Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

It's an integrated product. We can do project management, strategic management, and resource management all in the same place. We don’t have to get sources from everywhere. This helps us make decisions faster.

The main benefits of using the SaaS version are its availability, and that we don't have to think about maintaining the systems.

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.

We could use expanded reporting capabilities because right now that is fairly limited in what it does. I just heard that in 15.2, they have more reporting capabilities; so that will be great.

It has been good so far in terms of stability.

It is highly scalable.

We use CA tech support all the time. They are very accessible. When I need them, they are available to address any issues that I have.

We had about 5 or 6 different ways to record time for work that we do. That is reason enough to move to a single solution.

The most important criteria when we select a vendor are their reputation and their strategic direction. I think we chose CA primarily because of their reputation.

I wasn't involved in the original set up. I think it's pretty simple because we're on SaaS.

Do your research. Make sure you understand what the business requirements are before deciding on a tool because a tool itself is just a tool.

The most valuable solutions for us are being able to share data across the organization to help use technology to drive our processes. We are trying to use it as our system of record for reporting, integrating with Salesforce and SAP so all of our reporting will come out of the system. That's the plan.

I love the grid-like portlet.

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.

I would love to see skills-based capacity planning. We're pretty mature in our resource management. We decreased the number of roles that we are using, but this actually hurt our perspective for forecasting capacity planning. Now, we can’t drill down to the levels of proficiencies within a role. There’s no way to incorporate that into the portfolio, so it doesn't really help us. We would like to be able to drill down to the skills level better.

We would like to see skills built into the Portfolios. This way we could do accurate resource and capacity factoring in the skills of our resources. Not all resources are alike in terms of ability and we do not want to over burden ourselves with multiple roles to distinguish skill level.

Scheduling needs improvement. If we look at our demand and capacity in Portfolios, all we have to go off of are roles which do not accurately tell us how many resources we have to do the work.

Stability is fairly good.

I think it’s scalable. We're looking to expand, bringing on several new groups, so we'll likely go from 300 users to 800 users pretty soon. We've been cleaning up things as we go along. We ended up removing multiple financial entities to merge them into a single entity. This was a big project for us, but I think it's going to help us scale.

I was involved in one aspect of the setup, but not the entire deployment. I think it was fairly complex, but what I did was more on the business side, not the technical side.

We did not consider any other vendors.

Understand how your business works, and know that the PPM tool can only do so much. You have to develop your processes to go along with the technology.

Working on the technical side of this CA tool for last 9 years with different different companies and clients.

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.

Time Entry, Resource Allocation, Interactive Dashboards, Risk Management, Integration with Jaspersoft reports.

The application memory management and responsiveness of this JAVA product can be improved, especially in the peak usage times. A better way to track, analyze and tweak the heap memory would be a great addition to this PPM tool

More than five years.

Occasional slowness of the product at peak usage times like Budget season, mostly due to poor heap memory management.

No. Its perfectly scalable and perfectly easy to implement the change.

Customer Service:

It's awesome 10/10

Technical Support:

It's very good 9/10

No

Yes, the installation/upgrade is complex. You will need many mock runs in non-prod environments before we try the new version in PROD. Each version upgrade can come with new issues and challenges. But from the latest v14.x versions, this has been simplified a lot.

In-house

We did some analysis on HP PPM. Found Clarity PPM better.

If anyone is looking for a Project and Portfolio Management tool, then I highly recommend CA Clarity PPM. Of all the PPM tools we had tried, Clarity PPM is the most robust, multi-functional and reliable tool.

Check out my other Clarity PPM detailed review at http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/ca...

Our primary use case is mostly for financial purposes. We have a finance team and it's used for time keeping as well. Those are the two major things that we use it for, financial budgeting and for time keeping. I am the tech support of our team so I'm responsible for keeping the servers working, upgrading the system and getting certain integrations and the like. I'm a software engineer. 

This is the first PPM tool I've used so I can't provide a comparison. It's technically fine, is very user friendly, and it's a good tool. We get pretty good support from Broadcom as well.

The solution is lacking in certain integrations but that's generally the way because each organization has different preferences. I feel like they could be using more updated technology, like EPA and things like that. I think those are the aspects that they might improve because we need to keep up with the times in order to be relevant with the current technology, and with what is happening in the world of technology. The standards are there and it takes a lot of time for every organization to move their core base to newer technology. I understand that aspect as well, but they could look into it.

There are many technologies that leverage JavaScript, for example, such as NodeJS and AngularJS and all of that and JSON as well. We're not using any of them which is understandable because they use Java. I'm younger, so in college I dealt with newer technologies like the NodeJS which I like. These are technologies that they may implement in the future.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is mostly stable. I'm not sure if other organizations follow this or not, but I always stick with one version below the latest to give the vendor time to catch all the errors and bugs. I don't have any complaints with the stability. 

We have a lot of Clarity users in the company and it already scales to a pretty substantial level, I would say.

We have very good technical support. 

I would say that the support and the community of Broadcom is pretty extensive and it's actually very good. I did not use it initially, but I would suggest that you should use the support and the community that is available for Clarity. We were lucky to have good initial support so I didn't have to struggle that much because I got enough knowledge transfer to get me through.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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.

• Portfolio management
• Resource management
• Project management, of course

User-friendliness, I think that's the key. Right now it's really clunky. We're also looking to upgrade, but an upgrade is not going to fix everything. The new UX is good, but there are still a lot of limitations. Once they work through those kinks and get those limitations removed, we'll be able to upgrade.

One of the things we use is timesheets. In the timesheet UX, you can't do things like splitting time, managing overtime versus regular time, very easily. That would be helpful. 

Financials are okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement in financials.Financial plans, if those could be made so that you're not always grouping your financial data by predefined attributes, that would be helpful for us.

It's pretty stable. It doesn't crash, I would give stability a nine or 10 out of 10.

Earlier, there were major issues, but since 2015, when we moved to SaaS, there haven't been.

Scalability is pretty decent. We are on SaaS, so CA takes care of scalability.

Current tech support is much better than the previous technical support. Most of the time they answer our questions quickly, but it's hit or miss. Sometimes it does take some follow-ups and escalations, but 70%, 80% of the time they are quick.

Recently, what happened was we had a request to backup our database, so that the development team could start to move to production. But nobody ever got back to us, and they were supposed to. The team kept waiting, so I had to do escalate it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. They were pretty straightforward. CA took care of everything, we just did the testing.

I wouldn't be able to say there is one particular criterion that's important when selecting a vendor, it's a combination of all of them that we will look at, like 

• trust
• cost
• the value they're going to bring.

I would rate it eight out of 10, actually.

I would say definitely look at this solution but understand your business needs first. There is a tendency on the customer side to look for "one size fits all." That's never the case. So make sure Clarity is really a best fit for your business needs. Otherwise, you are just buying a fancy, glorified timesheet tool.

We use it for both portfolio and project management, as well as time tracking and resource management.

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.

• The portfolio management
• The waterline functionality
• The data that we can get out of the timesheet information.

One of the things that was highlighted that is coming was the top-down planning functionality and that looks pretty compelling. 

If there is support or guidance around how to take a more waterfall-based shop and transition it into an agile-based team framework within the tool, that would be good as well because it is definitely different in how you manage and execute projects.

The integration needs to be improved with Jaspersoft and Microsoft Project.

It seems fine. We have not had any issues.

We are a fairly small shop, so we really do not run into any scalability issues.

Their online documentation is okay. It is not great. It is hard to get to some of the answers to the things that we may be running into, such as use cases that we are trying to fix. So, frequently we have to put in tickets. 

Sometimes they are great and exceed expectations, and sometimes, they take a little longer than I would anticipate.

The one that we had at the time, Microsoft Project Server, which was pretty basic in the data that you could get out of it. It did not have near the functionality around portfolio management that this CA solution does. So, that was really one of the reasons why we were evaluating new tools.

As with any fairly complex tool, there were a lot of things that you can't solve for. You can't write a 100% of the requirements and expect to roll it out. So, we ended up with some gaps. One of the areas that we would improve upon is not necessarily with the tool, but having more tips/tricks on adoption. How to get people outside of the PMO to use the tool and get the information.

We looked at staying with our current solution, which was Project Server, and seeing how we could leverage it. We also looked at Innotas, then CA. So, those were really the three. Innotas had a great portfolio functionality, but its project management was very basic. Its resource management was kind of non-existent. So, CA had the full package. It really had everything that we wanted.

I would give them advice that the learning curve and the adoption curve for an organization, which is attempting to bite off this much functionality and complexity, is a lot longer than they will think. Put some serious energy into how to get the groups involved into driving adoption. Then, knowing that the new OData connector is now out, finding ways to quickly leverage data, so you can start telling business stories and showing the value of the tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Stability in the marketplace. We definitely wanted to go with something that was going to be around for a while, and they were constantly improving.

The primary use case for our product is definitely the project management and portfolio management part of the tool, in that we have never really had anything like this before at our company. Previously, it was a lot of shoot from the hip, not a ton of follow-up on major projects, or at least proper follow-up. It has just been a way to prioritize for us, if adding project x, what does that do to projects a, b, and c at the front-end. 

We are still learning a lot with it. It is definitely a big culture change for our company in that we have never really had to do this before. I would say it is the accountability piece. There are just a lot of the pieces that we have tried to do and we have tried to do unsuccessfully, so we are using this product and so far it has been a success, but we still have not really pushed it out very hard yet. So, more to come.

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.

The new UX is very user-friendly and simple. The new user interface has been great, I think it has been easier. It will be an easier way to get the product out and used more frequently and more real-time, whereas mainly a lot of only the IT people were able to use the old interface well, just from their background. With the new user interface, it will help a lot.

I am still wrapping my head around the whole process. This is still a newer aspect for me compared to what I have done in the past. I really can't comment on this, because I am still learning all the features that are available within this and using them well and efficiently. I think once I get my head around it and how it will work for our organization, I would probably be able to give a better comment.

Still to be determined. I would say so far so good. I do not really have any complaints about it, but I probably can't give a very detailed answer.

Scalability is massive. It is awesome. It is definitely something we have never done at our organization. It is just steering the ship that way. If the product is a 10, we're probably only using it at a one or a two right now with everything that is available. So, it is still to be determined.

Our old solution was pretty much Excel, and we really did not have it. For a health system, we are now facing a lot more cost pressures, and needing to spend our dollars way more efficiently than we ever had to. Other organizations or sectors have already cut a lot of their costs. Healthcare has lagged behind in this, mainly because we did not have to in the past, and now we are at that point. In looking at that, and really analyzing what we do and how we spend, we need to be more on our forefront now. That is why we ending up investing.

It seemed pretty straightforward.

It was based on our enterprise manager's recommendation from another system that we had talked to. I do not really know all of the background that went behind that, but I know this came to us. This was really one of the only products we had looked at.

It was just the next step where we as an organization needed to go. We were very impressed. It was really getting our organization to buy into the process more than the product. The product, having all of the features which are available, is the reason that we wanted to go that route.

I would absolutely recommend this product. Just the capability of it is really blowing my mind so far. It is more than anything we have ever done. We have worked with Microsoft Project and used Excel spreadsheets in my department. So, this is just blowing our minds, everything that we can pull together, and how much more efficient it is.

I am the backup for our project management office in that I assist our project manager, getting out and helping all our project managers, and everybody from IT. I am in our innovate office, which is basically, project management. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Accessibility would be my number criteria. Helping us out and getting us going.