Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

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.

For us, its most valuable features are about resource management, resource assignment, and time tracking.

It puts the right resource at the right place at the right time. Previously, what we were doing was kind of a manual process where it was based on relationships, and the sales rep would reach out to their specific technical person in order to talk to the customer. Now, since we have such a large pool and we're seen as being much more efficient to actually get the right resource with the right skill, not necessarily the one with the sales rep relationship, but who would actually know the most about it and possibly who was closest to the customer. It's one of our parameters that we have.

Improvement to the project hopper would be great. It's a feature that we could really benefit from.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We initially had some performance issues with some system down-time, but nothing recent. When they moved data centers, it gave us a lot more bandwidth and memory.

It's very scalable. We've been growing with it. We now have four different organizations on it.

They're very responsive. The call you back. They actually bother you if you're not as attentive as you should be, so that's actually really helpful. People are always knowledgeable. They'll walk you through the whole thing.

It was a long process. It took an awful lot of requirements, and I think the tendency of our company was to make it exactly what we wanted instead of looking to best practices.

You have to figure out your biggest need and pick the software based on it. A lot of times I think it's that one glamorous feature that people love that they want to go with, but I think you have to look across all the different requirements, weigh them, and take it from there.

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.

I love the time tracking module. That's what I'm most familiar with, at this time: being able to go in and actually break it down; see what everybody is doing; how they're allocating their time; see who's underallocated, overallocated.

It's really helping us with our resource management; being able to pull people where they need to go; get additional help where help is needed. It helps us collaborate with our project management teams, our PMO, all across the company, shared services.

Overall portfolio management is something that we would like to improve on.

The company has been using it for several years now. Personally, I've only been using it for under a year.

In my experience, it's very stable, especially compared to other applications that we've used in the past. I have no complaints whatsoever.

At this time, it's meeting our scalability needs. We are looking to build out other areas, so we are assessing the different components to build out in.

From what I understand, from my technical person, the support is excellent.

I actually don't have a lot of experience with the initial setup; however, we are right now just beginning to upgrade. It seems to be that it's going to be fairly easy. We're going to be able to get it upgraded in less than six months; 3-6 months.

Personally, I have not evaluated other options. I come from a different area, and we have other ways of doing things that are not as streamlined.

I have a finance background so when I am selecting a vendor, I definitely want someone reliable, someone who is affordable, can answer all of our questions, who can bend and flow with the organization's growth. Or, if we sell pieces of the organization, we need to be able to flex, so I'm looking for a partner that will be able to do that.

I don't like to give anything a perfect score because I don't know enough about every aspect of it; however, from my experience, it's been a great tool.

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.

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.