Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the quality of the database; the online database is transactional and we are able to get real-time data.

It has helped our organization in regards to the portfolio feature. We are now able to pull all the information together and have a consistent product across all the portfolios. We have various domains and different groups aiding our infrastructure, marketing and sales. Thus, being able to have all the information in one place helps us with the analytics, reporting and decision-making aspects. 

Our business area doesn't really use the system. It's just the IT department that uses the system that we're using. We collaborate with them by giving them some access so there is visibility for the projects that their business might want and then the IT team supports it.

As far as the performance is concerned, I haven't seen any issues.

Currently, we are using version 14.2. It's hard to say at this point but we have been able to get most of what we need out of the system; there is a list.

Cost and speed are important factors when selecting a vendor.

You should do your homework. Make sure that you understand what you're getting. This would be relevant for any solution. You should then talk to other companies or entities that are using this solution.

We are not using the SaaS version of the product, i.e., our specific company is not using the latest version but we do have a global company that's using it.

We are currently using the Idea feature for project intake. We actually locked (CA PPM) Clarity down, so people can't open projects. In order to initiate a project, they come through the Idea feature. That helps us because for resource management, we get more applications and all the required fields are populated at that time. That feature is very valuable for us.

We are using the SaaS version of this tool. It works the same as the non-SaaS version, but I know that our responsibility on the back end is different. We don't have that responsibility anymore, and that's a benefit to us.

The project management expertise varies across the organization. This tool works for the people who are advanced as well for the new people.

With every pre-launch process, we want to be transparent in what's going on for the organization. We want people to know up front what's expected and when they're going to be needed on a project. This tool helps us get that transparency.

I'm looking forward to the addition of the Jaspersoft reporting feature. We don't have that right now. This feature is going to make things easier to measure. I do a lot of metrics and recording, and this feature will help.

The stability of this solution is fine. I've never even seen it go down. It's very, very good. We're always notified when there is scheduled downtime.

This tool is scalable. It’s big enough for us and the right size for our organization.

We have a consultant who we use for our technical problems.

We had Primavera before we moved over to (CA PPM) Clarity. I wasn't involved in that decision, so I don't know the reason behind that transition.

To offer advice to colleagues researching this solution, I would need to know what they were looking for first, and then I could see what wasn't working for them. Nonetheless, (CA PPM) Clarity is a very robust tool and you can really do a lot with it. It has a lot of features and a lot of capabilities that we don’t even use yet. For our needs, it works.

The Project Portfolio Management software helped get all of your projects, all of our project costs, and all of our people working on those projects gathered together in one single place so we know what we're working on, and where we're spending our money.

The main benefit of using the SaaS (software as a service) platform is that everything is taken care of for us. We don't need to buy the hardware. We don't need to do the installation. We don't need to do the upgrades. That's all done for us. It's just handled.

It gives us a better sense of what people are working on and where we're spending our money. It also lets us know what things are actually costing. So sometimes projects that aren't valuable are costing a lot of money. It gives us that information. It lets us know if we have enough people to take on additional projects, or if we don't have enough people, and we've got to make some hard decisions about those projects.

It's a single database, so all the information goes in one single place, and there are common workflows and processes, common forms and pages to fill out. We have the same information on these projects across business units and business divisions, and then within given teams, and we have that same common repository to view information.

Resource management is the key, so making sure we have the right people working on the right projects, and we have enough people to manage those projects. It gives the ability to add some prioritization and ranking of those projects as well.

So the only thing that’s missing is that the dashboards do not go into enough detail. The user interface and the user experience can be improved.

One of the things they're doing now is they're putting that new user experience in, a new user interface which is very simple and easy to use. It's something that people can understand easily without training, but it's still very limited. It only covers a little bit of the product. It covers just very basic project and task management. You cannot go as deep into it into the more detailed task management, or more projects, or in idea management, and so on. I'd like to extend that user experience into other areas and deeper.

It's stable. It's been around a long time.

It scales as far as you want to go, so there are no issues.

My impressions of technical support are a little mixed. You can get some very good people, or you can get a little less junior people. So sometimes you get your answer right away; sometimes it may take a little bit longer, but you can always get your answer. There are a lot of good resources out there. There's a great community, so you get a lot of good information and answers from the user community.

It's a very good solution. You get a lot of value out of it. If you're bringing it into an organization, the software is only part of the challenge. There are also the people and processes that you already have. Go in stages. Start with a step, and then take a bigger step. Don't try to do it all at once. Try to do a phased implementation.

There are many use cases for Broadcom Clarity PPM. We have worked with large telecommunications companies, enterprises projects, and maintenance projects. We provide ideas with the life cycle management, then we convert the idea to be used in Broadcom Clarity PPM.

The most valuable feature is the portfolio functionality because we have the ability to work with different scenarios and many kinds of financial management. We can integrate with ERP, and with other solutions from third-party vendors. The financial model in Broadcom Clarity PPM, it's the most valuable aspect.

The solution could improve the way the workflow is developed. I think they could be more dynamic because they are in a way static. They're very powerful, but they don't have any interaction with end-users.

In a future release, I'd like to see more stable chargeback procedures, because they are not as synchronized as they should be. Sometimes they do not provide real-time information. We have to use another solution to receive this information.

I have used Broadcom Clarity PPM since version 8. 

Broadcom Clarity PPM is stable.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is scalable because we can use it to do a lot of things in the area of organization. This is was the main solution for many enterprises to manage projects, financials, portfolios, workflows, and to manage all the integrations.

The initial setup is easy, but it could be better. It could be more intuitive because there are a lot of configurations that must be done manually, such as environment variables. If there could be a wizard for the users to use it would make it easier for the users and administrators.

We can deploy the solutions with two or three consultants for large organizations and if you want you can train them to do the maintenance.

Technically some procedures are difficult, such as day-to-day queries, because they have their own structure. It's not a common structure for everyone. You should know the SQL  language to understand all the queries, this should be universal, it is a necessity.

I would recommend to those that want to implement this solution is to understand all the project management terms that are related to large projects, such as time management, financial management, and resource management. It is important for the solution to be deployed by people who know all these management roles and are familiarized with these types of solutions.

I rate Broadcom Clarity PPM an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight because there are more solutions on the market that are easier to manage.

Primary usage is to track project information, including the labor book to projects. The performance has been really good.

You can't manage what you can't measure. It helps us measure things like time compliance, as people are putting all their time into project costs. 

It is very intuitive. Even if you do not have training documents or anything, you can start feeling your way around pretty easily. I like that piece of it.

I would like to be able to do time submission and time approvals on mobile rather than have to go in the system. It would just make things much easier for everybody, being on the go, and a lot of us have an app for our email on our personal phone. Therefore, to be able to do everything there would be much more convenient, and I am sure we would get better buy in from managers, too.

Stability is very good. We have very little downtime.

We have been with a pretty consistent number of users, so we have not had to move. So, I do not know. For the little increase we have had, it has gone very smoothly.

We meet with technical support periodically. I would give them a nine out of 10. They are good.

The old one we had just did not meet our needs. We had to do too many configurations, and we wanted something that we could keep a little more vanilla. As it was and not have to worry about tweaking it for our needs. We have tweaked it, but with what we had previously, we had to do major changes.

All the complications came from our side with our users as opposed to CA.

The support and the transition from our old system to this, they made it go very smoothly. We had people onsite helping us. They were very good at letting us do a concept and run through it first, and test everything we needed to test. Those were some of the things I liked about it.

Changepoint. It pretty much came down to Changepoint and CA.

From the other ones that we looked at, this was the obvious choice for us after doing a PoC.

Contact CA. They are very good at sending up a PoC.

I do like the new UX very much. We have only turned onto a few users so far. We just upgraded to 15.3 a few months ago. The ones that have been using it do like it very much. We just have not rolled it out to everyone yet. We want to have some feedback first. So far, it has been very positive.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

• Support is a big one.
• Ease of use of the product.
• It interfaces well, and we are able to get the data out that we need.

For me it's the Project and Portfolio Management tools within PPM, the portfolios. The functionality within there, and now we're starting to use resource management to tie into that as well.

It has improved things very much so. They're just starting to full-fledged adopt it right now. Gives them better visibility across the organization.

I don't know if it's missing or not, but I'm anxious to learn more about Agile and using the tool with Agile. We're starting to use that methodology more and more within our organization. So how do we use the tool more effectively for that?

Also I'm looking for some more enhanced portfolio management capabilities.

Stability is good. Haven't had any problems.

We have scaled it. Scalability is very, very good.

I haven't used it.

At another company I used HPE PPM. I like Clarity CA PPM a lot better. It's more user friendly, easier to figure out if you don't have the significant training that you need. Pretty intuitive.

At my current company they previously used a home-grown solution but I'm not sure how they decided on CA.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came to the company after it had already been set up.

I think the important criteria when choosing a vendor are 

• reliability
• innovation
• the ability to listen to their customers. 

I think those are the key.

Don't customize it right out of the gate. Understand its capabilities out-of-the-box.

PPM provides the ability for staff (employees and contractors) in the entire IT organization to track time against specific investments and other work. And we can extract the data to analyze what our resources are working on. It also allows us to perform high-level resource planning.

By using PPM, we centralize where IT resources are tracking their time and eliminate the use of other tools such as spreadsheets.This enables us to gather data on what our resources are working on.

Reporting could be improved. Both the user interface and administration of Jaspersoft is very confusing and not user-friendly.

In my current organization, we have been using it for about two years.

We are on SaaS and system availability is close to 99%.

We have not had scalability issues with the application itself. However, we ran into issues with interface using XML Open Gateway (XOG) when we are injecting mass data into the application (such as resource assignment).

We use CA support and the support engineers are very knowledgeable about PPM. They have experts with deep knowledge in area where we have issues.

We did not have a previous solution.

We are on SaaS and the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do not deal with pricing or licensing.

I was not part of the evaluation process in this organization.

I strongly recommend to using CA Service for their expertise. Also, minimize the configuration as much as possible (stay out-of-the-box). Although PPM is highly configurable, getting to know how various functions work together in the tool is much more important than changing a label on a screen to meet a specific requirement!