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.

The most valuable features are the resource management, project management, and tracking time for our employees.

I would like to see better dashboards within the tool and better integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

It is very stable.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, we just had too many spreadsheets and one-off processes.

We considered HPE, CA, and I can't remember the other one.

The most important factors when we decide on a vendor are: the quality of support, the functionality, and whether it is customizable to suit our business needs. It must be extendable.

You should know that you can customize it to suit the way that you do business. Don’t think that you need to do everything all at once.

Resource management is probably one of the most widely used features of this product and it is what we are using now.

One of the other features that we have started to step into but haven't really done yet, is portfolio management. It is a direction that we are heading in order to leverage it more deeply.

We mainly use resource management for resource forecasting which basically helps us to manage our resource capacity. In this way, we can understand our availability overallocation and that is really where we are using this tool most in our company. We definitely want to broaden our use of the features of this product.

The main benefits of using this tool as a service platform are leveraging CA to handle availability and stability of the platform. Also, they carry the load in terms of execution of any product upgrades. We need to be ready for the upgrade and help test the upgrade, but they keep us on the upgrade path. These are some of the primary advantages.

The organization is not benefiting as much as we would like it to. That is not necessarily a tool shortcoming but an adoption shortcoming. Basically, we need to shift and mature some of our business processes to leverage the tool's capability more. We are having some challenges for people in our organization to adopt this tool. The reason being that people get grounded in a comfort zone as to how they do things today or how they handle things outside of a tool. It could be inertia or people are just comfortable doing things the way they are doing them now, so change is hard.

In terms of projects, this solution has helped us to have one place where project statuses are kept. We have done some work with the standard status report format, so that helps in terms of everybody being familiar with how things are going to be reported. For timekeeping standards, we have one tool and do things one way.

A direction we are heading in, as we are not using the tool, is to do portfolio management or even to do some of our strategic planning; that is the direction we want to head in next.

Some of the things I was planning to look into while I was at a recent CA conference is how other people would implement features like portfolio management, resource capacity planning, financial management. That is what I went to learn more about.

There is some room for improvement in the UI. Some of the folks that use the tool, sometimes they feel it is cumbersome navigating around it.

We don't have any major issues with the stability of the product.

I am not aware of us having any scalability issues. As a matter of fact, I don't think our user base would be considered huge compared to other CA clients. We have around 2500 users, so it is not huge.

I haven't personally used technical support.

PPM being an industry, CA PPM is an industry-leading product and we certainly keep utilizing it. We don't have a compelling reason or business case to move away from it. In fact, we want to invest in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It happened before I joined the company.

Think about your business processes along with the tool’s capability. The tool has a lot of capability but you need to make sure your business processes are aligned to leverage that capability in order to maximize it.

The problem is leveraging the organization; it is hard to get people to adopt it. We need to shift some business processes so we can leverage it more. We have partnered with CA and they are doing what they need to do.

Manage projects, resources, and financials.

It's performing better with the new UI. The old UI is clunky and slow, but it's staring to get better.

It's pretty much the source of "the truth." Everything is together, everyone can see all the resources, financial projects, how long a project's going to take. Anybody can go in there and see any information they need about the organization as a whole.

Usability of the new UI. It's easier for people to go in there and know what to do. To train people, it's faster, more intuitive.

Also, managing resources. It's definitely the most important thing for managing your project.

Work Breakdown Structure in the Tasks: be able to drag and drop to a level three instead of just stuck at level two.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

Upgrading to 5.1 there was an issue, a syncing issue on the back end, that ending up getting fixed after about two weeks.

No issues with scalability. It seems we can have as many users as we need to. We've probably added around 50 full licenses but I haven't seen any issues with that in resources we have; a few hundred resources in there.

Tech support is good. A 10 out of 10. Everything was responded to within 24 hours, except for one issue where there was some miscommunication, but that ended up getting resolved in a few days just by sending an email to our rep.

Everything was through Microsoft Project, just the desktop version. People would get printouts or PDF's of them.

I was not involved but I think it was pretty straightforward.

Workfront was one of the vendors. We went with the CA solutions because headquarters was going with CA PPM, so we decided to move in that direction.

It has improved; 15.3 was a huge update. You have the Risks/Issues/Changes added to the new UX.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• usability
• functionality 
• making it easy for the end user to use. 

Make people want to use it. If anything's overly complex, people won't use it. People have a difficult time moving to a new solution so it just has to be easy, so a non-technical user should be able to feel comfortable, click around, and not be intimidated by the solution.

I would give it a seven out of 10, just because the classic UI is very cumbersome. It can do everything but it's hard to use. It's easy to use once you understand it, but it's intimidating at first for somebody to see the solution. With the new UI, CA is heading in the right direction, and fast. They're adding features, I would say major features, two times a year, which is fast.

I would recommend it, but are there better solutions out there for another company? Maybe. There may be easier solutions out there.

CA should go in the same direction, move forward with the UX and keep developing that. There are a lot of startups that already have the usability; it's easy for them. But they're missing features.

Portfolio management, to capture market ideas, gather criteria around those ideas, and make business choices on which ones to move forward.

We're in the early stages of implementation, but it seems better than the tool we had before, which was a spreadsheet.

It makes it easier to compare different opportunities, and to track the metrics though the process. It helps us make better choices of which opportunities to go after and not go after. Then, we can balance that with what we have for staffing, to know what we can actually staff.

It makes it easier to function.

More team-based management, and less people-based management; as far as the resource management goes, to do it per team and not per person.

I personally believe that for software development, management at the person level is not the right level to manage. Managing at the team level is a better level.

To my knowledge, the stability is fine.

Scalability seems fine.

I have not used technical support. Others have. I think we get the support we need.

Our previous solution, a spreedsheet, was complex, and it was difficult for multiple people to use. To make it easier to use, we needed a different tool.

We felt CA was a better fit for our needs.

Getting agreement on how to use the process is complex, because there are a lot of people involved. The tool is highly flexible, so it does take some effort to choose how to use it as well.

CA, Oracle, and one or two others that I don't recall.

Regarding the new UX, I don't have an opinion. I've only used it a little bit so I don't think I'm the best person to ask about the UX itself. I think it's easy to use.

When selecting a vendor functionality is the first criteria, does it do what it needs to do. Certainly trust in the vendor is in that list as well. But the first need is that the tool has to do what we need it to do.

Be clear about how you want to use the tool, what processes you intend to use as you're making your selections.

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 detail available in the financial costs and forecasts
• The comprehensive resource planning views
• The portfolio planning capabilities

All of these show not only the current state, but also integrated views of the impact of proposed changes across the organization in terms of resources and costs.

CA PPM provides an integrated view of the total set of projects in the organization. It also has the ability to see data by multiple slices: by department, project type, objective, resource type, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Since it is all in a common database, there are no longer questions about the data sources, or how current the information is.

• Some of the legacy configuration in the system can use some updating. In particular, providing configurability in timesheets, fiscal periods in resources, and project planning.
• The provided reporting tool is inadequate.
• Structured reports are too difficult.
• Security administration is immature.

I have been using this solution for twelve years. I began with much earlier versions.

There are no significant issues with stability. Unplanned outages are extremely rare and brief.

There are no issues at all with scalability. The system is capable of supporting tens of thousands of users globally.

Technical support is variable. The core product support is very good, typically with quick response times and very helpful engineers.

The support for the reporting tools is much less effective.

Support for infrastructure related issues, i.e., how the application is affected by the operating system, browser, and related external elements is variable. Some are quickly resolved and some drag on.

I am personally familiar with a number of other solutions, but my current organization has been using this software since I have been associated with them.

Most other organizations that I am familiar with who switched solutions, did so to take advantage of the comprehensive feature set, the ease of use, and the easy configuration.

The product itself is easy to set up and configure. Whether that is complex or not, depends on how complex the organization is.

If there are a lot of business rules that need to be incorporated, then those need to be accommodated and it will take more time.

In some cases, the real implementation timeline is around managing the change to a new system internally, and not in preparing the system itself.

Be sure about what kinds of functions you will want your users to perform on the system. That will impact the type and cost of the license based on the licensing model that CA uses.

This is an enterprise PPM solution, so it will have functional aspects that extend into many corners of the enterprise.

The focus should be on the functionality that is needed, and not on small differences in cost. There will rarely be a significant cost difference between systems that are competing at this level.

This product was in place when I joined the organization.

Take the implementation as an opportunity to simplify your business processes and not simply to try to replicate existing processes into a new tool.

The out-of-the-box functionality has a lot of power and capability and should be used wherever possible.

If you do have a few critical, must-have processes, have them demonstrated before you commit to the tool. Be sure that they are real needs and not just legacy “that’s how we have always done it” items.