Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

Detailed schedule makes estimation of resources, and resource forecasting, easy and meaningful.

This product is good for resource management and project management. I have managed detailed schedules with great success.

Reporting is not good as they keep on changing reporting environment.

Not anything significant.

Yes, scalability may be issue in a SaaS environment but can be resolved by proper configuration.

Okay, but not that great. Over the years the support level keeps on dropping.

No, though worked with Daptiv and HPE PPM. Daptiv is not ready for a big corporation.

Initial setup is not complex. It sometimes gets ugly and complex after customization.

This project management software is a little bit costly compared to others, but it is mature. Customers should understand this product is geared towards project management, not financial management.

We evaluated CA PPM vs Micro Focus PPM.

This product needs technical expertise. Purchasing the software is not sufficient and support is very important.

Project Management features that are excellent in managing the Project Management Life-cycle, along with other related details like Financials, Resources and flexibility to customize, as per requirement.

For an insurance company, all the project management activities, approvals and processes were offline.

CA PPM gave them the ability to automate approval processes, managing project life-cycle in a central tool, filling time-sheets against the projects and providing the reports to executives.

It helped them reduce their effort in the terms of cost and time involved.

The forms (e.g., project properties page) need to be more attractive, colorful, and field more flexibility for validations.

For more than seven years.

Stability issues have occurred in on-premise implementations but have significantly reduced during on-demand implementations.

On-demand implementations are more scalable as compared to on-premise implementations. As with number of users added, licenses can be increased and infrastructure requirements are taken care of by CA itself.

Good (seven out of 10).

Organizations that have migrated from other solutions to CA PPM may have found this more suitable to their business requirements.

Initial setup varies on the organizations requirement.

If less customization is required, it can be setup within few weeks and is simple. However to meet the requirement, larger customizations are not provided by the tool or require integrations and data flows with other vendors, and this could take months to do. Hence, many organizations prefer to go in phases.

Once an initial setup is made and the tool is ready to use, other major functionalities are added with time.

It's important to understand your organization's requirement clearly, then understanding how the vendor is categorizing its licensing (e.g., different license types and their respective pricing).

Better understanding of requirements and how it will be implemented (with number of licenses for a given budget) would help.

As per the focused areas like Project management, Financial Management, etc., the organizations should weigh all suitable products in market w.r.t. time and cost involved (e.g., HP PPM, Planview, etc.).

The objective should be a benefit in medium to long term, as some solutions may save money in short term but can turn out to be expensive later. I would suggest to go through the comparison reports, blogs, and demonstrations of the products before making the final call.

Focus on correct licensing and integration with other applications like JIRA, Remedy, ServiceNow, SAP etc during the implementation. Also, this application has good automation features to automate your offline/over the mail approvals and processes. This can also be kept in mind during the designing part.

The most valuable features are the ability to manage projects, statuses, various queued tasks of the project; and time tracking related to resource management.

It definitely gives us a way to group and manage our projects across the entire organization, as well as track time of resources so we can use that within our capitalization efforts.

We're actually trying to evolve our portfolio management practice within the tool, but from a project perspective, it's done well. I guess we're still trying to see how we can maximize and use it across the portfolio.

We are not with the current release, and I do not think that there is anything really glaringly wrong about it. Some of the issues we've had as far as project integration issues, for example, are probably addressed in the current version.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any significant outages, no crazy bugs. The version we're running is probably about three releases from the current version, so we like to make sure it's a stable version before we upgrade. We will probably upgrade to 14.4, the current version soon, but right now it's pretty stable.

It's really scalable.

Personally, I haven't used technical support. We have a technical lead who does most of our technical work and deals with CA’s technical support. I think he's been pretty happy.

Personally, I think there are some things that could be a little better, particularly regarding response times. Over time, I think, they have showed improvement. There hasn’t been anything glaring that would make me say their support is terrible.

It's been set up for over 10 years now. It's evolved from there, but I think the initial setup was over 10 years ago.

Make sure the organization is ready for the solution. Sometimes it's a lot about process. The tool can't fix process issues. If the process isn’t built for the tool, it is not going to work correctly. Make sure you prepare the processes first, so they will be ready for it.

We look for something sustainable. Sustainability is a very important value for the users and for our IT team, who are the people supporting it.

We've used this solution as an enterprise tool. It allowed us to bring organizations together for communication, planning, and cost. Outside of our IT department, we are integrated heavily with our marketing areas, both on the wireless and the wireline side. That includes marketing, sales, operations, products, new business development, and networking. All those areas come together and are able to communicate within the tool.

This solution has brought our groups a lot closer together and allowed them to communicate much easier rather than using emails and spreadsheets. Data is now in a central location. It's simplified the funnel process from our business partners, particularly into the IT and the network areas.

It has facilitated a much better ranking process, so that we can focus on what's most important for the business partners. It has helped us align our projects and portfolios to the overall business or IT strategy. It enabled proper management of the funnel and proper ranking and priority setting.

I'm really excited about seeing a simplified user interface. We've starting looking at the new UI with version 15. I'm somewhat disappointed in the limitation of functionality there. We'd like to see that expanded much more. As I understand it, you can't use custom attributes in the new UI. That limits what we do, because we have a number of customizations that we've made. I would like to see better performance, as always.

Our environment is fairly stable, but it is not as fast as what we'd like. Stability-wise, it's up and running. There are performance issues. It's obviously not as fast as we'd like it to be. The biggest complaint is too many clicks to get to where you need to be in order to perform a function.

It scaled very well. We have around 6,500 users. We have had no scalability issues.

My group doesn't use technical support as much as our development team, but we seem to have a great relationship with CA.

We actually moved from using three different project management tools into a single system. By the time I came along, the choice was made. There was a pretty heavy process of reviewing vendors with similar products, grading and rating them, and making a decision.

I was involved in the setup. I came from a background of not knowing the product, so it was complex at the time. We've grown to understand it since.

I would suggest not customizing it. It makes it much simpler that way and makes upgrades easier. It makes long-term maintenance much easier and allows you to use existing functionality.

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.

The project management part of it is definitely the most valuable part of it to us. We don't get a lot of value out of resource management or portfolio management yet. It really helps reporting on overall statuses at an aggregate level that we have going on. It's really the best part.

The way we're structured, we support a lot of different organizations. If marketing wants to see the status of all things marketing, along with their impacts on other organizations, we're able to whip that together pretty quickly. In all our previous tools, that was always a black box.

It changed the way our departments talked to each other. Particularly, IT became a delivery organization along with everyone else. They didn't talk before, and now they do; so all the data is front and center. They're starting to tear down some of those walls. They're sharing data now, as opposed to just hoping everything's OK.

It comes down to the shared space aspect of it, particularly when you start talking about code releases, alignments, and things like that. It seems to be that everybody is on the same page. There are a lot of things that get exposed because they're now sharing data. Some of those risks can now be mitigated ahead of time, as opposed to last minute. That was a problem we had back before PPM.

The whole business transformation thing that all industries are going through is very big right now. Those are the higher priority projects that we're able to dedicate money, resources, time, everything to those key initiatives, as opposed before when everyone had their own priority.

• Considering that agile is a big buzzword these days, I don't really like that PPM is so strictly tied to CA Agile Central. There are a lot of other tools out there that people use.
• We're a JIRA shop. There's not a whole lot right now. Everything as far as a PPM JIRA solution is homegrown, and all over the place. I'd like to see some more industry standards applied to the tool.
• I really hate Jaspersoft, so I would like to see a better reporting solution, or perhaps some improvement around Jaspersoft.

It's pretty stable.

It's scalable, but not great. We're a pretty large implementation. We have 120,000 active resources in the tool. We see a lot of performance impacts, particularly in the newer versions with Jaspersoft and things like that, so that part has been pretty disappointing. But, you know, it still gets the job done. It's just a little slow.

We brought in some people from Services (back when there was a Services) to do health checks and things like that. We were constantly opening up tickets, particularly with the newer versions and Jaspersoft and things like that.

We were using PTC Integrity. We outgrew it; and it didn't handle customizations very well. Of course, we overcustomized to the point where it wasn't usable. Something had to go. It was more of a workflow engine; and so, it worked for IT. But we wanted a space where we had business, IT, and other groups all in one space.

I've been there from day one. The initial setup was pretty easy. I was kind of surprised that just getting the app installed, up and running, was pretty simple. The complexities usually came with stakeholder requirements. That's where things got a little nuts; but just getting it up and running wasn't bad.

We also considered HPE. PTC was on our list early on. They had a newer version, and that just didn't do it. There were a handful, but it was six or seven years ago.

The most important factor in choosing PPM was the usability of the tool. CA was good about helping us getting it set up initially with some of the earlier requirements. We had to redo a bunch of that due to shifting business needs; but their assistance was a big factor.

Don’t overcustomize it. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. We would've been better off if we could go back in time, roll it out of the box again, and use it for a predetermined amount of time before determining what we needed to customize.

We’re using the on-premise version.

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.