Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We use it to track projects and work in our portfolio. For us, it is about the reporting on project statuses during the project lifecycle.

The benefit of using the SaaS version is that it is more manageable than needing to have the infrastructure and the overhead of being on-premise, which would be too much for us. We really like being able to use the SaaS solution so that CA is managing everything except the actual data capture and generating reports.

With it, we're able to organize how we collect information and ideas and projects and get them funded. Without it, we would be using Excel spreadsheets and people don't want it to be like that.

It lets us aggregate all that information about ideas and projects, and put them into common reports which we can share. That's been very valuable.

I would like to see the ability to connect with other kinds of reporting engines like Tableau, or other kinds of BI tools. That would be crucial for us. We use those tools anyway, so we end up exporting data from PPM, and then importing it into those tools. It would be better if we could do it directly.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable.

Technical support has been up and down. That's not always a great experience. It's difficult to work with. I've been using this product for many years now, so it's both good and bad.

We had nothing before. We were basically doing it manually in spreadsheets. This was our first foray into formal project portfolio management. We made that move in 2009.

It was fairly difficult to get going. We had to try it a couple times. We had signed up initially for a program that was supposed to get it up and running in 30 days, but it didn't explain enough or train us enough about this very complicated product; so it actually took us a couple of years before it was right.

The HPE solution and the CA solution are really the only two options at this level. In general, we decide primarily on a vendor based on price and features. Our organization undertook a couple of different times to look at who makes these kinds of products, what they offer, and for how much (the per seat cost). We believe that we arrived at the right solution in terms of the amount of features for the cost.

Make sure that you need all the functionality included in the PPM tool because it's very complete. That means it can also be very confusing. If you don't need this much functionality, look at something that's not quite as robust in the enterprise class. There are other tools that don't have all the features. They aren't as complete, but they are easier to use.

CA PPM’s project management functionality is the most valuable. Being able to record project information, risks, issues, changes, status reports, tasks, and scheduling of resources etc. in one place instead of in different spreadsheets and documents is really important for project managers to manage their projects and for management to see the reports of that information.

Also, the time-tracking functionality and being able to track time to project tasks and other admin, sustaining tasks is also really valuable because we can see the actuals vs. the forecast for project metrics, and organization metrics. CA PPM has a mobile app that allows staff to time-track on the go, and also lets managers review and approve time on their mobile as well. This gives us a lot of flexibility especially for our services organization that is constantly travelling and removes barriers as staff do not need to log on to VPN with their laptop to time-track.

We were so disjointed previously because the project budgeted hours from our finance manager did not match the scheduled hours from our booking manager and that did not match the task hours from our project manager. Consolidating all the project hours into one location really improved the way we manage and budget project hours and helped get all these key people in alignment. This is critical for project success so we can execute on what is planned and if more hours are needed, a project change request can be done directly in PPM.

Additionally, being able to report on the data has been a real improvement. With everything in one place, running a report is real time and efficient. It really beats spending a lot of time manual time gathering the data and putting it into a PPT. PPM has provided a lot of visibility into our projects and the management has found the reports useful and insightful on project status and issues.

A huge pain-point is the Jaspersoft reporting. This is a new functionality that recently replaced the Business Objects reporting. Jaspersoft is extremely cumbersome and our end users dislike it, and are frustrated when using the criteria filter because many times the results returned do not match the results in the main system when using the inbuilt searches. It's a very frustrating function.

Another issue which almost became the deal breaker in choosing this system is scheduling. If you require scheduling resources across multiple projects for specific days dependent on the task, PPM is not designed for that. It allows you to see just the allocation across projects but not tasks. This becomes a real problem for a professional services group when resources are working on multiple projects at one time, and need to be onsite for different tasks so you need to be able to view across projects, and for multiple resources at one time. PPM has no calendar view for all the resources and what project tasks that are working on. We had to spend a lot of money customizing an add-on solution that could give us this calendar view.

A few other items that could improve, the time-tracking functionality is locked down and not very customizable. PPM gives you the ability to configure two attributes to help categorize the time, but that is all. It would be good to be able to add more flexibility to this module. Lessons learned module is only for lessons within a project. It is not possible to have this lesson be outside a project as a general lesson across the board. Also, there is no “template” that you can select for budget, there is only the ability to populate it from staffing so if that differs and in some cases it has to when you sell an engagement to a customer for one price but will not be changing that “budget” because it is a fixed contract, but you need to staff more hours.

There are definite improvements that could be made but overall, this is the best project portfolio management system I have seen and evaluated out there. I have evaluated several before we choose CA PPM, but CA PPM does give us the best project management functionality and features.

For us, it's about getting more information into CA PPM, which then allows us to drive more insights and provide that information to our leadership team and our executives to make a better informed decision as far as how they're investing, and how we're tracking towards our strategic objectives.

The value for Telstra is really around how we can manage strategic investments, so we've moved earlier this year to CA PPM Cloud. It's greatly changed our user experience for our 1,500 project managers.

I think the new road mapping feature that's coming out shortly - and available now, but obviously continues to progress - I think the product moving more to that grid base, so that Excel look and feel is how it's going. The app style of the new UI is absolutely fantastic. It's the right way to go. Our users will love it, so I think they should continue along that journey.

I think there's still a little bit of opportunity that we can do some stuff better in relation to the financial part of it; just that easier integration, that look and feel. Our project managers, and obviously finance people, love to interface and use of Excel. The more we can get CA PPM to behave in a similar way, which we're already starting to gain in that path, will be absolutely fantastic.

It's very stable. We've been very impressed with moving from on-premises to SaaS, and made the transition seamlessly. We could run the two systems in parallel, which is absolutely fantastic.

But just the speed. We were a little bit concerned initially about the speed of SaaS, considering the amount of security layers we've got to go through from our perspective, but the experience has been amazing, and the team absolutely loves it.

I think scalability is a big thing, especially around being on SaaS and on a cloud arrangement. That scale really sits with the CA side of things, so as we grow, CA are going to have to grow with us as far as that relationship. Of course, they can do that, considering some of their larger clients that they have in the US and other areas around the world. We're very comfortable that it leads into the future.

Tech support's been fantastic. We also have a partner that we use internally as well, so it's only their larger cases that we will escalate to CA, but turn-around-time has been fantastic. They work really well with our partner in relation to that as well, so we're very happy with the support.

We're also moving to the latest version for less than $20,000 for a major corporate system. It's just amazing.

There are a few things we looked at when we scanned the market for moving to a new PPM system. We've had CA since 2008, but we actually took a step back and looked at the entire market. For us, it's obviously the reputation that they have in the market, but more importantly today, really, around the cloud and the SaaS arrangements that you enter into. You also need to look at where you think that organization's going to take that product moving forward. For us, what gave us a level of confidence was the investment and the transparency that CA showed in relation to their product roadmap, and where they want to take it. 

To back that up, the fact that they were leading in industry evaluations, so being in the top-right, just reinforces also, as far as an independent body, that they're the right partner. They're already leading the industry. They're expected to lead the industry moving forward, so for us, that made the most sense, to partner with CA.

I would rate the product at an eight out of 10, and I would say that there's always room for improvement, and I think the team's already starting to improve that.

It's very hard with such a large complex product to actually get those new features in there. I've got empathy for how hard the teams have got to work to bring the new UI and new look and feel that we want. It's not just an app that you can quickly turn around, but I think they're striving really hard to do that as quickly as they can. An eight at the moment, and I think over the next 12 to 18 months, they'll be rating it much closer to a 10.

We are working on the development for CA PPM, building a couple of portlets, a couple of objects for better usability for CA PPM users in our company. We try to provide automation of CA PPM and easy access, easy usability. Also, easy reporting for our users.

It's really performed well. I personally started from CA PPM 7.5.3 to PPM 15.2. There has been great innovation regarding the development, regarding the technologies.

I see the benefits for the organization in the Resource Management. No more Excel sheets for resource management, no more Excel sheets for financial management, no more data retention for reporting purposes. It is pretty quick in calculations for the managers and financial teams, and getting them the data.

The financial management part because it calculates, it retains the data, and everything is pretty much cool about the reporting part for financial. For PMOs it has some cool reporting and a dashboard. That is a good part of CA PPM. 

I want to see the mobile product. And, if possible, integration for SMS functionality.

In terms of stability, along the journey from the Clarity 12.0 to 15.2, it has become a good, stable product now. They are bringing a lot more performance improvements to the product, and the database side also. So now it is pretty much a stable product.

In terms of performance, I would say scalability is around an eight out of 10.

The support guys are pretty much technical. They respond back to me as soon as there is a ticket with them. The conversation is good and we've had a lot of quick solutions.

No, we didn't have a previous solution. But in terms of managing projects, when we saw a lot of complexity in the managing of projects, we realized we needed to go for a PPM and try it once.

It is pretty much cool. And I would say the setup and the upgrade capabilities from CA, the way they have it implemented and prepared the end script is pretty much cool.

Only CA PPM.

Moving ahead, I am looking forward to CA PPM mobile technologies, the mobile app for PPM users, that would also be a good addition to the user experience.

The new UX is pretty cool. I would rate it about an eight out of 10. I joined in the demo for a couple of users for the new timesheet UI. They feel a little bit cool about it, and I have put one idea forward for the timesheet UI and that is with CA. But the new UI is pretty cool, and the "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down" approach for the approval or rejection of the timesheets is a pretty cool approach.

I would say the criteria for investing in a vendor would be how complex the implementation would be for financial, how complex implementation would be for the projects, how complex the implementation would be for Agile.

I rate it a seven out of 10 overall because they are still using SOAP functionalities. I want them to move out of SOAP and go for REST APIs.

Go for the PPM product, try it once, you will see it makes a big difference and you can get a lot of benefit from CA PPM.

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.

We are using it mainly for project management, but also for topics like resource management and portfolio management.

The project management from CA PPM has been improving a lot. Also, we have been reviewing, once a year, the functionality to see how we can make adjustments to the IT configurations and improve our system.

The most valuable features are the project, resource, and portfolio management processes are combined in one solution. The data is possible to use either in the one or the other process, and we do not need to enter the data multiple times. Then, we use the information for multiple purposes.

It would be good for them to work on the user interface to make it more interactive. They started with on something, but the functionality is not yet in a state where I would say, "Oh wow, use that one." 

The stability is okay. We do not have any issues with it.

There have been no issues on our side.

We use technical support every so often. The competency and available support are quite good, therefore we do not have any issues with support. Every time that we have a case where we need support, it is clarified right away.

I was not involved in the initial setup or implementation.

We evaluate if the solution is the right one for us once a year, therefore we are compare different alternatives.

On our short list, there was CA which is the product that we have now. Additionally, we evaluated Microsoft Project. From a functionality perspective, both were very similar, but we already used CA products for several years. We decided to stay with CA because the integration effort would otherwise be high.

Think about processes before implementing the solution. Then, connect the processes with the solution and make sure the solution is supporting the processes, and not that the processes need to be adjusted to fit to the solution.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is to have a good balance between cost and functionality.

It is mainly for handling the project and financial management across the organization. Mostly it is the IT department of the company which uses this tool. We may have a user base, in all, of about 20,000 users. It is also used by all the vendors of American Express. We on-board them onto the tool, and then they are able to track their the time against all the projects which they are working on with American Express.

There are a lot of other use cases.

It helps all the portfolio managers and the program managers to take stock of the financial situation at the program and portfolio level, because it rolls up all the financials at the product level.

We also have integration with CA Agile Central. So we get all the project-related data and the user stories-related data into Clarity and we report on to that: How much funding is there, and how much are the actuals between these two tools?

The resource management, the program management, financial management. It combines a lot of things, all of them are of benefit to our end users.

I don't work as an administrator of the tool, so I can talk from the standpoint of the end users who actually use it. I think financial management would be one of the most important features of all of them, to keep track of the finances. Everyone runs against a budget. They have a particular funding, which they have to manage. So I think the Cost Plans, Financial Planning, those are among the most important features for most users.

I think a lot of things that you'd want to see were touched upon in the roadmap yesterday, which we attended here at the CA World conference, yesterday. With the new UI, the Sub-Object part which they plan to bring into the new UI, I think a lot of customers would be happy to implement the new UI for their companies.

Maybe they could improve the mobile app. I think right now it only offers time sheet. If they can integrate a lot of other components into it - and not only CA PPM, a lot of other companies are now focusing on the mobile apps - I think that would be helpful for the users.

I think after the last upgrade, I think it was 14.2 or 14.3, the performance of the tool has improved a lot. I can see a drastic change in a lot of the stock jobs of the tool. And it has become quite stable.

When we started off - it's been almost eight, nine years now with CA PPM - at that time our user base was a lot more. But now with CA Agile Central coming into the picture, I think a lot of companies are making a shift of moving a lot of their user base from CA PPM to CA Agile Central. So it is cutting across various tools. It does not concentrate on a single tool.

They are very helpful. In fact, we have a bi-weekly call with one of the representatives from CA. And when they are in town, we have a meeting with them and they are very helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup, I think I joined a couple of months after the initial set up. But I've been there all throughout since then, including upgrades. The upgrades used to be complex. But now, I think it depends on upgrade planning. How often do you upgrade? If you upgrade once in three years, then it can be complex. But if you keep on upgrading as and when CA releases their upgraded version, I think it would be smooth.

Regarding the new UX, we have not actually onboarded that yet. But, we plan to in the near future. From the administration team, we have seen it, we have implemented it in our sandbox environment, but it's not rolled out at the organization level yet. There is still a lot of planning to go into that.

Regarding the most important criterion when selecting a vendor to go with, I think it would be a long-term partnership that the company has with them. If we had already engaged with them in some other products and we see a value, then I think that would be the most important criterion.

I would say that you should first see the problem you are trying to solve in your company. I think if project, resource, and financial management are the things you are trying to solve, then it would be very useful.

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.