Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

Many features of this product are valuable to our organization, such as:

• Project Management: Managing a project for a PM is always tough if he/she has to do it without a tool. Using this tool, they have a view of availability of the resources across the organization, which they can use in their project to leverage their skills. It will reduce the load on the PM, as well as provide access to all resource data in one tool.
• Financial Management: People always get stuck or avoid the things when it comes to finance. With globalization, finance has to be managed across the world. As everyone has their own ways of creating records for accounting, this functionality brings some standardization, which in turn, makes it easier to manage.
• APIs: No organization uses a single tool for all of its requirement. Connecting those tools is always required, so that data flows between them and organizations can make the correct decisions.

For an organization where doing projects is the one of the major sources of revenue, it helps PMs sees each and every small thing in their projects in a very easy manner.

As new technologies are being developed, it has to create interfaces for new-generation tools such as R, Python, SaaS & so on.

As my industry is going through a change where we need to make decisions according to data and not on speculation, analytics is one such domain that can be utilized for this purpose.

Because CA PPM is a tool where all data related to project will be kept, (past failure or achievement), I would like to be able to connect CA PPM to some kind of analytics that would help PMs to identify what could be the next step he/she has to take in the project. For example, do we need to add more resources or not, and many other similar questions can be answered as we have data and the tool to analyse it.

The kind of functionality has to be developed where a PM can identify what to do next if he/she faces a problem.

I have used it since 2010, i.e., 6+ years.

I encountered instability with V13.1 & v13.2, in terms of performance, but it was taken care of in very upfront manner by CA in the next release, v13.3.

In order to add customization, we can add a custom object. However, there is a limit of up to three levels in which parent-child relationship can be developed.

My rating for the product reflects the scalability of this product, which is very good compared to similar products available in the market.

I want to express appreciation for the technical support or level 3 support which CA offers to their clients. Their team are experts, and also know how to handle diverse customers with ease.

I haven’t used any other similar product but I am always talking with those guys to understand the differences.

As time passes by and new versions are released, setup is getting easier and easier. Organizations just need to understand their use case and set up the product accordingly.

In terms of pricing and licensing, this product is much cheaper compared to SAP PS, which is a similar product. Others might be cheaper, but they might not be able to fulfill all of your requirements.

As an individual, I never got an opportunity to evaluate the product before choosing CA PPM, but what I heard was that this product has scalability and usability that always attracts customers.

I have only one piece of advice before implementing this product: understand what you want to achieve with this tool. Otherwise, you will be clueless once it has been set up.

We've not been using the tool for long, although we love being able to track the cost per project, initiative, portfolio, and finances.

It helps us to track costs, and so it's also helpful when we’re planning to see the projected costs so that the company can make decisions and prioritize what projects to take on, and see the "what-if's."

Across strategic initiatives, it's improved what we do, as we did not use to have cost tracking across the company. It used to be based just on going with our gut, so the business didn’t used to track projects. Everything used to be dispersed across departments. Now it’s centralized so it adds to our consistency.

We want to get to know the CR functionality. We want to get a better picture of how to incorporate CR into our regular functionality.

We've been using it for two years.

So far no issues or crashes. Once during a little upgrade we had some issues, but they were typical and resolved.

We haven't had to scale.

I've not personally used tech support. We have internal tech support and they understand it. We use Regal in-house as well.

No, I wasn’t involved in the decision. This is scalable over a home grown solution.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

I would love to see the company teach me more how to actually take advantage of the tool. Know your requirement before using something like this and how it would fit in at the company in terms of the company culture and process. This is one of our struggles – they have, for example, never had to track time.

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.

The primary use case is to format the PPM, provide the forecasting and utilization of research utilization, and determine future trends.

The benefit is using the Capacity Demand Model. We can use it to forecast and see the future trends for resource allocations and demands. 

We are on-premise. I would like to see more features around the data warehouse analytics reporting. At the same time, I would like to see some more functionality on the UI side. They have the new user interface, but that new interface is only a portion of it. I would like to see that extended to other parts of the tool.

It is stable.

On a scale from one to 10, I would say PPM scales at a nine.

I have used the technical support. I have mixed opinion on them. I did receive very good support, sometimes. I did receive bad support, too. Most of the times, I would say it is a good support. Maybe there are a few people new to the tech support, and they may be still learning it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was not difficult for me. The documentation is good. I followed it and was able to set it up myself. It was pretty straightforward; no drawbacks.

It is a very good project portfolio tool.

CA PPM is an amazing product where you can evaluate anything, from concept to cash, all the way. It's not just project management, it's everything: enablement, managing, tracking, and controlling work.

CA PPM lets you forecast cost, effort, and identify capacity risks. It essentially tells you where your flaws are, and where you need to improve. You can manage your pipeline, your backlog can be groomed using portfolios, and you can use the waterline feature to do your annual planning.

It shows me my pipeline, my backlog, what my customers needs, where the demand is. It shows me where I have capacity, and what's my risk. I can rank my investments to deliver maximum benefit to the organization based on all these different controls. It usually provides a very good forecast: what you want to execute the next fiscal year based on your available capacity, demand, funds, and everything else. Also from a strategic alignment point of view, it can show you what kind of roadmap you have as an organization. What do we have committed? and things like that.

We are using the SaaS version of CA PPM aka on-demand. With SaaS, we are always current with the versions and everything else. We’ve given our heartache to somebody else for managing the server, uptime, SLAs, and everything else. We don't have an internal team that's always on call to make sure your mission-critical application is online. The SaaS version has a unique SLA established by the OEM to the customer to ensure it is up 24/7, and provides the highest quality of service.

There could be some additional enhancements, especially on closely integrating with CA Agile Central. Our CA Agile Central, formerly called Rally, is as an execution agent where Scrum teams are actually working on the product, which was planned and proposed in CA PPM.

We take the idealization backlog we established in CA PPM, define your features, and then take it into Rally to execute them. If I were to redo this whole thing, both of them would be one product, not two separate products. There's a lot of opportunity to merge them together to maximize the benefit to the customer.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

They're family, so they're very good, amazing.It is a collaborative effort.

Initial setup is fairly straightforward.

I'm end-to-end with Project and Portfolio Management software. I eat, breathe, and drink PPM.

Take baby steps. Go with a crawl, walk, run approach. The organization will never be ready to adopt any change, so user adoption is critical. Get a feel for your change. It should come from senior management. At the end of the day, we should show what's the value to each and every individual. What's in it for me? Then, yes, we can implement PPM anywhere without any stress.

Important things in picking a vendor are the support structure, and an orientation to reaching out and delivering value. CA Technologies always put the customer first and are factual, and deliver solutions that exceed customer expectations.

We are mandated by law to rigorously manage change to our systems and to ensure zero or very minimal impact to our customers. Given the systems that we had in place -- and we've got thousands of users and thousands of projects in major systems, comprising a large part of the economy -- we could no longer use disparate systems to govern all of those things. So we implemented Clarity PPM to enforce a standard change management protocol.

However, what we have found is we are leveraging the data behind it to do more portfolio management, which really boils down to, are we working on the right things? Are we using the right people? Are we getting return on investment? Are we utilizing our resources and it has opened up a level of transparency into our change delivery efforts and costs that we've never had before?

The answers are, yes. It's an amazing solution.

It has been severely disruptive in a good way, which is exactly what I had hoped for. Although we manage projects well, our practices were immature. But we didn't manage portfolios well. There was a lot of room for improvement and now that we're migrating to be a more data-driven organization with strategic alignment and execution and quality and performance and those kind of measures, it's changing the paradigm of project management in our organization.

Typically, a portfolio management tool or project management tool is bought by people that need to govern the process, but it is used by people who have to get the work done. It's nice to actually see a transition to the governance space to the user base because you will enable teams to collaborate, giving you better performance and better quality if you focus on the end users rather than a strict governance command and control model.

Even using basic functionality, capturing all the data, and standardizing simple practices has literally in the last 12 months lead to the behavior change that we wanted to see. It helped us accomplish our goals. It did that for us. We would not have been able to do it without this tool and/or the support.

I'd like to see improvement in broader portfolio management. It still seems to kind of be a specifically separate module from the project management and we really are aggregating a lot of data to make higher-level strategic decisions. Now that we're in that space, our executives want more. Specifically, they want to see high-level reports. They want to see the underlying data that supports it so that we can build that trust. So combining the portfolio and project management aspects would go a long way towards that.

I'm more of a super user on the business side of adoption. We are constantly in contact with our sales rep about challenges we have in maturity adoption and what pieces of the tool will support what types of strategic adoptions. I know that we had a technical resource on site to help us configure. I'm very happy with the level of support we've got from CA.

I'm actually leading adoption efforts and was part of the team that reviewed and implemented the tool. Adoption is always difficult. Change is hard and it's never really a technology-type thing. It's more of a human behavior-type exercise. We were challenged. We were absolutely challenged. We found our champions early. We set some minimum baselines and adoption. We reported on adoption and quality of data to motivate people to clean their stuff up. We let people innovate and go farther ahead and as they they pioneered some of the functionality. That's the hardest part of the whole thing, is getting people to adopt.

The thing with software is it can do anything but you can't adopt anything. Know your audience, know your internal customers. Start small. Keep it simple. Get the blocking and tackling and the basics down pat. You will see change. You'll see lasting change but you've got to stick with basics and build upon them.

I am a consultant and I recommend and implement specific solutions for my clients. I am currently working on behalf of a company that implements this product for its customers.

Clarity PPM is a product that I have worked with personally. It is primarily used for project management, project portfolio management, and for reporting services.

The interfaces for project management, portfolio management, and reporting services are always helpful.

Intake and demand management functionality could be better.

In the future, I would like to see integrated Agile features and better integration with Agile tools. There are a lot of different teams that are using Agile tools and there is a demand for that.

I have worked with Broadcom Clarity PPM for more than five years.

Scalability is great, especially with cloud-based solutions. It makes the product very portable and users can access it on tablets, smartphones, and whatever device they have. This model makes it scalable.

The implementation is not complete and it is expected to take between four and eight months.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.