Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Improvement over using various Microsoft tools, like just spreadsheets and other things. It's standardizing and expanding its use for the features that help our company.

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.

I have seen it now run for about three, four months, and it has been a stable product once installed and configured right, so I have not seen many needs to reboot the application.

I know it as being used for two-server system.

We intend to get into the thousands of users. We haven't reached that point. It's not driving the hardware resources that we would expect to see as something that's taxing the system.

As far as the features that we've planned to use, there's Jaspersoft, which allows you to move from Business Objects, and of course we have an upgrade being planned.

Specifically from CA, no, but the support we got from this contracted company has been very supportive, we've got the help we needed.

My company was choosing between either contracting with CA or this other contracting firm, or having someone internally be the tech-lead for PPM. We chose to assign it to me, because I have the skills to install, configure support having basically the OS knowledge to support such a utility.

I would recommend going right into Jaspersoft, which is part of the reporting feature of PPM, not to start out with Business Objects. Go right to Jaspersoft if you can.

The most valuable aspects of PPM are the project management modules and the visibility that it offers within them.

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?

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.

We've had no issues with deployment.

From my experience, it's stable, as proven by its pretty large user base who agree on this.

It’s 100% scalable. It could be used in a small company and very large, equally effective and equally powerful.

Because it’s comprehensive, I only know that it's the best-practice solution. If we're using CA PPM, we're doing best practices.

If you're a basic user, the initial setup can be straightforward. But if you're exploiting it to the max, setup is complex -- and unwise. It would be like driving an expensive sports car and not knowing how to drive it.

If you are going to buy it, you should understand its usage, and make sure you appreciate how to exploit it because it’s not cheap and you’d be wasting your money if you won’t exploit it. Some organizations underutilize it, and I ask people why they bought it if they don’t exploit it.

I like using the on-demand feature as it requires a lot less maintenance for me. Once you understand the product, it’s easy to use. It's initially challenging, but it does what it’s supposed to do. At this point, we can't ask for much more.

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.

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.

I've used it for eight years.

The system is extremely stable.

It has adapted well over time and handled everything we have thrown at it.

The support is excellent and very easy to work with. They are responsive, very nice to talk with; we have a long-term relationship.

Our previous version needed updating. There’s nothing more to say, we simply needed to update.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself and it was very easy.

Take the time to understand your desired outcome. You get so involved with what you want, but be sure to have a roadmap and game plan with using PPM.

It's valuable for us to be able to get data across the enterprise. We focus a lot on resources, so being able to get the actuals by project is big. We do reporting at the enterprise level and are focused on the portfolio management side of things, so communicating, aggregating, and analyzing are important. We are married to Business Objects InfoView.

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.

We’re happy with it. Very few performance issues.

We have not been overwhelmingly happy with that. We had the dedicated resource option, but it was challenging for us when we ran across problems during times of upgrade because we didn’t seem to get the assistance we needed. The documentation wasn’t always correct or thorough, or necessarily updated from version to version. There are some basic documentation problems, so we have found more valuable information for troubleshooting in the communities.

We get a lot of “I don’t know” or “let me find that”, but with nothing in the documentation, so we have ended up going with a third-party to help us as they had more expertise.

It was already in production when I joined.

We haven’t leveraged the full functionality of the solution. The tool is pretty great, and we have implemented some unusual things and not implemented some of other functionality that would enhance our use case. There are have been some challenges on the reporting side with maintenance, and that adds to our frustration when we go through upgrade after upgrade.

The main thing is defining your requirements – don’t let the tool drive your requirements. Understand what your goals are, so you can track that and really get the value out of the tool. It would be smart to use the functionality that exists within the tool in the out-of-the-box state, and only customize as necessary. Take your requirements and match up with OOB functionality and do the gap analysis to make decisions. When we first implemented PPM, we tried to make it into a previous tool that we had, which was terrible, so we turned PPM into the same type of tool.

Also understand what resource constraints you have in your organization to decide whether it needs to be on-premise or on-demand. Understand what level of control you really need in your environment because there are some limitations in the SaaS environment that you need to be aware of.

• Resource
• Project
• Timesheet Management

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.

They need to improve it's mobile compatibility.

I've been using it for five years.

There were some performance issues, but in the newer versions it looks fine. If there are lots of customization it can become slow.

Very good as CA support has an option to help companies build their own support team to help with their daily activities and monitoring.

Previously, I used HPE PPM which id similar to CA PPM. I am sure that most CA users would say that the CA solution is more reliable than the HPE one.

I have worked with companies who were using vendor team for implementation and support.

People or companies looking for PPM tools can go for CA PPM as it is perfect for customizations and is user friendly. As usual, most of the products have pros and cons and this product also has some issues. By using a better team and knowledgeable people in your team you can make it fit perfectly.

The best feature is the ability to control the demands of both big and small projects. For example, we recently implemented a CRM tool and it needed many resources and had many, many documents to support the project. PPM gave us the ability to control different projects with different needs at the same time because it's a unified tool.

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

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.

There have been no issues with deployment.

It's very stable, and we have roughly 115-120 endpoints.

We have a lot of endpoints, and it's scaled just fine.

We evaluated the HP solution, but the CA solution was more complete and integrated better with Service Desk Manager (SDM).

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.

The ability to provide transparency through your investment portfolios at the top-level financial all the way down to the work that drives delivery.

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.

Never an issue, stability.

As long as you have the licensing, we can scale.

Never an issue. They're always quick with an answer.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Nothing ever rates a 10. There's always areas, opportunity to improve.

We use CA PPM to handle our project and portfolio management, as well as time sheets for our resources. 

The new UX, though we are not on it. Some of the new features look really nice. We are just looking for them to be a little more fully fleshed out before we move to them. 

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

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.  

I cannot speak to stability, as we have only done a few light tests.

We have had varying degrees of success. Sometimes things are handled super quickly. Other times it takes a little while. 

Know what your full use case will be before launching into something as big as CA PPM. It does a lot of things and it is great at doing a lot of things, but if you only need a small subset, maybe it is not right for you

It does everything we need it to do. It could definitely be improved as far as speed and interoperability with other tools that we have in place.