what we needed to customize.

We’re using the on-premise version.

The most valuable features are portfolio management and the resources; resources are the key for us.

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.

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.

Stability of this product is good. We had supported over 300 users and I haven't seen any problems at all.

It could handle a vast amount of data and a huge number of users that are using the tool simultaneously.

I have not used technical support.

We weren't using any sort of PPM tools earlier, it was all through spreadsheets.

In my opinion, the most important criteria for choosing a vendor should be knowledge, experience, willing to walk the customer through their issues, understanding what problems they have and how the vendor can help them achieve their goals.

The initial setup was straightforward. Using the tool, you can navigate it, tell it what to do or what not to do.

They should look at the tool itself because it's a powerful tool. It can do a lot of things, cover a lot of ground quickly and it can easily be picked up as far as skill sets go.

This tool solves a lot of the project-related issues. Right now, we're just figuring out how to use the resources.

We are mostly using this tool for financial purposes, moreover for financial reports. The reporting is based on the CA PPM tool; thus we mainly use it for finances.

Although we have integration with different payroll systems such as AP and FA, at the end of the day we are getting the financial information from GL for our accounting purpose. This is our main purpose for using this tool.

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.

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.

It is too early to discuss stability because we are just going live in the first week of December. Let's see for the next 6 - 8 months how it is working and then it will be more relevant.

We are using it not just in one department but at the enterprise level; also in both our geographical locations, i.e., Canada and the US. The product is scalable.

We have used CA support and they are perfect. They respond back on time and give us the required solution. Even if they are taking more time, they will inform us beforehand. We are okay with their services.

Before this product, we had 3 or 4 legacy systems. One was used for time reporting. It was not a centralized one; only the Canadian people were using it. The US office was using Primavera. We wanted to collaborate everything into a single domain and that is why we selected the CA PPM tool.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor was more flexibility in the CA PPM tool. They were more approachable, so that was another reason.

Depending upon the environment you are in, whether you are on SaaS or on-premises, take the decision based on which environment your company wants to be in and not just get any product. Talk to other banks or any other customers who are in SaaS and have similar requirements. Based on that, make your decision. Since on-premises has some benefits and on the other hand even SaaS has its benefits, so based on that you can select your solution.