Broadcom Clarity Reviews

The communication aspects have greatly improved. Before it was a lot of just relying upon hallway conversations or picking up the phone, maybe sending out emails, and they may or may not get answered. Knowing that we have these workflows in place and that they are going through, and that our executive leaders have to take an action as well as our department managers and program leaders, that has been beneficial.

What has been valuable are the workflows that are there today in order to keep our executive staff informed as well as our program managers and department managers.

We have not migrated to 15.3. We are still on 14.4 and the look and the feel is a bit antiquated, but seeing some of the improvements that are in 15.3, it is catching up with the times.

The features, they are slowly rolling out. I like the collaboration aspects of what I am seeing with 15.3 to where your team can go in and have conversations that are captured versus going to some other field, clicking on a tab, and typing in your information there, then hoping others migrate to that area. It is improving.

We are in the SaaS environment. Within the SaaS environment (since CA is supporting it), it has been extremely stable and reliable.

It is serving our needs today, but there is certainly a lot more that we can be utilizing. As an organization, we are in an infancy stage of implementation. So, I see over the next few years ramping up and improving how we can utilize the tool.

They are extremely responsive. They can be very technical, whereas for my needs, I'd prefer if they scale down to layman's terms and explain things in other terms. We do work through the issues, and I know that they are well qualified and highly technical.

I would probably rate it about an eight out of 10, because there is always room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is more about the product and what it can provide for us as well as the professionalism of the organization and the staff. We rely quite heavily on their expertise and on their thoughts as well as their best practices.

It's project and portfolio management. We just rolled out phase one, but the primary use case for us right now is to make sure that all our project managers are able to put their resource plans and cost plans into a centralized system, so that our finance team can roll those numbers up and do forecasting.

In terms of evaluating it performance, we just started about two months ago, so it's hard to say right now. Numbers are rolling up but folks are still getting used to the process and are slowly working towards that.

We just put all the data in one place and hopefully, after we have accurate data, we can make more decisions based on real data rather than gut feeling.

Right now it is the resource planning, because I know not all of the project managers really did resource planning before. This has set up an expectation for them to do that necessary step, going forward.

We use a product called TFS and we would definitely like to see integration with that. It's not there right now. Agile Central is the one that is integrated with, however, I don't think we are leaving TFS. 

I think stability is good so far, except the test environment is not as good. We're using the SaaS solution, so we do see errors quite a bit in the QA environment, but the production environment seems to be more stable.

We don't know yet, we don't have a lot of people in there yet.

I feel that the Professional Services team is reacting better than the support team, in terms of how quickly we get the feedback; also in terms of how careful they are with our environment. The support team actually broke our QA environment without telling us. We were wondering what's going on for something like a day.

So far it's straightforward, but we haven't really done a lot of customization. We just try to use what is out of the box. 

Regarding the new UX, we haven't used it yet.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, although I wasn't involved in the selection, what I heard my boss say was that there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies using it, and if all of them trust it, that's probably a good indication that it's a good product.

Just focus on what there truly is, because there is a lot of functionality in the tool, and probably nobody is going to use all of it. So just focus on what you think are the most important things for you right now and just look at those particular features.

Our primary use case is for doing portfolio and project management. Our engineering group serves a lot of different markets. We have a live events market, we have commercial market, we have transportation market that we serve. There are all these different requests coming in and hitting engineering, and it really becomes a question of, "What's the most important thing for engineering to be working on?"

We really needed a good way to prioritize that work and make it visible so that, not just our management, but also our engineering group can look at that and say, "Yes. This is the most important thing. This is what we're supposed to be working on."

We were doing all this in a spreadsheet. We were in Excel and it was a nightmare. It was really just, "Get off of the spreadsheet and get something centrally located and available to everyone." 

We are planning on integrating that with our work item management system. We currently use TFS but we're looking at VSTS. So we're looking at doing integration there and tying that portfolio and project management into our work Item management system as well.

I think the most value that I have seen is the the team management, the resource management. We have flexible scrum teams, we have developers that will serve on one scrum team for a few sprints or for a project, and they'll switch around. Being able to track where people go, and making sure that our teams are fully staffed, and well staffed, so that we can be successful on the projects we're trying to do.

We've only been users for about a month, so I can't really say what is there and what isn't there. 

Some people have expressed interest in how are we doing the time tracking stuff because we have a separate time tracking system. And then within TFS we also track hours and our effort levels there. It seems like that is maybe a direction we could go, unifying all that under one system.

I've not had any complaints or heard of anything, so it seems to be perfectly stable from what I can tell.

Scalability is great. We've got literally hundreds of engineers. We've got a lot of teams working on a lot of different projects. It seems very scalable to me.

The step from spreadsheet to this... We knew we were in a bad spot with the spreadsheet. We said,"Okay, let's take a good first step and get off of that and then we'll go from there." It's really exciting. I'm hoping to see the tool mature and see how it really benefits organization in the future.

The initial set up was handled by a couple of their engineers but someone came from WinMill and did a training with us and a bunch of our engineers. That was really helpful to get introduced to the system: This is what we can do. This is what we can't do.

I wasn't involved in the setup but I keep hearing the term "configured", like we did some of our own configurations, not customizations, but certainly the platform seems very configurable to suit our needs, and that was very helpful for us.

In terms of the new UX, we've only been on the one version. That is the UX. We've never seen anything else. I just came out of the 15.3 session though, here at the CA World conference, so I'm curious to see what happens. I don't think we're on that version yet. I'll be curious to see what my organizational feedback is once that goes live.

It's still pretty early, like I said, we've only been users for a month, but I would give it an eight out of 10 overall.

The most valuable features are resource management and portfolio management. We have too many projects in our organization and not enough resources, which PPM allows us to manage.

Right now, it’s supporting project prioritization. That’s why we brought it in. It lets us get a holistic view of what the projects are and whether there are deficiencies in a given area and whether we are short on something. We’re not quite there yet in utilizing its capabilities, but it’s getting better.

Anything that enhances portfolio management will help us out, but we’re still struggling internally to fully utilize that capability.

Pretty good. There are some hiccups in terms of our understanding of how the product works, and CA support understanding the problems as well. We didn’t understand that there are two components to PPM – in terms of the PPM solution and then the reporting is handled out of business objects. In our situation in on-demand if you run a report and then leave it up in business objects the time-out on the BO side is not the same as the time-out on the PPM side and it doesn’t synchronize and come across.

How that manifests- when it times out it makes my reports unavailable and can’t report anymore. We have a workaround for the moment. It took one or two months to even understand what the problem was, and CA didn’t understand either. CA provided a solution that was for on-premise versus our situation which is on-demand (cloud-based).

Not seeing any issues, but we’re only at 150 users. It could handle many more if we needed it to.

There were some misunderstandings when we set up our account in terms organizational differences within our business units, which we still need to straighten out with CA.

CA directed us to a systems integrator who may not have been completely skilled in the product, or maybe our timelines were too tight. Our product knowledge is still incomplete in some of the areas.

It’s a big robust application that does lots of things that we don’t use or need to use. Because it’s so configurable, in that way it is very complex.

Reporting has been an issue for us, so what I would consider a fundamental report that links financials to actuals. Do due diligence around time entry and allocations because that’s really the engine that drives resource scheduling and management. In order to get the tool to work there has to be a lot of underlying data that have to be good. Getting resources to put in their allocations, getting resources to make sure their time sheets are completed, and getting PMs to allocate and assign resources are all key.

The most valuable part is the ability to report efficiently across the globe how the company is doing. This is the biggest advantage to me.

Standardization across large company standard operating procedures. The biggest are financial reporting, task management, work breakdown structures, risk and issue reporting. As all of this can be done from one place. We can manage it all with change management.

I want to see trends and how things change over time. Now, you only see what’s live in the system, and there's no way currently to see what yesterday’s project was and how it's changed. They don’t have snapshots in time.

Also, I'd like flexible reporting that can be done quickly. Right now, we pull everything into Excel, and the length of time for reporting can be long.

We've been using it for 11 years. I joined five years ago and they had already had it for six years by then.

There's been no issues. There are occasional problems, but these are quickly resolved either internally or with the help of CA.

It scales well, but the problem is cost.

I haven't used it internally as our in-house IT team deals with them.

I wasn’t involved in the setup.

Buying in large quantities is more cost effective than a one-to-one basis. Periodically, we try to figure out how much we need to avoid buying one-to-one.

Look at the support as that's important, not what's in situ. However, things like trend analysis and flexible reporting are missing, which are weaknesses.

Take advantage of out-of-the-box functionalities. We made the mistake of doing a lot of customization when we set up 10 years ago, and it doesn’t play well with certain newer abilities or other output. So use as much out-of-the-box features that are already there as possible, as you never know what you want.

Our primary use case has been for supply and demand management and resource management. So far, it has been okay. We do two levels of resource management. 

Our first level is at the project overallocation, then we also have to do resource checking at the key date and event management. 

On the event management side, we had to do some custom steps. Our research managers and our booking managers have to go through multiple steps to go through that process. It is still efficient, but it is not as efficient as it could be if we had to do some custom stuff.

There are some tool limitations. We had to create some of our own summary competencies to create more of an agile tool concept, or an agile team concept, that they did not really have.

We are hoping for:

• Better resource management
• Reducing the time it takes to get resources identified. 
• Demand
• Putting all of our projects together in one project. 

We used to have where one department would have their own plan, another department would have their own plan, and these were all different plans for the same client. Now, we are smashing them together so there is a little bit of a learning curve of working together, which is more of us; organizational change management. 

In general, we hope to reduce our time to finding resources to backfill resources and also reduce admin time to get a project setup and running. 

• Having information altogether in one single source.
• Being able to look at the data across team members, resources, projects and coming up with the algorithms and resources. 

Moving more to an agile state. It is very difficult. There is not a good way to have a team member manage tasks. So, a project manager can update assignments and can say, "I'm going to move this work to this person," but when you are going to a more collaborative based approach, PPM does not support that. 

It is hard for them to say, "I have a person on my team who is going to be available, I am going to move that task to them." That requires a project management license, it doesn't require a team member license, so the licensing model does not sometimes support the way the business world is going. I think they need to reexamine having some of the capabilities of a project manager be available to team members. 

It still lacks some key features and we had to do some custom stuff. It has some deficiencies, but we also have not optimized everything. 

Stability has been okay. We have had some performance problems. I do not think it is necessarily related to CA. I think it is the way we deployed it. We need to optimize it. 

I do not think that stability has been a problem. I think we just need to do some indexing. 

We have not, CTS has, which is our IT partner. We also have worked primarily with Rigo Consulting to do our implementation services. Since we are just now getting live those are the ones. 

Microsoft Project focused more on resource management, schedule management, not necessarily on demand management, integrations, agile, etc. We switched due to scalability.  

We had a lot of problems with Microsoft Project. We had to abandon using Microsoft Project because it was not working. We kind of had egg on our face. That is one thing that CA can do better. Give us a better scheduling tool. 

It was about a four year journey for Cerner. We know that our resources were not being deployed. We were spending a lot of time trying to find the right resources. IP uses it. CTS is going to be using it. It was an enterprise decision to invest in a new solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We worked primarily with Rego Consulting to do our implementation services, since we are just now getting live. We just rolled out about four weeks ago.

Talk to other clients.

The depths of tools and technologies that you have available for all clients has surprised me. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Willingness to do partnerships
• Willingness to be transparent
• Credentials and references from other people. 

I am a project manager/program manager, too. So I look at it from the high level also, which is a lot more difficult I think for the program. For it to go back to the initiative, figure out exactly what you are spending, how much you are spending on it, and which projects are included in it. 

From a project standpoint, I think it actually works really well, because it is much more simplistic, and it is at that lower level. So, you can track your risks, issue some changes, and it is a lot easier than when you go up and roll up to that program level.

This is a hard one, because some people just see it as overhead. Everybody is used to just doing it within their Excel spreadsheets within their teams. Some of it is just kind of a roll up of data, such as, what is our milestone for when we are going to get the BSD done? What is our milestone for code drops? 

So, there is definitely a mixed view, even from myself. I can see the benefits of it, and I can get the data out to be able to report on it. However, I also feel like it is a lot of overhead.

Probably the data itself. We do a lot of extracts from Clarity. There is not a lot of reporting within the tool itself. So, we actually export it, run reports, and roll out that data.

It was very interesting, because we did get to see the newest version. There are a lot features that I really can't wait to actually get my hands on. 

When we upgrade into the cloud, we are still going to be a version behind. So it is hard to say what I would want in it, because I have seen a lot of the things that I would want in it. They are going to be in it once we actually do the upgrade.

From a stability perspective, it is very stable. We do not have a lot of changes to it. However, we also do not upgrade as often as the tool is upgraded.

We leave that in the hands of our upper management on when we actually upgrade. So, we have done multiple upgrades, and we have configured it a lot. Going forward in December when we do the CA PPM, we are going out-of-the-box. Therefore, we do not have do a lot of the customizations. We can still configure, but we do not have to customize it.

We have not used technical support. Our PMO usually deals with any problems, questions, and they work through the technical solutions.

We see it as overhead. Let us collect all the data in one place. Which, it is always nice to have everything in one place, but it does cause that overhead. So a lot of the teams are not comfortable with it. They are going to track it separately. We are just a data gatherer to say, "Okay, what is the last date we are going to code drop? When are we going to be SD?" So, a lot of overhead.

We use our product for the following:

• Time-tracking
• Project and portfolio management
• Resource management, which is part of the timekeeping. 

Our organization, being a utility organization, does a lot of projects in two different methodologies. Being able to track all of the projects with all of the details of those projects, and being able to move projects along from a process perspective, that is really beneficial. Off-sheet would be much more difficult.

In the version that we are in, it has been able to collect all the data, and in some ways, provide dashboards of aggregated data. 

We are not currently using the existing version. I think we have a need for more portfolio management and intuitive resource management, which are met with that next version. We are just not there yet. 

I do not know if I can answer that as I am still new to using the product.

Scalability is great. It is very manageable and can scale in different areas. One of the limitations would be mapping our current agile processes in the same tool set without obviously integrating to a different type of tool set within the same portfolio.

I have not personally used the technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have used some of the other products on the market before, and some of those are a little bit more user-friendly, but again that may be solved with the newer version.

From what I have seen, the new UX is pretty impressive, which meets that user-friendly, more adaptable, or agile, user-friendly solution. 

I believe firmly in process management, so from an organizational perspective understand your processes, then be able to look at this tool and know the full capabilities of the tool before you just install it. Sometimes companies will install a tool to handle the basics and not ever grow to its full process and tool alignment, which could be beneficial.