Broadcom Clarity Reviews

It’s deployed corporate-wide and has a heavy user-base, and we provide custom modifications to the solution. I also do all the deployments for seven different environments with each having three servers.

I’d like the install to work a lot better and to be more tailored. It also needs to support a forced functionality of the install.

It’s not bad, though we have intermittent issues with services going down. It’s a background service that runs reports, which seems to hang every so often, so we need to be pretty diligent in keeping our eye on that. When it goes down, users aren’t able to run reports so we have to bounce the reports server. But overall, it’s fairly stable.

It’s pretty easy to throw into any environment.

Usually their tech support isn’t very good. We usually end up fixing it ourselves or writing our own XML code. But, they try their best.

If I call support, I don’t like getting a middle person, which I frequently do. I try to figure it out myself before I call them. Escalations are usually very good. We had an issue with a recent upgrade so we created a P1 ticket and escalated it after day one and they were right on it. They worked well with me and they were there with me for a 17-hour day to get the system up.

They’re getting better and have been better recently than in the past.

The installs never go smoothly. You can have all your system requirements met and all your ducks in a row. The CA XMLs won’t work.

We recently did an upgrade which took over two weeks to get up and running, which was an incremental update.

The install packages are the worst I’ve ever seen.

Overall it’s a very good, powerful product. It’s one of our two or three major products. It’s used by everyone, and it’s easy to customize. It’s fairly reliable once it’s deployed, it looks nice, the reports look nice, and it’s easy to move around. The only gripe I have is the install.

With any solution, you need to be able to customize and tailor it. You need to modify and add your pipelines and any other custom attributes you need, fairly easily and fairly quickly. It needs to be able to deploy from one environment to another fairly easily, which the CA PPM solution does.

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. 

• 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 most valuable part is related to portfolio management in the home menu. We can add attributes in new and existing pages from the administration section.

In comparison to other PPM tools, these features are clearer in this solution. We can also make ranking rules, in order to select the right projects to put inside the portfolio.

Our organization, a consulting firm, is working with CA. Based on this, the CA PPM tool is one of the main services this company offers to the other organizations and configures it for them.

There should be the improvement in their strategy to align the organization with the Portfolio Management section. It should be visible in the application.

However, I see that most of the usage of the application is in terms of the technical parts. For example, when the customer wants to add new sections or make custom objects.

I have had experience working in the PPM field as an intern for around a year. However, I have used this solution for five months.

There were no stability related issues.

I did not encounter any problems in respect to the scalability. The capacity is good and it depends on the data that a company wants to enter.

I used Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project in other companies. My current company has the main concept/business of PPM and they use the CA PPM tool to offer their customers.

In terms of the licensing, I know that there are different types of demos and licensing available, such as studio or a normal user.

In this case, the user can try most of the modules. But for the administrator demo, I saw that the user only has accessibility rom the Admin menu

For a limited time, I tried out the Project Objects - Progressive Project Management Approach (PPMA) solution. It was also useful and user-friendly with a graphical environment that helps the user not be bored.

• Try to understand the most important parts of the system and make a relationship between the different parts of the portal.
• Try to engage in knowledge sharing, in order to boost fast learning and be more agile to use the system.
• Have specialists for the technical parts and the configuration aspects.
• Have other employees for the front-end functionalities.

It helps with our marketing efforts, projects, timing, budgeting, and resourcing. It also gives us a one-page overview.

We're able to run our business more efficiently because the solution is cloud-based.

We use JIRA, so I'd definitely want PPM integrated with that. Also, it needs to connect better with other software so that we can simply drag items into PPM. Additionally, it would be nice if it worked with Microsoft Office.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability, and if you have sufficient storage, you shouldn't have any problems.

It is scalable, and it adapts well from the end-user point-of-view.

I don't have personal experience with CA technical support, but my point of view is that they are professional, and the sales and technical guys are also professional. We are very happy with the people at CA.

Because we're smart, we knew we had to switch, and when we saw what CA had to offer, we chose this, although we had pressure to put this in place internally.

We didn't look at any other solution.

We got too much marketing and not enough of the actual product itself during the sales process. Pay attention to the product and not the marketing.

Project Management and timesheets.

For projects, having all of the relevant data in one location is helpful.

• Project Management, as it allows us to track all of a project's elements in one database.
• Reporting allows us to create custom reports.
• Dashboards are useful to review a large number of projects.

Needs Gantt to MS Project link.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate support a seven.

Multiple solutions. Switch was to pull data into one software package.

Complex. There was a lot of customization that was required to adapt PPM for our needs.

We evaluated other options, but I was not involved in that stage.

Consider your company's requirements and review the features of PPM against those requirements.

The capacity to plan and manage projects. It has the profile of every person who works at the company.

Perfect for centralized planning and viewing the capacity of work of each group which is developing applications

The product doesn't have a way to simulate different kinds of plans. When you have a new plan with a high priority, there isn't a way to simulate the impact of the new plan

We have been using the solution for four years.

We did not have any stability issues.

I wasn’t involved at the beginning of the project. During my stay at the bank, we didn’t perform any upgrade with CA PPM.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We did not use another solution previously.

I didn't attend the initial setup, but I heard that it was difficult.

We did not evaluate any other options.

I can say that it’s a product with high potential.

Obviously, the project management aspect itself is valuable to us, but we're also using it for portfolio management and financial planning. The combination of these three functions makes this a great tool.

We used an old, in-house system and we configured CA PPM to look and feel like the old one. This didn’t benefit us and we should have probably used PPM as it came.

There were some bugs in the old version that were supposed to be fixed but are not. Some features that needed to be added have never been added.

After assisted implementation, we haven't had issues with deploying it.

The solution has up until this point been stable.

It has scaled well so far.

Online support would be an 8/10, but it depends on the person, and the first level is not good as the next level.

We got support for our implementation so that made it easier.

I only recommend to use it the way it was designed and to minimize custom configurations.