Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

• Resource
• Project
• Timesheet Management

I have worked as a developer and Clarity consultant with multiple companies and found that using CA PPM made the organization’s daily work easy. Project Managers and the resources of companies can use the project and timesheet part as there are lots of reports available to use for management. Also, it is a customizable tool.

They need to improve it's mobile compatibility.

I've been using it for five years.

There were some performance issues, but in the newer versions it looks fine. If there are lots of customization it can become slow.

Very good as CA support has an option to help companies build their own support team to help with their daily activities and monitoring.

Previously, I used HPE PPM which id similar to CA PPM. I am sure that most CA users would say that the CA solution is more reliable than the HPE one.

I have worked with companies who were using vendor team for implementation and support.

People or companies looking for PPM tools can go for CA PPM as it is perfect for customizations and is user friendly. As usual, most of the products have pros and cons and this product also has some issues. By using a better team and knowledgeable people in your team you can make it fit perfectly.

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).

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.

We use CA PPM to handle our project and portfolio management, as well as time sheets for our resources. 

The new UX, though we are not on it. Some of the new features look really nice. We are just looking for them to be a little more fully fleshed out before we move to them. 

It helps a lot with the automation and manual processes to go faster.  

One major thing that is super relevant to me, and my role in handling it, would be having more published API access, so we could integrate with all of our other tools that we are using.  

I cannot speak to stability, as we have only done a few light tests.

We have had varying degrees of success. Sometimes things are handled super quickly. Other times it takes a little while. 

Know what your full use case will be before launching into something as big as CA PPM. It does a lot of things and it is great at doing a lot of things, but if you only need a small subset, maybe it is not right for you

It does everything we need it to do. It could definitely be improved as far as speed and interoperability with other tools that we have in place. 

Managing the work of a federal agency.

It's performed very well. We've expanded it quite a bit. There have, though, been a couple of issues. 

• The configurability
• The resource management

They're valuable because that's what the customer uses the most.

I've also seen a little of the preview of the new UX and I'm impressed.

The organization that we contract for, they have centralized visibility into a lot of the different things that they were doing manually before, or on spreadsheets. There are a lot of reports that we've written based on that, that are sent out to executives and to management. It's a lot more efficient. It's all centralized, and the reporting is a lot easier, since it is all centralized. The data entry is a lot easier as well as the reporting.

I would like to see much more advanced financial management capabilities. Particularly, both financial and contract management capabilities. Even though there are some of those built in now, our federal customers manage their finances and their contracts differently from most folks on the commercial side of the world, so we've had to configure a lot of things, specific to them. It would be nice if some of that was built in to the product.

Additionally, there are some things that come with the product that are problematic. And the biggest one and, the company certainly knows this, is the integration with Microsoft Project. That's been a real pain in the butt for us. We've actually had contract issues because of it with our customer; it's not as robust or as full-featured as it could be.

There's no downtime or lagging.

In terms of scalability, so far so good. We haven't had any issues. We're using the cloud, CA cloud.

It's good. Sometimes they don't get back to me as quickly as I would like, but they're definitely always within a day.

The factors that are important to us when selecting a vendor are

• capability
• integration points.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because there are some pieces that are just not there that we would like to see. It's not like core type features that you'd expect in a product like this, the ones I talked about earlier, the financial stuff.

I would say, take a very strong look at CA PPM, depending on if you have a couple of specific things that they were looking for. 

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.