Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We use Broadcom Clarity PPM for business. We have many types of business cases which have to be approved, then once approved, we move them from idea to business case to project. We use the platform for different projects.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is a high-value product. It's amazing, and it helps us become productive. It's a nice product. It's helpful, and we can do a lot of things faster through Broadcom Clarity PPM.

We also love that the platform is scalable and very stable. We have trust in it, even from a self management perspective.

Easy to enhancements for any requirements In Clarity PPM environment VS other platforms.

Broadcom Clarity PPM has some areas for improvement, particularly its dashboard, because it's too slow. The look and feel of the platform need to be enhanced. The UX or user experience of Broadcom Clarity PPM also needs to be improved, e.g. sometimes when you need to do something on it, you need to click three or four times for the action to go through, instead of clicking just once.

An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom Clarity PPM is being able to communicate through the dashboard. If the dashboard enables us to communicate and shoot the message there, that would be amazing.

I've been using Broadcom Clarity PPM for 10 years, and I'm still using it, as I'm a technical person.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is very stable.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is a scalable platform.

The Broadcom Clarity PPM technical support is good. They always reply back to us. Support for the platform is amazing.

Broadcom Clarity PPM was really smoothly to install. There were no challenges with its initial setup. The deployment took three days. The installation of the software only took a little time, e.g. three days, but we spent two to three years with the configuration.

We used an external team for the implementation of Broadcom Clarity PPM, particularly just for them to give their inputs. We used Ignite as the third party.

Broadcom Clarity PPM costs us $500K, and that's only for the installation and kick off within the first year. For each succeeding year, it'll cost you $200K.

I have experience with Broadcom Clarity PPM only. I have no experience with Jira.

We have 800 users of Broadcom Clarity PPM within the organization.

We have one guy: a business analyst, and he's in charge of handling and maintaining the project and Broadcom Clarity PPM itself.

Everyone in the organization is using Broadcom Clarity PPM now, so there's no need to increase usage, e.g. all our departments including top management, even the CEO, uses the platform. We can approve, reject, and do things on the platform. We monitor each project and dashboard through Broadcom Clarity PPM, e.g. every PM on the CapEx project has access to the platform.

The advice I'd give to others who are looking into implementing Broadcom Clarity PPM is that they need to be agile. They need to be flexible.

I'm giving Broadcom Clarity PPM a rating of nine out of ten.

During the time, we explored the options, and some of the competitors to Clarity only offered a cloud-based version. Due to our server security restriction, we wanted to go with the on-premises option, and Clarity offers both on-premises and cloud versions.

The valuable feature is the portfolio management, which includes project management and status reporting, managing the projects and programs at a portfolio level.

Currently, we are facing a challenge due to our cybersecurity concerns. We are having difficulty using the Broadcom mobile application, which is not compatible with our network and inflow settings. 

Additionally, there is a tool called JasperSoft, which is embedded within Clarity and used for reporting. It is not user-friendly or developer-friendly.

I have two years of experience using Broadcom Clarity.

Stability is fine, but it's not good. There are some issues with bugs or glitches.

I would rate the scalability of the solution as eight out of ten.

Customer service is good, and I would rate it as eight out of ten.

Positive

We did not have any other solution before this. We were using external project management tools from Microsoft.

We had an implementation partner.

We are still on the journey, so it is too early to say the percentage of work. However, it's good, and we are in good shape.

Based on my experience, I would recommend Broadcom Clarity to other people.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

• Project and other objects portfolio management
• Financial management
• Reporting possibilities

• Ensures a consistent approach to project management and approvals of the project gates.
• Provides an integrated view on the planned and active investments. (Ideas and Programs/Projects)
• Enables us to measure performance of the project portfolio

Up to version 12.x the GUI was still Web 1.0, and although it has been redesigned with release 13.x-14.x it is bit behind other solutions. (Based on the evaluation of 15.1 release I can confirm that UX has really improved). Replacement of Business Objects with Jaspersoft BI and its full integration within CA PPM is still not finalized but gets better with every release.

My company has been using for 10 years. (I am involved for last six.)

Upgrade projects from 12.0 to 13.1 (2013) and then to 13.3 (2014) were rather smooth. I was not around when Clarity was deployed the first time (2006-2007).

I have not really encountered any stability issues. I observed two occasions in past six years that service needed to be restarted due to becoming unresponsive. More often, we experienced unpleasant lags with screen refresh in the beginning (due to incorrect set up of portlets mostly that was later resolved).

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support experience varied over the time.

We previously used two instances of Clarity in the business division and a different PPM tool in the IT organization for IT PPM. The decision was to deploy one system group-wide for all kinds of projects.

Business requirements specification and evaluation took four months, followed by almost six months of the design review. The tool itself was not to be blamed, as the organisation was not willing to adjust any of the complex workflows it was using with the previous solutions.

We chose the least expensive vendor and their level of expertise was not balanced (in some areas excellent, in others less so).

We never estimated ROI (which is huge pity as there are calculation tools available both from CA and independent consulting companies).

It is not the cheapest option, but definitely worth the price (if properly designed and implemented).

No other options have been evaluated as the management decision was to apply EA principle of recycling already owned tool deployed in 2 independent installations.

Get familiar with the out-of-the-box functionality. Even if you do not plan to roll out fully fledged resource management with time tracking, make sure you understand how the things work. If you decide to start with something "lighter" (that is what CA PPM integrators always suggest), you will be left dependent on the custom solution of that vendor.

We use it for project management, resource management and, to a lesser extent, portfolio management.

We are definitely doing well in resource management, although struggling to adjust to the agile environment. As far as project management, we are doing risks and issues, status reports, change requests, all your standard issue pin box stuff, and that is going just fine. In the portfolio management space, we are going to be growing our usage, and we are excited to see the stuff in version 15.

It is shifting as we go through our agile transformation. In terms of being able to do quarterly status reports, board reporting, resource reporting, and that kind of thing, that has been ongoing at Schwab for a number of years. As we are shifting into the agile space, and having some differences of opinion between our card carrying PMPs and our card carrying agileists about what level of detail needs to be where, our agile community wants to manage things in terms of stories and sprints, but upper leadership still wants to see the status reports that we have always done. So, how do we make both camps happy? That is not a tool specific issue. It is really an industry issue right now.

The ability to have all of the data in one place from risks and issues to resource capacity and actual utilization. We are currently undergoing an integration with our financial systems that will allow us to bring in financials into our cost plans and minimize the need for project managers to be going into both Clarity and the financial system. They will have everything all-in-one place, so that will be really beneficial to our users.

We are still on 14.3. We have not used the new UX. I did laugh at Kurt's presentation yesterday, because he said, "You know what? Three years ago, we were up here, and I was standing in front of a bunch of PowerPoint slides. Now we actually have the functionality behind it," because that was my observation. Two years ago, they were basically just screen mocks, and it all looked great, but what do you do?

My concern with the new UX is that my core users, the folks who are in Clarity day in and day out, are not going to get the full benefit of the new UX until we have OBSS and all of the other functionality available. I understand the need to tailor the new UX to make time tracking easier, make resource management easier, and do those kinds of things. I get that, but folks are going to track their time anyway, because they want to get paid.

The most vocal folks in my stakeholder community are those day-in day-out PMO analysts and resource managers. I struggle also from a maintenance and support perspective. Now, I am going to be maintaining both new UX screens, which the blueprints make look like it is going to be really easy, but we would still have to be maintaining new UX screens as well as classic views for those functionalities that are not yet available in the new UX.

I have this idea. We currently have the ability to allocate from assignments. Something that we are doing in our organization is we have created a report which we give back to the resource managers, "Hey, based on the last three months of actuals, here is what your work projection looks like." 

I would love to see that go the next step forward and just allocate from actuals. If you can look at it and say, "Okay, based on actuals for the last six months, here is what we think this is going to look like." That at least gives the resource manager a place to start, and a way to have a conversation. Particularly, as we get into agile teams, those teams are working on the same thing for extended period of time. It is not like they're on and off. It is more of the agile approach, where it is ongoing, continuous improvement, and deployment. That is something that I think would be interesting, and I do not know if it is something that CA has looked at before.

We have been quite stable. We are on-premise, so obviously any stability problems that we are having is on my infrastructure guy. He might be the better person to answer that question, but we have not had challenges. 

We are relatively new to Jaspersoft, and are running into some speed and performance issues (not necessarily stability issues), and also some unpredicted behavior. I think that we are on the initial release of Jaspersoft, so maybe some of these things have been addressed in later releases.

I will reference my last job where when I first started, nine years ago, working with PPM (Clarity), we started out with a PMO of about 20 people, and keeping track of IT resources in the couple hundreds. Over those eight years, we scaled to a PMO of 250 people and thousands of users. 

So, I have seen it scale up. I have also, unfortunately, seen it scale back down, which is why that is where I used to work. So, it is definitely a scalable system.

I have worked with CA Services in the past and felt they were knowledgeable. We have a few open tickets. 

In terms of tech support, I would refer you to my development lead. They do most of the work with tech support.

It was already installed when I came to work for my current employer.

In my previous job, I was doing a side-by-side pilot with PPM and a competitor. There were pros and cons to both. Nobody is perfect in the space. Some of the downfalls and frustrations are when, coming into a new organization, it has been over-customized or they have over-engineered things. So, keeping us safe from ourselves, while still giving us flexibility, would be a great way to do that.

No tool is going to fix your process problems. You better have a pretty good process in place, and know exactly what it is you are trying to do. Implementing a tool in parallel with implementing a process, you are potentially going to do that sort of over-engineering that I was talking about. The tool is not going to solve the problem. The tool can help you automate, but it is not going to solve those problems.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Being available when we need them, and leaving us alone otherwise. Being available to us when we need the assistance. It is great to have a relationship where you are not always trying to sell us something, but when you see something that is a good fit. It is sort of like crying wolf. If you are always trying to sell us new features and so forth, we are not going to want it unless we really need it.

I will throw another thought out there, which is I am getting a lot of pushback from my management about, "Hey, we need to upgrade, because this is coming end of life." We hear that a lot from our vendor partners. "This is becoming end of life. It is going out of support." The feedback that we get from my management, and what I am going to be asking my account team to tell me is, "Do not tell me it is going to be out of support and we have to upgrade. Tell me what it is going to do for me over and above what I currently have, then I can sell it to my leadership."

We are the support team that administers the PPM tool, currently addressing over 3,000 customers in 28 different business units.

PPM is awesome. We do have an on-premise system and we use our developers that we partner with, both CA and one of the consulting agencies for them, to make sure that we're implementing things correctly and taking on things as they come.

Right now, it's the PPM piece of it, the scheduling, the Gantt, the task view. It gives that full visibility to the team. But we're wanting to take that further and start building upon the financial piece of it, doing extracts from contractors to employees, to determining resource planning and future planning, and doing "what-if" scenarios.

I think the biggest benefit right now is the reporting. It gives that quick visibility and it's consistent data; versus everybody just trying to go out there and look at their own individual pieces, looking at it as a whole.

We're looking at adding the Agile piece to it. I want to make sure that that integration is very smooth. And I'm here this week, at CA World, to see how that's going to play out for us. So, it's understanding, when we have multiple customers using both Waterfall and Agile, how that can come together, because we are still supporting HR, finance, and business planning for their outputs. Regardless of your methodology, we're going to be giving them streamline information.

Stability is awesome. Not to criticize any other tool, but we actually have some customers right now that are migrating from another tool because that tool has been down so often. Part of our success, we believe, is that our team administers the tool, we don't give out administrative rights to our customers. It's fully owned by our team, but we have a 99% "up" rate so we're very excited about that.

It's nice that we have the options. We try to tell our customers not to "drink from the fire hose." It's important that they start off and have some discipline before they take on more. They come to CA World, they see all the exciting things and features, and they come back and say, "I want it all." So it's kind of my being the "pacemaker" for them. I have to say, "Let's start here and build off that," while building their disciplines. They're getting their PMs engaged because everybody adopts change a little bit differently. So we want to make sure we're doing it smoothly.

Tech support is very good. We've had our challenges in the past with MSP interface connector, especially because we're on-premise and we've got configuration settings that are required. Sometimes it's an issue with the PMs themselves just not following instructions. But other times, you realize that there is a known issue or defect. Support is really quick to identify that, let us know, and either there will be a workaround, or we need to upgrade to the newest version.

Not in my current company. In my past life, we had been using a different PPM. And I was instrumental in doing the proof of concept. We interviewed several customers and put them through the gamut before choosing Clarity.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but as a support team, my team will do a lot of the testing in the different phases of upgrades. We test it from an administrative standpoint, but also as a user, as a PM, different rights permissions. We'll swap those out to make sure that everything is fluid.

The updates are straightforward. We have a development team that helps to make sure that we're migrating properly.

We're excited about the new UX. We're actually going to do the 15.3 upgrade in 2018.

When looking for a new vendor, our criteria include combining all the "asks" from our customers, but also with what we can manage. What's ready out of the box versus what we're going to have to customize. I'm a very big fan of CA's configurability. It's not necessarily something that is custom-built, but people can rearrange their filters, they can set up their criteria based on their needs. 

I give it a nine out of 10 right now. I'm not giving it a 10 because I have to see how the Agile piece works. Past life, we were using Rally and CA PPM and their integrations were just really wonky, and we ended up backing out of it. That was kind of cumbersome. So we're looking forward, now that CA has obtained what was formerly known as Rally, the Agile Central. I'm very curious to see how's that going to overlay. If it makes me happy, it will definitely be a 10.

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would say know the data that you have and what you want your output to be later. I think it's important to think about the future, because if you start off - for clarity purposes - using that idea, there's not a step before that. So you really want to have to make sure that your idea is your goal-point from the beginning. 

Also knowing what you want to extract from it later. Permissions and securities are going to have to dictate, "Are you going to access that?" or "Are you going to want your customers to be able to pull their own information?" Do you want to utilize partitions? Because everything has that downstream impact. If you know what you want or you think you know what you want, take that step back and look at your long-term goals and how they fit into it. From everything, from work streams to tasks.

It is mainly used for project management, developing the portfolio of the project and the budget process of all projects.

For a very long time, Broadcom Clarity had not developed the old interface that Broadcom no and we were not able to see any new features on the system because of the older UEX. We switched to the new UX at the end of March and it needs some time for the user to react to the new features.

But if overall main features are being talked about, the financial part of Clarity is really appreciated.

Among things to be improved, Clarity can really work on its SAP interface. The current interface lacks out-of-the-box connectors for different applicators in the system. Therefore, this requires external support, which is beyond our expertise. In-house development is done for the interface, but as the system becomes complex, there is a building need to maintain the necessity of updates. If the updates aren’t maintained, then the system might be compatible. Additionally, the report generation process using a different software poses difficulties, leading to the need for external consultancy to create specific reports. Certain features, also face compatibility issues with our existing system. Despite these limitations, we find the system satisfactory overall, although a learning curve exists, especially for those unfamiliar with its particularities. 

I have personally used Broadcom Clarity for seven years.

It is very scalable. Currently, we have around 350 users, the majority of whom are from various governmental services. Though some smaller organisations, such as the tax service, use the software for their projects, their numbers are limited. Despite offering a variety of services, there is an underutilization of its features. We have the capacity to activate more choices to improve the information flow between the system and SAP, particularly in the financial area. Previously, node two was the option, but we're now lobbying for modifications that may need changes to the system's financial structure. Furthermore, we have forthcoming services that are interested in using the product, and thankfully, supporting them will not need large setup modifications.

Yes, we have contacted technical support and customer service. The transition to the new UX has unlocked new adjustments in certain areas compared to an older version. The features like information handling, planning and resource allocation have made it a little unstable. We contacted the support team and their response has been quick and swift. Although they didn’t offer us the exact solution, we have got almost appropriate workarounds for the solution whenever it was needed. 

In recent times, I have been involved in the purchase of the license for this solution. However, the process of procurement changed and the option to buy individual licenses was no more available. The new subscription model was introduced, as a followed-up trend in the industry. The subscription costs put us in shock because it was double what we paid in the past as the yearly maintenance. We negotiated and the price was dropped. But this incident made me observe a lack of transparency from Broadcom in terms of licensing expenses. This isn't unique to Broadcom but seems to be a broader industry issue.

We use the time sheet for reporting against tasks. We have a large user group that we keep track of all the time, and where people are spending it. From using the solution, benefits would include knowing what our people are up to, one, being able to post that to GL, we do use it as a sub-ledger. We also are starting more and more to use it for allocating resources, to make sure we understand what the availability of those resources are versus the work that we're asking them to perform.

Ease of use, the user experience has been our biggest obstacle to overcome. I've seen some of the things that they're coming out with next year, and I applaud all of those. It's been long overdue to get that type of user experience into place. I'm going to say user experience, not to sound like a broken record, scalability, we have a constantly growing, we probably grow organically 10% to 15% a year in our user base, so we've got to be able to scale. Stability and ease of support, I'm an application development manager, so we've got to be able to put in some changes, upgradability and things of that nature. All of that kind of comes together for my perspective, that's what I look for.

That's going to be kind of multifaceted for us. We've used the product since the late '90s on ABT, went live with Niku in 2004, that became Clarity, and then CA bought out Niku, so we've come a long way over a long time.

We have a very stable environment. We had our first outage, unplanned outage, this year for the first time in six years, and it was not due to the product, it was due to a third part vendor did something they shouldn't have.

Very scalable. We have, like I said, over 12,000 users right now, and I feel no problem, given enough money and time, that would scale up to whatever. I've discussed with other users of the same product that use many more than that.

It's been mixed. We get some technical support folks that know exactly what the need is, and we've had some that I've had to escalate a number of times before we could get an issue fixed.

Initial set up, user adoption was a little rough in the beginning, especially with the technology at the time. It was new, we were coming from a homegrown, "I have exactly what I want", to trying to use out of the box technologies.

I would put it right at a 7 to an 8/10, because I like what it is. It provides all the solution you need, the only takeaway, or coming off that 10 mark, is the user experience and the user interface. Forward looking to what the application is going to become by the time you go live and what you're going to do with it, not necessarily looking back and talking to users of long past, like myself, we have had it for a long time, but I try and keep my fingers on the pulse of what's coming.

The most valuable features is the broad spectrum ability to pull in all of our portfolio information and drive that down to where the end result outputs to our financials. This allows us to close books each month.

We're a private company, so we do a lot around CapEx from the perspective of revenue and how all that is driven from a financial perspective, so by having a broad overview of bringing things in through ideation and portfolio management and approvals for money spent, we're able to keep a pretty good control over that from a holistic, enterprise-wide perspective.

Particularly in our technology department, we get approvals for projects, expenditure for each project, and when the projects are approved, we're able to track them on the portfolio down to the project-level.

This is from a global-perspective too, as we're headquartered in Nashville but we have heavy usage over in Asia, Hong Kong, and our Tokyo office. CA PPM is pretty good in getting a really granular, line-item overview of where we're at, pretty much almost real-time from expenditures.

They've got to come up to the year 2015 on user interface. It's really just not there. We've recently been looking at other products, wondering if we want to make a move. We don't really think that's the right answer, but at the same time we're hoping to see something here to help us with what we're doing.

They've really failed to innovate on the user-interface perspective. The complexities of the product are it's strength and it's weakness. We have a poor level of user adoption right now, just because it's so hard for people who who go in just once a week to do something. It's difficult for project managers to go in and remember how to do it, get through things in the user interface. We're kind of hoping to see something here at this conference, future road maps for user interface improvements, HTML5, whatever, to lessen some of those qualms.

Deployment has had no issues.

Stability’s fine. It's feature-rich, and that's fine.

No issues whatsoever.

I don't believe that we've had any instance that made it outside of our internal support in recent memory.

We recently upgraded to 14.2, and that was smooth and issue-less.

It's functionality is way up there at a grade of 9-8 out of 10. It's the industry leader in what you can do with it. The ability to get in and do that stuff, for people maybe with a lower technical aptitude than guys like us at these conferences, the user interface would make it a 4.

Make sure you have a PMO in place that is a very strong center of knowledge for your project managers. Also, make sure you're providing solid training on the usage of the tool. If you elect to go with a more agile model where you're kind of doing away with PMO, then what happens is you lose that center of knowledge about the use of PP MCA, and as I mentioned before, the complexity of the use of it is it's weakest point. We're experiencing a lot of problems with that right now.