Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We use the time sheet for reporting against tasks. We have a large user group that we keep track of all the time, and where people are spending it. From using the solution, benefits would include knowing what our people are up to, one, being able to post that to GL, we do use it as a sub-ledger. We also are starting more and more to use it for allocating resources, to make sure we understand what the availability of those resources are versus the work that we're asking them to perform.

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

That's going to be kind of multifaceted for us. We've used the product since the late '90s on ABT, went live with Niku in 2004, that became Clarity, and then CA bought out Niku, so we've come a long way over a long time.

We have a very stable environment. We had our first outage, unplanned outage, this year for the first time in six years, and it was not due to the product, it was due to a third part vendor did something they shouldn't have.

Very scalable. We have, like I said, over 12,000 users right now, and I feel no problem, given enough money and time, that would scale up to whatever. I've discussed with other users of the same product that use many more than that.

It's been mixed. We get some technical support folks that know exactly what the need is, and we've had some that I've had to escalate a number of times before we could get an issue fixed.

Initial set up, user adoption was a little rough in the beginning, especially with the technology at the time. It was new, we were coming from a homegrown, "I have exactly what I want", to trying to use out of the box technologies.

I would put it right at a 7 to an 8/10, because I like what it is. It provides all the solution you need, the only takeaway, or coming off that 10 mark, is the user experience and the user interface. Forward looking to what the application is going to become by the time you go live and what you're going to do with it, not necessarily looking back and talking to users of long past, like myself, we have had it for a long time, but I try and keep my fingers on the pulse of what's coming.

For us, its most valuable features are about resource management, resource assignment, and time tracking.

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.

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

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We initially had some performance issues with some system down-time, but nothing recent. When they moved data centers, it gave us a lot more bandwidth and memory.

It's very scalable. We've been growing with it. We now have four different organizations on it.

They're very responsive. The call you back. They actually bother you if you're not as attentive as you should be, so that's actually really helpful. People are always knowledgeable. They'll walk you through the whole thing.

It was a long process. It took an awful lot of requirements, and I think the tendency of our company was to make it exactly what we wanted instead of looking to best practices.

You have to figure out your biggest need and pick the software based on it. A lot of times I think it's that one glamorous feature that people love that they want to go with, but I think you have to look across all the different requirements, weigh them, and take it from there.

The most valuable feature is work flow management. We really work with the business to make sure that we have an end-to-end reporting of the work flow tool for delivery for implementation and design for our customers.

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.

From an admin perspective on the business side, one thing I'd like to have is a drag-and-drop feature. I think that anytime you can maximize your effort and try to automate it, it definitely makes the admin user perspective a little bit better. 

Also, I would say the intuitiveness needs to grow even more exponentially than it has, and I think with the project hopper and things like that, you're going to see that type of vision grow. 

From an admin perspective, it needs to be more predictive. It's not as predictive as I would like to see.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We just upgraded to 14.2, and when we went from 13.1 to 13.3, we were very buggy. There were a lot of browser issues, performance issues, lag time, but this upgrade has been virtually seamless. A couple little tweaks here and there, but not in this version.

We started with a very small pilot in the central area. We expanded to the continental United States, and then we just brought on Canada, and also then looking to expand to Latin America. Within that, we have different groups that are using the tool in different ways, but still trying to report on a holistic view. I would say the scalability is definitely growing in an upward fashion.

I wasn't involved in the original setup, but the upgrade was much more simplistic than the first round. From a business perspective, it wasn't difficult.

I would look at ROI and really try to assess what type of information is going to drive the success of your company. If PPM could assist in doing that by either reducing cycle times or giving you real data in order to drive the direction of your business, then go with PPM.

It allows us to manage everything, and in terms of business value, its best features are about managing money and financials. We are able to show the business how we spent money and the results we obtained. The tool recognizes this need. Simply put, we use Clarity data simply to track planned vs. actuals. Of course, it is not as simple as that. We have budget plans for labor and non-labor, and we track against that.

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

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

We've had no issues with deployment of PPM.

We've had no issues at all with stability since we implemented this solution.

It’s very scalable and it's one of the major factors of why people get this solution.

We have had absolutely no issues with the support. They are extremely knowledgeable, and I haven’t heard of a situation of any complaints related to this from my team either.

It is complex because of our company, as we are asking the tool to do some things that it shouldn’t, but we made it work.

We have a budget allocated for a project, but the project is released over multiple months so we want to answer the question, “How much business value was delivered in a release and at what cost?” We also track to answer the question, “Will we be able to get all the functionality we need in the budget we allocated?" It is important to track this over short-duration iterations for a long-term product.

You have to look at your own internal systems and processes and optimize them before you implement the tool, but PPM can do a lot of things. It’s a flexible tool. Just don’t use that flexibility too much.

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.

We've not been using the tool for long, although we love being able to track the cost per project, initiative, portfolio, and finances.

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.

We want to get to know the CR functionality. We want to get a better picture of how to incorporate CR into our regular functionality.

We've been using it for two years.

So far no issues or crashes. Once during a little upgrade we had some issues, but they were typical and resolved.

We haven't had to scale.

I've not personally used tech support. We have internal tech support and they understand it. We use Regal in-house as well.

No, I wasn’t involved in the decision. This is scalable over a home grown solution.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

I would love to see the company teach me more how to actually take advantage of the tool. Know your requirement before using something like this and how it would fit in at the company in terms of the company culture and process. This is one of our struggles – they have, for example, never had to track time.

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 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.