Broadcom Clarity Reviews

The following features are valuable to me:

• Project, portfolio, resource, and time sheet management
• Ability to customize through process management and custom objects

These features are useful in better organizing projects and resources for the PMO in our organization. And reporting is helpful in seeing a clear picture of project health at the project and portfolio level, so that practitioners make informed decisions.

I worked for one of the major manufacturing organizations, where they need to manage employees across geographical locations and minimize turnaround time for finding employees to assign work. With PPM’s Location OBS, they are able to find the nearest available employees for the work. This significantly reduces turnaround time.

Compared to other PPM tools, there is some room for improvement in:

• The UI
• Customization
• Financial management: I would like to see a powerful end-to-end, user-friendly mechanism where the organization can maintain labor and non-labor expenses effectively and generate final invoices out of it.
• Portfolio management: It has limits around the number of investments.

Many of our clients were not using some of these features, because of complexity and less customization facility, and I would like to see OOTB portlets on this product.

The best feature is the ability to control the demands of both big and small projects. For example, we recently implemented a CRM tool and it needed many resources and had many, many documents to support the project. PPM gave us the ability to control different projects with different needs at the same time because it's a unified tool.

We're able to allocate resources from various parties -- business analysts, developers, etc. -- as they work off a single platform.

I think it needs better reporting. The reports should be more user-friendly as they're currently hard to understand. 

Also, the UI is pretty logical, but it's hard to extract the data I'd like to see from the reports.

There have been no issues with deployment.

It's very stable, and we have roughly 115-120 endpoints.

We have a lot of endpoints, and it's scaled just fine.

We evaluated the HP solution, but the CA solution was more complete and integrated better with Service Desk Manager (SDM).

For us, it’s all about resource management and schedule management. Without this, we would be in trouble. This solution has it and more.

It’s driven global consistency and the management of our projects. We have used it a long time and are seeing great benefits by sticking with the product.

We have not deployed the latest version, but a problem we are seeing is the inability to get data out of the system and into Excel. This is a feature we want and need.

We have been using this solution since 2003.

It has been consistently stable over the years. This for us is critical.

In terms of scalability, it has adapted well. We use it for both small projects and very large projects. I think it’s great that it handles both kinds of projects with equal power.

They're very knowledgeable, and there have been times in which we have had big issues which we call show stoppers. When this happens, you need a different level of support, and, thankfully, we are on first-name basis. Therefore, all is resolved quickly.

We did not have a global solution and we needed one. This was something we needed internally and now we have it. You need to really understand what the business needs are going to be; this is essential. Also, I recommend going out and evaluating, both personally and from people in the industry.

The most valuable aspects of PPM are the project management modules and the visibility that it offers within them.

It gives us a view of where our project-management pain points are. Do we have enough resources? Where are our costs going? Are we spending too much internally, or should we be outsourcing?

The tool itself is comprehensive, but it's missing input from people like me. People need to be taught how to use it. Users are trying to teach themselves instead of learning effectively. So the education and training are what it’s missing.

We've had no issues with deployment.

From my experience, it's stable, as proven by its pretty large user base who agree on this.

It’s 100% scalable. It could be used in a small company and very large, equally effective and equally powerful.

Because it’s comprehensive, I only know that it's the best-practice solution. If we're using CA PPM, we're doing best practices.

If you're a basic user, the initial setup can be straightforward. But if you're exploiting it to the max, setup is complex -- and unwise. It would be like driving an expensive sports car and not knowing how to drive it.

If you are going to buy it, you should understand its usage, and make sure you appreciate how to exploit it because it’s not cheap and you’d be wasting your money if you won’t exploit it. Some organizations underutilize it, and I ask people why they bought it if they don’t exploit it.

Administration, project management, NSQL queries and portlets, XOG data transfer, user community forum, sandboxes and documentation.

Make timesheets more user configurable and controllable, e.g. user-definable filters and user-selectable tasks as alternatives to the population algorithm.

Make the rights administration more comprehensive, covering also areas now outside it.

Add custom fields that can be populated with SQL query results.

Launch the planned lightweight GUI.

Update Open Workbench to the usability currently normal in Windows software.

Add a GUI for XOG client.

20 years.

Normally, the installation is fairly straightforward. In some versions there have been some hickups which have been cleared with support or community.

Recent versions have arrived with recommended actions to ensure a smooth upgrade, which were not needed for earlier versions. In many instances, the organizations have made configurations and customizations which make the upgrades more challenging, but they are not in the vanilla product.

Stability is usually good out of the box. If the system is not maintained, that will result in reduced performance and problems. The current 64-bit version is very scalable, bearing in mind that a clustered environment with load balancers requires knowledge in that area. The development of third-party items such as Java JDK, Tomcat and browsers is usually so fast that the versions supported by CA PPM are not the most recent ones. That can be a problem for larger organizations that have standard environments in those areas.

Standard support usually works and there is even the possibility to chat with support online.

There are some very experienced professionals with CA and also with other organizations who are active in the user community forums and their help goes very deep into the product. Further, there are office-hour chats where you can ask questions from several CA experts attending. The support is good and the supporters skilled.

The initial setup after installation is fairly straightforward. It depends on the functionality the organization wants to use, but I don't think I have seen the sequence elsewhere than the user community forum. The documentation covers installation walkthroughs, but after that, there are optional paths for proceeding.

I am a member of the implementation team. Sometimes there is vendor presentation in the team, but not always and then there must be SME's with prior experience. Plain in-house teams do not have the required expertise for an initial installation. Learning through trial and error will prolong installation and especially initial configuration.

In addition to the on-premise offering, CA offers this also as SaaS (on-demand). In my opinion, that allows a cost-effective way to implement only as much as you can utilize by having only the initial implementation team use the initial functionality. Then, if so desired, you can extend the functionality, number of users and move to on-premise. With on-demand, CA takes care of the system maintenance, but the user organization is responsible for the data maintenance.

Some organizations think that when they hire an implementation with prior experience, the implementation is straightforward, which is not the case. Unless it is just a version upgrade, the user organization does not know the product and consequently does not know the best way to use the product for their ways of working. Therefore, a development environment for the implementation team is a must, as well as a system for testing the developed solutions.

Improvement over using various Microsoft tools, like just spreadsheets and other things. It's standardizing and expanding its use for the features that help our company.

We just started using PPM in my department, which is an engineering department. What I do for it, is I actually support it as from an IT-end, so I get it installed, configured, and running, and then go on to the next feature that takes IT work.

I have seen it now run for about three, four months, and it has been a stable product once installed and configured right, so I have not seen many needs to reboot the application.

I know it as being used for two-server system.

We intend to get into the thousands of users. We haven't reached that point. It's not driving the hardware resources that we would expect to see as something that's taxing the system.

As far as the features that we've planned to use, there's Jaspersoft, which allows you to move from Business Objects, and of course we have an upgrade being planned.

Specifically from CA, no, but the support we got from this contracted company has been very supportive, we've got the help we needed.

My company was choosing between either contracting with CA or this other contracting firm, or having someone internally be the tech-lead for PPM. We chose to assign it to me, because I have the skills to install, configure support having basically the OS knowledge to support such a utility.

I would recommend going right into Jaspersoft, which is part of the reporting feature of PPM, not to start out with Business Objects. Go right to Jaspersoft if you can.

I like using the on-demand feature as it requires a lot less maintenance for me. Once you understand the product, it’s easy to use. It's initially challenging, but it does what it’s supposed to do. At this point, we can't ask for much more.

We upgraded from a previous version, and the reporting feature has made that aspect of our work easier. Other than that, I wouldn't say that it's changed the organization too much.

I think the user interface could be more user friendly. For people who don't use it as part of their daily routine, it can be challenging at first. You get used to it, but it could definitely use some improvement.

I've used it for eight years.

The system is extremely stable.

It has adapted well over time and handled everything we have thrown at it.

The support is excellent and very easy to work with. They are responsive, very nice to talk with; we have a long-term relationship.

Our previous version needed updating. There’s nothing more to say, we simply needed to update.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself and it was very easy.

Take the time to understand your desired outcome. You get so involved with what you want, but be sure to have a roadmap and game plan with using PPM.

It's valuable for us to be able to get data across the enterprise. We focus a lot on resources, so being able to get the actuals by project is big. We do reporting at the enterprise level and are focused on the portfolio management side of things, so communicating, aggregating, and analyzing are important. We are married to Business Objects InfoView.

In our organization we are very siloed, so our executive management doesn't always see the value in sharing data across the enterprise. We feel that the business isn’t using it to its fullest extent, although it does give visibility as enterprise projects are moving through different regions.

It allows us to collect all of the projects for which people want visibility across different lines of business, but we have a lot of leaders who don’t understand a lot of the value of the information and what we could be doing with it, which is a business problem – that has hindered out ability to leverage the functionality with the tool and therefore some of our project managers aren’t fully engaged with the solution. It’s a top-down problem, but the tool is fine.

We’re happy with it. Very few performance issues.

We have not been overwhelmingly happy with that. We had the dedicated resource option, but it was challenging for us when we ran across problems during times of upgrade because we didn’t seem to get the assistance we needed. The documentation wasn’t always correct or thorough, or necessarily updated from version to version. There are some basic documentation problems, so we have found more valuable information for troubleshooting in the communities.

We get a lot of “I don’t know” or “let me find that”, but with nothing in the documentation, so we have ended up going with a third-party to help us as they had more expertise.

It was already in production when I joined.

We haven’t leveraged the full functionality of the solution. The tool is pretty great, and we have implemented some unusual things and not implemented some of other functionality that would enhance our use case. There are have been some challenges on the reporting side with maintenance, and that adds to our frustration when we go through upgrade after upgrade.

The main thing is defining your requirements – don’t let the tool drive your requirements. Understand what your goals are, so you can track that and really get the value out of the tool. It would be smart to use the functionality that exists within the tool in the out-of-the-box state, and only customize as necessary. Take your requirements and match up with OOB functionality and do the gap analysis to make decisions. When we first implemented PPM, we tried to make it into a previous tool that we had, which was terrible, so we turned PPM into the same type of tool.

Also understand what resource constraints you have in your organization to decide whether it needs to be on-premise or on-demand. Understand what level of control you really need in your environment because there are some limitations in the SaaS environment that you need to be aware of.