Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

We primarily use the solution for time management, product management, resource management, and financial management. We use it for any type of governance that's needed for a project.

The solution has helped us with the finance aspects of our organization.

The solution is the best tool for portfolio and project management.

It's very good out of the box, without configurations required.

The user interface (UI) needs to be improved. Right now, it's not the best.

The usability at this point is terrible. It makes the product hard to use unnecessarily. It's not intuitive at all. I've had to force myself to learn it and it's been hard.

We use an older version, so It might have been updated in newer versions. That said, everything needs to be fixed, including the font, colors, and navigation. It's literally every aspect that needs updating.

The core of PPM is very complex.

The solution needs more documentation.

The technical support is not the best. It needs better support for Agile practices.

It's very difficult to integrate anything with the product.

I've been using the solution for five or six years at this point.

The solution is stable. There are no issues there. I don't recall having any issues with reliability.

The scalability is a bit complex. It's hard to modify things on the product, which affects the ability to expand.

I'm not sure of how many users are on the solution.

The technical support was terrible. We weren't too satisfied with their level of support.

When it came to getting help with integration, we really didn't get any support.

They also need more documentation. There's not enough to really be able to help clients.

We didn't previously use a different solution, however, Broadcom used to be CI Technologies.

The solution is not straightforward. It's complex. On top of that, the usability is bad, which makes the entire process even harder than it has to be. It requires a lot of knowledge.

With one client, with all the implementation and configurations needed, the deployment process took about a year.

I'm not sure how many employees were needed for deployment or maintenance.

I don't know of what the actual costs of the solution were.

I recommend PPM. I'd advise against changing functionality on the box, however.

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution, however, I believe it to be some aspect of version 12 - potentially 12.4. It's an older on-premises version.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

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 it for project-tracking, budgeting, and resource-tracking.

The budgeting. With budgeting would be the resource-tracking, because we budget our resources. Overall budgeting is probably the best use of Clarity for us, because we can see how much we are allowed to spend, how much we have spent, and then how much is left over.

It has all of the features that currently we need.

Project managers have insight into everything regarding their projects. They can do anything they want, such as update and edit their projects within Clarity. They use it every single day, in every way that they can, to keep it updated and to track their project features. It has made project-tracking much simpler and easier.

What I do is just keep things running as much as I can on our end, so I think that would be something that our project managers would better answer, because they are the ones that use it. I just keep it running. 

We have had issues, but that goes with anything. Nothing is perfect, so we work through those and we do what we can when those issues come up to get them fixed quickly. Nothing big; nothing that has obviously stopped us from using it.

We use CA technical support whenever we need to. We try to fix as much as we can on our end, but obviously there are things we can't do that CA has to do for us. However, they are always very helpful. They are always very willing to work with us to figure out what is going on, and to help us out in fixing any issues.

I was not around during the initial setup.

I was not a part of the decision-making process.

I like the new UX. I think it is cool. We pretty much only use it for the time-tracking, which probably more companies do than not. The UX is super-simple, very user-friendly, colorful, and fun. So, I think it is really awesome, and we have received a lot of positive feedback from our time-trackers.

It is something our company continues to use and likes to use. Otherwise, we would not be using it. It gets the job done, and it helps us get our jobs done. 

The key benefit that most of our clients see is the ability to ensure they have the right resources, working on the right work. It also provides the opportunity to pivot to meet new demands.

The ability to provide transparency through your investment portfolios at the top-level financial all the way down to the work that drives delivery.

Additional enhancements to portfolios with the new user experience. Because, while portfolios deliver a lot of the value-driven information, the new user experience really takes the view of the information to the next level, and it takes it from being a tired-looking feel to a new design approach.

Never an issue, stability.

As long as you have the licensing, we can scale.

Never an issue. They're always quick with an answer.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Nothing ever rates a 10. There's always areas, opportunity to improve.

Project management in CA PPM is elastic and comprehensive. You can adjust the solution to any organization quickly and easily.

Studio is a powerful component that lets you add and modify features in an easy way without writing code. These features include new objects, attributes, views, process, and portlets.

The interface needs improvement. The new UI/UX (from version 15.1) is modern and more intuitive, but it only covers a small piece of the solution. The rest is the classic UI.

A new UX in CA PPM is the answer to the problem with complexity and the huge options in classic UI, which is the cause of problems using the solution for a beginner. The new UX is quite easy to use, but only covers time sheet management and part of project management. Switching between new and old interface is tiring. I understand that to develop a new UX needs time, but integration between the new and the old UI/UX should be better.

I have been using CA PPM for eight years.

We have not had stability issues.

Technical support is good, but fixes for bugs have a very long life cycle of many months.

We did have a previous solution. However, the class of the tool was much lower, so the tools are not comparable.

The initial setup was quite complex, especially in the financial area. But the solution can be usable after one hour of setup by an expert.

The price is high, but the solution is very comprehensive. The price is acceptable only if the solution is core for the organization.

CA PPM is one of the best solutions in the PPM area, but it is quite expensive.

The ability to identify business value associated with the financial management of projects.

Just the ability to capture the project scope and the cost associated with it. It adds to the business value.

Not sure which release we are in right now, but we're going to use the next release with Jaspersoft integration. I'd like to see their collaboration.

When looking for a vendor, I look for stability in partnership. For this price and for our use of the tool, this is an effective enterprise solution.

The most valuable features are its compatibility with other programs, easy to use and the report generating feature.

It has consistent delivery of reports and all project-related information housed in one place.

We would like to see compatibility with more than just one scheduling tool. Primavera P6 is our tool and it drives our projects.

Currently, we are still in development and we're not in production. The few times that we've tried putting it in production, it hasn't been that stable.

From what I've seen at a recent conference, I'm quite impressed. You can do a lot with it and there is lot of room for growth.

They are very good and extremely responsive when it comes to addressing questions. They provide good suggestions for any troubleshooting.

We were using a previous solution; it was a combination of Microsoft Access, SharePoint tables and Excel. It was becoming too cumbersome and time consuming to produce reports and we needed something to manage all our projects. With the number of projects we were doing, the things we were trying to track and report on were getting more detailed; thus we needed a tool to manage all that.

The vendor’s ability to understand our current process, adapt to it while also being honest and setting guardrails for us on what their limitations are and what the product can deliver, were important criteria while choosing a vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was quite complex. We're still in the initial setup.

Make sure that the production requirements are detailed and thorough, so that the vendor can understand what is needed for successful implementation.

We're not in production. We had gone to production, but we had to go back. There was difficulty in understanding our process and expectations from the start of the project to where we are now and that hasn't been realized.