Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Flexibility is probably the most significant feature that we take advantage of. Being a large company with a lot of customized solutions, migrating from our legacy applications into PPM obviously has been a major challenge. The flexibility of PPM, our ability to customize it and configure it to our needs has been a big selling point of the tool.

Probably the biggest reason for going with SaaS is the thin footprint. Obviously, not having to engage our internal resources to basically support the infrastructure for PPM was a big selling point. The ability to essentially upgrade without a lot of involvement from our staff was another big selling point for us. Obviously, the vision is essentially to have transparent upgrades for the tool with minimal effort on our side. Certainly, going with the SaaS solution has allowed us to basically upgrade the application in a matter of weeks rather than spending months planning for the upgrade.

The major benefit is, with our legacy applications, right now, we have approximately 600 IT projects, spanning 12 different portfolios. In our old world, we had essentially a number of different solutions supporting the 600 projects and 12 portfolios. The vision that PPM has allowed us to take advantage of is, now, we have consolidated all our portfolios and projects under one tool, instead of a multitude of solutions.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and business strategy because we all now talk the same language, if you will. In the past, with everybody having their own spreadsheet-based solution, when you essentially try to talk about project status, you really had to understand what their solutions were for managing their portfolios and their projects. By having everything consolidated under PPM, now everybody has a unified way of looking into their projects. When you talk about what's red, yellow and green for your project status, it isn't essentially this grab bag of, “Well, that depends on how you measure it.” We're all now being measured by the same tool, being PPM. When we talk about our status being red, yellow or green, we all know exactly what that means because, essentially, it's all PPM speak and not essentially some homegrown solution supporting the various portfolios.

We're really looking forward to the integration of Agile Central into PPM. Obviously, we now have a solution that services the needs of our project managers and our portfolio directors. Being able to integrate Agile Central into our solution base here, obviously allows us to extend the reach of PPM from the project management and portfolio managers all the way down to the actual development teams. Obviously, bringing everybody under a consolidated umbrella will help unify the beginning-to-end lifecycle of our projects.

The big improvement for us would be timesheet management. We have a legacy timesheet management solution that we're moving off of into PPM. It goes down to the activity level for the recording of time. In the current PPM solution, while they handle the reporting of time to the individual task and your project plans really nicely, breaking it down to the individual activity level such as requirements, design, different support activities, the tool doesn't necessarily play in that space really nicely. Certainly, we'd like to see them do a little bit more with regards to taking that time recording down to a lower level of detail. Of course, for us it's all about analytics and, of course, project management thrives on analytics.

It is very stable. We have not had a single issue with the SaaS solution for PPM since we've been on board. We came on board live in production about a year ago. We have not experienced a single outage with SaaS solutions since we've gone live. Obviously, knock on wood, we understand that, in the IT world, downtime is a fact of the way things work but, as of a year in production, we have yet to encounter an outage that has impacted our user base.

Indeed, we have used technical support, more so from a development perspective, though, not from, obviously, an issue with a production outage or issues with our production environment. Being that we're looking to configure the tool in different ways to satisfy the needs of our various portfolios, we've actually had some conversations with CA support to help us understand how we can essentially move from the vanilla PPM to something that obviously suits the needs of our business. They've been very responsive with regards to answering our questions on how exactly we can move from today's world to what we need to do in the future.

We had a plethora of solutions and, of course, they all did things a little bit differently. When we tried to take a look at the overall portfolio of all our IT projects, there was really nothing to unify everybody under one common solution. Essentially, if you talk to one portfolio, they manage things in a certain way. A different portfolio would do it completely different. Of course, when you tried to look at the overall IT budget, it got to be a very complex solution. Of course, if you try to take a holistic look – you have resources and projects, and you have your planned budgets – nothing was under the same umbrella. It was a hodge-podge, and a lot of manual time and effort went into basically having just a simple conversation on, "Hey. What do we want to do next year?"

Bringing everything into PPM, now, the conversation’s about what we want to do next year and the whole what-if scenarios that come out with regards to, "Hey, what if we do this? What if we do that?" Instead of taking weeks and months to have those discussions, we can now have them in real-time, right here and right now.

We actually employed an implementation partner. With PPM, there are a lot of consulting firms that specialize in PPM implementations. We actually picked an implementation partner who helped us through the various questions and considerations to evaluate before we went live.

Certainly, doing it ourselves would have been a little intimidating, but with the help and assistance of CA services and the implementation partner, actually, the migration from our legacy solutions to now a PPM-based solution has been relatively painless.

We did have five other vendors on our shortlist. We did take an exhaustive look at all five of them. In the end, it really came down to CA PPM’s flexibility and the ability for it to basically configure itself to meet the needs of our organization and its ability to be a SaaS solution rather than an on-premise solution. Certainly, we're looking to have a unified solution that we can essentially standardize the company but still configure it so that it's specific to our needs, and yet, obviously, have it hosted at an external site, where we don’t have to necessarily spend the time and energy to make it happen.

I definitely recommend going to CA World and talking to all the other companies that have implemented PPM solutions to see how they did it. One thing we definitely learned at a previous CA World, when we were doing our evaluation of PPM, everyone we spoke to had accolades about how they love the tool and what they are doing with it. Of course, when you hear all the stories of how they basically move from their legacy solutions to a PPM-based solution, you quickly realize that it can do everything you need to do, more and more.

It's definitely met and exceeded all our expectations with regards to the tool. We knew we'd have to make some concessions with the tool. Obviously, if you're moving from your completely customized solution to one that's more of a package-based solution, we figured we’d have to give up on some things with regards to our process, but we found with PPM, it's so flexible and so configurable that everything that we had customized for the homegrown solutions, we were able to actually port it directly into PPM. Now, essentially, we've got a standardized solution across our whole entire organization that still has all the benefits of our homegrown solutions that we had in the past.

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 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.

For us, it's the ability to feed payroll with accurate timesheets and capitalize project hours.

It provides accurate reporting for our investors who are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So we must have absolutely accurate financial statements.

They just introduced Jaspersoft in 14 and some of the security around Jaspersoft is very difficult to use. You cannot really assign security group permissions for specific reports. It's very difficult to do, so I would really like to see them work on the security aspect of Jaspersoft reports.

I think it's very stable for the most part. We run into periodic issues, especially with Microsoft Project and its integration; but it’s always difficult integrating with a third party app.

I think it's very scalable. We just acquired another company. My company primarily does the lottery, and the company we acquired primarily does gaming. It is the same industry, but with very different practices. I think it really fits both because it's very flexible.

I love technical support. I love them. They're awesome.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I think it was fairly complex. We'd never done anything like that before. There was another team that did the initial setup. It is just that through attrition, we lost them all; so I became the technical support.

Technical support is your friend. Technical support is wonderful. They're very helpful. They're very knowledgeable; and they can get you through most anything unless, of course, it’s a bug. In this case, they have to report it to their people.

I think the most important thing when you select a vendor is that it fits the business need. If the business isn't happy, it doesn't matter how much or how little you spend.

The financial portfolio management portion is valuable. It's really valuable for our executive leadership in order to make decisions on projects and portfolio funding.

It has provided visibility to finances. Where they are, how they're spent, as far as projects are related.

The solution is limited in terms of project management, collaboration, and things like connectivity to other applications. It's very limited in that functionality, unfortunately. We would love to see a better set of collaboration tools. We would love to be able to integrate more easily. I am very technical, as is my co-worker, and we can configure it as long as the availability is there. We would like to be able to connect more easily with SharePoint, maybe JIRA, and other collaboration tool such as Microsoft Project. We would love to be able to have that kind of platform so that we can do that inter-connectivity between all those applications.

It's a very stable product and a good solution. It’s limited in what it can do but for what it does, for what we need, it does just fine.

We're hosted, so as far as scalability goes for us, it's just a matter of user licenses. The user licensing itself could use a little bit of a revamp. Instead of giving everyone the same license, we should have read-only licenses and things of that nature.

I think the previous solution was homegrown. I don't think they had a solution, but rather they had a lot of little solutions. It is the same now, but at least we've consolidated the finances into one.

I wasn’t involved in the setup. From what I gather, it wasn't that complex because it was pretty base. It was all hosted and it was relatively turn-key.

Take a good hard look at what you need as well as where you may see your product needing to be in five more years. Then take a look around you at the market and see where things are moving. Even if you are not going there now, it doesn't take much to turn on a dime. You might need that expanded capability package later.

The solution can be used for strategic planning. It is also used for portfolio and project management.

The product’s functionalities and suite of services grab the customer’s attention. The product is flexible. It is easy to use. Users can configure the product to match their environment, products, and services.

The architecture must be improved.

We are resellers. We have been presenting the solution to a couple of customers in Kuwait for eight months.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight or nine out of ten. It is very scalable. Around four to five enterprise customers are interested in the product.

We can deploy the solution on the cloud and on-premises.

The subscription is not that expensive. However, the implementation and the services related to it might be a little bit expensive because it's a very unique field. We don't find a lot of people working in this field.

Broadcom Clarity is a popular solution. A lot of third-party research organizations give it a high rating. It is always on the top in Gartner. In our region, Gartner has a big say in the choice of products. Other similar products have some limitations.

I highly recommend the solution to medium to large enterprises. If organizations want to align their business objectives, vision, and mission with the execution on the ground within their departments, they must use Broadcom Clarity. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We're using it for project and for portfolio planning, and we're continuing to use it for financial investment planning in the future.

We've got four different instances on it, but we've only rolled it out in my area, corporate IT, and for 150 users. 

It performs well.

We've been lacking a project management system that we could easily pull data out of, as leads were putting it in. So the users were not updating the systems, whatever system they were using, as much.

It allows me to keep track of the projects, residual location, it gives me the ease of getting status reports out, and checking risks and issues.

I don't have anything specific to note right now. We're not using all the features, functionality yet.

It's stable.

Technical support is typically on par, gives you quick answers, and gets back with you relatively quickly.

There's always an issue or two that hangs out there, that does not get resolved, but for the most part we get good service.

We were using Artemis. We switched because it was not meeting our needs. They weren't using it in the way that they wanted to be using it. It didn't have the functionality.

We are using software service, so it's been pretty straightforward.

Oracle Primavera was on the shortlist as was Attask. But CA PPM is a more comprehensive enterprise type of solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is longevity.

I give CA PPM a nine out of 10 because there's always room for improvement, but they gave a good quality solution.

I would recommend it.

Primarily we're using it for 

• project management
• status tracking
• resource allocation tracking
• and timesheets and resources for our project management team.

And we're just starting to actually roll it out to our legal team. Yes, that is correct. Our legal team is actually going to use the Project Object in PPM for tracking their litigation cases.

It has performed well.

It's a kind of one-stop shop repository of all of our project statuses and what everybody is doing. So we don't have multiple systems that have to track time and status, and risks and issues.

I think it's very configurable. However we want to change something with out-of-the-box configuration, it's pretty simple to do.

The expandability of the new UX for the majority of what we can do on the classic UI side.

Stability is very good.

We haven't really tested scalability yet. But we will be with this little "legal team" project, and we'll see how it scales to a completely different demographic of users using the interface.

Technical support is very good. I'm happy with the response time and they are definitely knowledgeable.

We didn't have any centralized PPM solution. Everybody was just using Microsoft Project for their own thing. We needed an overarching solution to give visibility on what everybody was doing, and what we can do as an enterprise.

Complex.

We probably should have bitten off a little bit less of the sandwich to begin with. Our implementer was more of a solutions expert and a consultant than they were a trainer. I think we were looking for more of a trainer than somebody to just tell us how we need to set it up. It was less collaborative than I would've liked.

I was not a part of that evaluation. I'm going to say "yes", we evaluated other solutions, but I don't know who they were.

I have two words regarding the new UX: Love it.

When evaluating other vendors, the most important thing is a lot of the professional services, because my organization is not inherently a technical organization. We are a restaurant company. We don't staff a lot of technical folks. So probably the number one priority is that technical professional services offered.

I give the solution an eight out of 10 because I think the classic UX is a little bit clunky. Obviously the new UI is taking over. But also obviously, everything we can do in the classic UI cannot be done yet in the new UI. So we're waiting.

In terms of advice, have your specific requirements of what you need upfront. That way, you're not going to be swayed by all of the cool little gadgets that you could use. Know what you do want to use upfront, and then all the cool gadgets can come later.