Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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. 

Within my company, resource capacity management. That's the PMO's goal for it at this time. Hopefully in the future we will manage portfolios in addition to using it as a prime entry system.

Some people are not used to managing through the tool, but as far as the tool goes, it works very well.

With that goal of gathering time from resources, and being able to predict out whether or not they'll have some capacity, it's a great improvement over what was there before, which was essentially an embedded spreadsheet within a SharePoint sight.

In addition, the reporting tools are superior to what was there before, which was someone crunching through an Excel spreadsheet. I've been able to do status reports through the projects, which has given visibility to my manager, and that's an improvement.

It has improved communication vertically, with some amount of data to be able to show that more resources are necessary, or why projects aren't moving as fast as management would like. That sort of communication makes my job a lot easier.

Within my environment, being able to give status reports to my manager is very useful, saves me a lot of trouble. 

I enjoy the Risks/Issues section. I wish that they were combined into the same module. I use that to raise things before they happen. 

I do appreciate the report that shows how utilized a person is set to be within the coming months. I use that feature a good bit.

The only real improvement from my side - I'm spoiled by things like Trello, with the very easy user interface, things like Basecamp - it's very much a static software project. If I was to focus on something it would be that user interface; making that something that is a joy to use, instead of something that feels like data entry.

If there was more drag and drop type functionality that would be fun, but it works well for what it's supposed to do.

The second thing - and this is specific to our company - integrate it with CA Service Desk Manager so that, when you have time for a ticket or when someone gets assigned a ticket, in PPM it automatically shows that they have to account for that: they would both enter time in the past and, also, that this is going to take them time in the future.

As far as a tool that communicates with resources, with individuals - what they're supposed to do next or what action items came out of what meeting - it's not really used that way. Probably I could envision a way that it would be used that way. Until it's as easy as sending an email, it probably won't be utilized by the resources in that manner.

We host internally, so it's not like it goes down. I haven't seen a ton of bugs. I bug-tested the heck out of it when they initially deployed it and got some things fixed, but they also had some custom code.

We use Service Desk Manager as well. We have a custom tool to integrate the two. One of the reasons why PPM was chosen was because, "Well, it must integrate with SDM, because they're the same company." But that was not the case. So, they got a custom tool in. Whenever something happens with PPM, where there's an update or anything like that, it breaks that tool. That's probably not tenable. That's not really my area, I didn't manage the deployment, but I could imagine that that's eventually going to be a problem.

I imagine that the scalability is there. The problem is, at this time, my company is only looking to give IT workers and project managers access to the tool, and they're trying to get buy-in to expand beyond that hundred-person group.

It has to be able to support a greater amount, and I imagine that the value would be there, but they haven't gotten to that point yet.

I have not used technical support. I haven't had any technical problems.

It's better than an Excel spreadsheet, and that's what was used before.

They brought me in to comment on it's Agile functionality and they said, "We have this Rally product." And I said, "Does that integrate?" They said, "It could." I said, "Don't worry about it."

I use Trello today, I used JIRA, I used Team Foundation Server. I talked to some people here at the CA World conference and I said, "Are any of those tools worse or better than Rally?" They seemed to like those tools more. I haven't used Rally to tell you the truth.

Regarding the new UX, at this point I feel like there could be more done to make it a more fluid experience. Five years ago, seven years ago, that sort of windows and records click was standard, and there wasn't much else out there that was better. Nowadays, things are, across software packages, just a little bit more fluid.

Is that a bad thing that it's like that? No, it's just that's where they could go next.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, first, that they meet the requirements that we set ahead of time. Second, that they are willing to answer those questionnaires. If they're not, then it's my opinion that they are not ready for prime time and we wouldn't even talk to them. And suitability, that's above everything else; that's above costs, that's above relationships, or how well known they are.

I would advise a colleague to look at the nature of the work they are trying to do, and what is the end goal they are trying to achieve. If your end goal is to ultimately get to the point where you can report up, then it might be a very good product to look into. If your end goal is either greater communication with your team, downward, or being able to have a clear idea across the organization of what needs to be done in a project, maybe look at another tool.

Portfolio and project management.

We just started, but it's a simple and powerful tool. I really love it compared to the previous one.

Previously it was complicated. We had to do the costing, everything manually, after doing the integration of a couple applications. Now, because of CA, it's going to be one application as a whole.

It will be one application for the whole PPM department: portfolio, project, and reporting in one tool.

It will improve things because it's already integrated into one. Before, there were something like three applications, and you had to integrate, and sometimes there were a lot of errors coming out. Sometimes the old system would crash.

• Timesheet Approver
• Resource management

You know where the hours of each resource manager or each worker are.

Blueprints. I'd also like to see the user interface simplified, and to have a lot of templates available on each blueprint.

I think it is stable. It's been on the market for so long, and it's CA.

Scalability is good.

I'm not sure about why the switch was made, because the one who made the decision is our director, and the architects. But I think it was because it simplified things for the users; that matters.

We evaluated Primavera Unifier and some other portfolio management systems. We went with CA because it's so easy. Everything is easy to do.

Regarding the new UX, I actually haven't heard about it.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are that

• their product has to be easy to maintain
• the users can easily adopt it, with whatever interface
• it's easy to upgrade.

I would tell colleagues who are looking for a similar solution this will work. Give it a try. I know there are a lot of products out there, and companies that are really well known. But just give them a chance to demo it and you will like it.

The platform is quite robust. We were looking for a solution that would help us build a PMO for our operations, which are based in four different countries. They all have different needs, and different business objectives and relationships; so we needed a very robust yet flexible solution.

CA Clarity, now called PPM, has met all our expectations. We're very delighted with the use of it. Internally, we have seen a good return on investment. The adoption rate has been quite easy for all our project managers and the head of the department; so we are very, very happy users.

There are several benefits to it. First of all is the accountability. You can go deep into any project that you have in your portfolio in terms of resource assignments or scheduling, costs and deviation from the plan. All of that combined with a very intuitive user interface makes the work a lot easier for all the PMO activities.

It was a big improvement because we did not previously have a formal tool to manage projects. So, we went from nothing to using the “best of breeds”; so we are very satisfied with how everything turned out.

I don't have a deep knowledge of the product, so I am probably not the best person to give you feedback on that. That would be more the function of our PMO head.

I know that there is a kind of normal evolution in the PPM roadmap. So there should be more analytics, some small improvements in terms of usability, and things like that. But I think the platform is very stable and very reliable. It's scalable; and it complies with any expectation that a company, at least a company of our size, might need.

3 years now.

Deployment has been quite smooth, where the partner´s expertise helped a lot.

I think it's a very stable platform. We haven’t suffered so far from any kind of technical difficulties. There are some bumps in the road. Maybe these are more related to functionality, or things that appear on the way that you need to learn; but I haven’t seen any technical issues.

It's a scalable enterprise-level solution. There are no problems with it.

At first, we got good help both from CA and the CA partner who joined us in the deployment. Once we rolled it out, thought, we didn’t have any kind of technical issues.

We did not use any other vendors before CA to provide a solution. When we were selecting a vendor, we considered their reliability and presence in our region. This is a key factor for us, and CA has fortunately been stable in Latin America. It's committed to our countries, and that means a lot. Price is also important. That’s normal.

It is definitely worth taking a good look at it. Don't be scared off by some people saying it's an expensive solution. You cannot compare a tool like this with some other tools that are out there in the market, or even open-source options. It's an unfair comparison. If you're looking for an enterprise-level solution, then CA PPM definitely is the best out there.

I like to be able to keep track of all our project work in one place, so I don’t have to go get information from three different places. All the info is right there.

We are using the SaaS version of PPM. We don’t have to maintain the servers. We don’t have to keep up with all the hardware, and so on. It’s all taken care of for us.

The biggest benefit really is that we can easily find out the status of all project work in terms of the lifecycle of the project, how well it’s going, and who’s involved in any of the projects that we have going on across the company. It’s in one place. It’s easy. It’s simple to get all that good information. We need that every day, so we’re not chasing it around all the time.

There is a collaboration feature on each project. All participants in the project can share documents and share discussions. They can communicate with each other through actions items that they can get, emails, and so on, directly from the product. That’s the one-stop-shop we have for all of our collaboration on our projects.

We set up portfolio plans, and we create scenarios for our portfolios. We can determine if we decide to move this project out, or bring this project up, what the overall picture is going to look like in terms demand on resources and everything else. That’s all there. It’s all in one spot. We don’t have to gather a bunch of information from different places, and then try to compile it all. CA PPM does that for us.

There are always things that can be improved. There are always opportunities to make it do more things than it does, and it seems like CA does that. Every time they bring out a release, we’ve got improved features and new features. The sky is the limit on what they could do, really.

They have a different product for Agile management, for example. They could merge these two together, and come up with one product. That would be awesome. Even though they integrate, it would be even better if it was just the same product.

It’s very stable. We’ve yet to experience any downtime because of system crashes, or anything like that. It’s become more stable over the years as a matter of fact. In older versions, there was already a process engine and processes to help automate some activities. There have been significant improvements in that part of the application. It’s much more reliable than it used to be, and it’s very good.

It’s very scalable. No matter how many users we throw at it, it still works. It still performs. It still does what it needs to. The number of projects it handles just continues to grow, and it doesn't blink an eye. It keeps up with everything we give it.

CA technical support has been invaluable to us with this product. For upgrades, and for any kind of general technical questions that we might have, CA support has been outstanding.

Initial setup is a little complex, to be honest with you. Again, it’s improved significantly over what it used to be, so they’re continuously improving that whole process and the product itself.

Spreadsheets were not efficient. It was a real pain. We did not really consider any other vendors. We knew that CA PPM product was the right product for us.

The alternatives all fall short in some areas. CA PPM has a very robust portfolio management capability, for example. I have not seen another product with anything quite as robust as what CA PPM provides. Resource management is another area that CA PPM excels in, but other products just come up short.

We know CA. We’re closely associated with CA. We understand a lot about CA that maybe someone else wouldn’t if they were just coming in blind.

I think the Gartner Group information that’s provided, their magic quadrant report, and so on, is really helpful for understanding why you would go with CA for a product like CA PPM. CA PPM just outshines all other products in the Project Portfolio Management space in terms of capabilities, what it can do, and how it works. It’s really a good product.

Save time. Manage your projects in Clarity and in CA PPM.

The most valuable for me is the opportunity to have a single tool to manager my entire projects portfolio. It is where I can see more value, because I can rate my projects, compare them. We can use a process based on PMI guides, because the solution supports it’s best practices, as lessons learned, change management, risks, baselines, etc.

We use CA PPMs resources to have the only version of the truth on a single path. Before CA PPM, each project was reported and managed with different rules, formats, etc. With the use of the tool, we could centralize, define KPIs, reports and manage better our portfolio. Besides, the SaaS license is a very good feature, because we enjoy the security of CA.COM with 100% of availability.

We use almost all features of the tool: baselines, change management requests, registration and search of lessons learned, and we developed our own KPIs dashboard.

In the past we had to deal with a lot of spreadsheets and power point presentations with different formats and with no vision if it was real project information. Nowadays, we have all managerial projects information into CA PPM solution, managed and administrated by planners and PMO roles. We can now report projects to all stakeholders in the same format with good information, besides having a unique and trustworthy repository.

Now, I have more knowledge about it, but in the beginning it was a little bit difficult to get used to its navigability, and end-users needs more help to get used to it. I miss the lack of integration between data, for exemple, between projects and portfolio information, but I think it was a problem of the implementation instead the solution.

Business Analytics information (a BI solution) with KPIs and dashboards and the possibility to expand these with custom data. It would be good to have more intuitive navigation.

I've been using it since 2014.

We use the solution as SaaS and it is always available.

We have contact with a CA company in Brazil, and simple questions are solved in time, but we have old questions that we couldn’t solve until now and it’s difficult to discuss as some issues are more complex with them. For example, reports with information and pictures. It’s a issue for us.

The implementation was simple and straightforward, even though we implemented it as a service. We had a six month project before the go-live. In this time, we configured some processes and learned to understand the mechanisms of the tool and trained end-users.

We implemented the tool with a CA partner, Deloitte. My advice is to have at least one senior expert of the tool in the team. We didn’t have that and I think if we had, today we would be facing fewer problems. It is important to know about issues and details about the tool to design a better implementation.

We evaluated four distinct solutions, and in the requirements/commercial negotiation, my company choose CA PPM.

I strongly recommend that you have your project and portfolio management process defined and look for a senior consultant expert in CA 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.

Project and portfolio management.

It's performing okay, I would say. There are no issues with the performance, but I think we are not using it at capacity. 

I would say the Project and Portfolio Management, its potential. If you talk about any other tool for PPM, I think CA PPM has the most potential.

It gives us all the projects in one view where we can drill down into our portfolio and see the potential benefits at the end of the day.

I am not sure what features they could add but, personally, what I have seen is that last year when I came to CA World, PPM was on version 15.2 and this year, after 365 days I am here at CA World again and CA is still on 15.3. Within a year only a point release. It looks like CA itself is driving it slowly and they should do something. It says something, that after the whole company worked hard they are still only coming up with a point release. It is something doubtful.

I think CA is already doing the work, probably, by going to the new UI. I think they are on the path. But they need to take a risk and go. Their initiative started, I think, two years back about going to a new UI. It's showing progress but not at a pace that I would like to see.

Since we moved to version 14, we haven't seen stability issues.

We haven't had issue with the scalability yet.

At times it is good but it is not always the best.

Response time is a bit slow in some cases. In some cases it is frustrating that we have to escalate, we would prefer not having to. But at the time, if there is an urgent issue and you get frustrated, you have to escalate it. It doesn't give you a good feeling about getting support that way. After you escalate, you get support. You get everything you want but, at the end of the day, you still feel that it would have been great if CA would have helped us during our first attempt.

I was involved with PPM setup from scratch. It's not straightforward but it's not complex either, if you know the product.

We are using version 14.3 but we would love to go to 15.3. We have seen the new UX and it's looking good so we think it is a positive change.

I would say go with PPM with SaaS. I would suggest that any customers or new customers use Clarity PPM at its default values, not customize it terribly. It has a lot potential using the product out of the box rather than making your own product.

CA has been working every year to provide a product upgrade, and if you can't use the latest features immediately, or in the near future, you are missing out on a lot. Use the regular settings, or at least most of the product out of the box, and leverage or grow from there, rather than making your own changes.