Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

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.

Demand, Resource, Project Portfolio Management, for my business consulting services, PMO services to other clients.

Capacity and demand of the resources, optimize the response times of my requirements, detect the control points of the process of attention to our clients, a collaborative environment, notes, remember agreements, efficiency in the times.

Look and feel of the user experience.

Two and a half years.

No, its normal.

None.

Eight out of 10.

We started with the default use of the solution with some parameters, then we were increasing automations, control points, and other more technical issues.

For all the functionalities of the solution, the price is in the market range, since it is a product which offers governance issues and supports the digital transformation, which is where we will go in the next year.

Yes. Planview, Daptiv, MS Project, Changepoint.

My advice is to start using the solution almost as it comes, something basic, simple, that it already provides. Then we develop small consultancies, configurations by functionalities, demand, projects, portfolios, resources, inventory of applications, services, products, etc., until arriving at a model of strategic government.

Besides offering software development services, PMO, attention to demand of requirements, we are a CA Technologies Partner, for consulting services, consulting and strategy of governance, methodology, processes, as it is what we do with our clients.

• 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.

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.

The primary use case is managing projects.

Visibility to where we are on projects. It tells someone where we are; if we're in trouble or not. I do look forward to getting more Risks/Issues functionality. I think that will help it even further. But pretty well, it's visability.

• Easy to use, visually
• The new UX is intuitive, which is cool

The features I use the most are the planning, the Kanban layout.

Having everything in one solution. Right now I don't really have to bounce back and forth between the new UX and CA PPM, so that's a good thing. But, improve Resource Planning. 

To be honest, I'd like to see having it work internally. Catch up to the features that are available in the solution. I think it's more on our side than on the CA side.

No problems. Some in our company have mentioned have mentioned they've encountered small problems, but I don't see them.

I really haven't put that to the test yet.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup, I understand that it was not straightforward, very complex. We were told by our headquarters that this is the solution we're going to use. "Here you go. Here, figure it out."

Internally, it would have been easier if our headquarters had used it in the way it was intended, and then, shared that knowledge with us. I don't believe that happened. So, we did go outside and hire a consultant to bring knowledge in-house. It helped us better understand how to use the tool.

I think the new UX is going to be better for project planning. There are some features I'm looking forward to in future releases. Some of the stuff we saw in the roadmap: program planning, roadmapping, dependencies. The Resource Planning, I look forward to using that a little more.

When choosing a product/vendor the important criteria for me are

• easy to use
• quick results; being able to provide a status in two seconds

• having anyone else sign in, where I can display my screen, and they know what's happening with the project. That's important to me.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because it's "almost there" and it's probably the best solution I've seen in my career. It's not a 10 because I see what's coming and we aren't there yet. We use what we have now, but the next release will help move the needle further.

I don't know if I would give advice. I would just tell them how it's worked for us.