Broadcom Clarity Reviews

I basicually use it for program management at financial services clients.

We primarily use it as a standalone program management tool.

Value streams, investment cases, road mapping, and fast destinations. These are the ones we use to manage stuff.

The risk management capability is good. It has a decent way of raising risk issues, connecting them to tasks or projects, and notifying users based on the access level.

I would like to see probably a little more features in terms of agile project delivery. It's mainly used as a program and project management tool, but it's not that great for agile projects.

Another major concern I see is usability. Many users I've worked with, including myself, feel that the application could improve in terms of user-friendliness.

I have been using it for three years. 

Stability is fine. The major concern I see is usability. Many users I've worked with, including myself, feel that the application could improve in terms of user-friendliness.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability is not an issue. I have seen it in an environment with around 20,000 users for one of my clients. 

ROI is good only when you're using it at a large scale. If you have a few users, it's not that good in terms of ROI.

We had to pay for licensing. It's costly. That's the main concern.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. It's been designed well and is very compliant with regulatory requirements. Security aspects are good in Clarity.

Clarity is pretty good for program management.

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.

We started looking for a tool to manage our resources, that was our primary driver. Resource capacity utilization, resource management. But of course, the other features that are available, portfolio management, project management, we definitely wanted to use those as well. So, primarily, resource management, but project management and portfolio management as well.

It's an excellent tool for resource management. I really like the new interface, the user experience, which is coming out soon. Right now, it's something of a legacy format, and it's a little bit - I wouldn't say difficult to navigate - but people are used to very intuitive interfaces. Currently it looks like, "Ah, it's a legacy interface." But with the new one, I think it's making a really big impact. We have not started using it yet, though. We are currently using 15.2, which has some of those features. So we are waiting for 15.3 to start making use of them. 

For resource management, it's a very strong tool, has all the features that you would desire in a resource management tool, so we're very happy with that.

Basically everything. 

• You can identify resources by roles.
• You can manage by skill level.
• You can manage your capacity by roles.
• Assigning to projects.
• Booking resources in Soft Book, Hard Book.
• Gives you visibility into who is currently working on something else but may be available through the Soft Book feature.

I like every feature that's in there.

A little bit better financial management. Right now it is more accountant-related, the financial management - of course, it's finance, it has to be financial. But it should be a little bit easier for project managers.

To give an example, if you have a non-labor cost that you're tracking, let's say a software expenditure or license subscription, tracking that you need to manage as a resource in the project plan, that adds a lot of effort for product managers to maintain. If they can come with ways of simplifying the cost and financial management, that would be one thing that we would really like.

Never had any issues with a CA product.

In terms of scalability, it is a little bit slow. Right now we have about 200 users, and we are bringing on our European counterparts as well - our company acquired another company - and we are trying to bring them on. It is slow. We've created a support ticket, and hopefully they'll respond. I think for regular day-to-day operations, it's okay. But when you get into Jaspersoft reporting, it is slow. And nowadays, people don't have patience, I don't have patience.

Technical support, they're good. They get back to us pretty quickly. Never had any issues with them either. They get back to us quickly, they try to resolve the issue. They are definitely knowledgeable.

We were Microsoft Project Server users. I think about seven years ago we started using Project Server with the same goals of a centralized repository and collaboration for project managers and team members; also, resource and financial management. We never got to the resource and financial management part of it, because I think on the time sheets side we were aggressive, and that did not go well with the resources, so we started using it only as a project repository.

We were in it all the time, and every year when there was a new demand for projects, and we were trying to set the portfolio for the next year, the question always was, "Okay, who's available to take up which projects?" And every time it was a spreadsheet, and I was working with 50 resource managers bringing their allocations and merging them; it was a nightmare. 

And at any point in time, especially when a new demand would come in during the middle of the year, if you wanted to inject that project into the portfolio, we didn't know what the impact of that would be on other resources. Again, it would be another big round of, "Okay, call all the resource managers." 

So that was our key need for the PPM tool.

I think our decision was the right one. We went with the minimum configuration. We wanted to use it out of the box as much as possible. A CA consultant came and I think we had him for about three months. They came and gathered the requirements and configured it a little bit to suit our requirements and I did some additional fields here and there, but mostly out of the box. He was very knowledgeable, he helped us in setting up easily. 

Right now we're in the adoption mode, and our timesheet compliance is around 92%. We're just about three months into it, and I really like it. We have still yet to use all the other features that come with CA PPM.   

We are focusing for now on project management, and generating reports, out of that: status reports, timesheets, reporting on actuals. We want to get to the next phase where resource utilization capacity is accurately defined in CA PPM as well. Financial planning, it was initially out of the scope, but I think as soon as they started seeing actual costs in the system, everybody wanted to see, "Okay, what's the budget every month? What was the planned cost?" and things like that. So we're trying to put that data in, and set up processes for keeping it up to date and things like that. So far, so good.

Regarding the new UX, it's very good. I wish it would come out faster, but I know that it has to be developed, tested, and rolled out. I like the way they're doing it in something like an Agile format, giving you some features and then gathering feedback and improving them, instead of trying to wait for a big bang, which I think might take couple years for them to finish. So, I like that. Could it be faster, is the only question.

When selecting a vendor, when our company is looking at vendors, we develop the RFP, gather our requirements and it has multiple sections: 

• The financial stability of the vendor
• Where are they in user ratings, are they in the top quadrant? 
• How long they've been in the system?
• Are they the industry leader? 
• Are they committed to this product? We don't want to deal with a small company which has really good looking reports right now, but you don't know whether they're going to be in the business or not. 
• How much they meet our requirements, obviously. 
• We also look at how big they are in terms of supporting us.
• We want to make sure they have a broader customer base.
• They are constantly working on product improvements and things like that.
• And that they are there if you need help in implementation. Are resources from their side available to come and help us? We typically prefer people who are in the U.S., but not necessarily.

In terms of advice to others, there are a lot of players in the market. This is a major transition for our whole industry. You have DevOps coming in, you have Agile, you have a lot of other things automated - data creation and the like. You want to pick a vendor who can help you in all those things. 

PPM is one part of the tool. There is also the argument about whether product managers will be there in 2020? So you want to look at something that is more current and has all these new technologies incorporated. If they're not incorporated, at least that they have those planned, so later on you can start to bring them on board.

And during the implementation, I would definitely say start simple. Start as simple as possible. Give as little additional work to each of your resources as possible. Then slowly, once you start to prove the value of the tool, you can slowly start to make more and more improvements on the new features.

The most valuable features are portfolio management and the resources; resources are the key for us.

It has benefited us as we can prioritize which products or projects we need to focus on throughout the calendar year and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

We are in a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. If in some way, we could access the database through that, it would be great.

Stability of this product is good. We had supported over 300 users and I haven't seen any problems at all.

It could handle a vast amount of data and a huge number of users that are using the tool simultaneously.

I have not used technical support.

We weren't using any sort of PPM tools earlier, it was all through spreadsheets.

In my opinion, the most important criteria for choosing a vendor should be knowledge, experience, willing to walk the customer through their issues, understanding what problems they have and how the vendor can help them achieve their goals.

The initial setup was straightforward. Using the tool, you can navigate it, tell it what to do or what not to do.

They should look at the tool itself because it's a powerful tool. It can do a lot of things, cover a lot of ground quickly and it can easily be picked up as far as skill sets go.

This tool solves a lot of the project-related issues. Right now, we're just figuring out how to use the resources.

We are mostly using this tool for financial purposes, moreover for financial reports. The reporting is based on the CA PPM tool; thus we mainly use it for finances.

Although we have integration with different payroll systems such as AP and FA, at the end of the day we are getting the financial information from GL for our accounting purpose. This is our main purpose for using this tool.

It has definitely improved the working of our organization. Now we have a controlled PPMO that is handling or managing the projects. They have proper guidelines and can apply proper SOX compliance. We have governance for PMs and RMs. Monthly, they review this stuff and they can report on that.

There are some challenges that we are facing in terms of Jaspersoft software. I talked to the product team and they are seriously working on that. I am hoping that another 6 months from now, there will be improvements in the reporting and performance areas that will be very helpful for the user community.

It is too early to discuss stability because we are just going live in the first week of December. Let's see for the next 6 - 8 months how it is working and then it will be more relevant.

We are using it not just in one department but at the enterprise level; also in both our geographical locations, i.e., Canada and the US. The product is scalable.

We have used CA support and they are perfect. They respond back on time and give us the required solution. Even if they are taking more time, they will inform us beforehand. We are okay with their services.

Before this product, we had 3 or 4 legacy systems. One was used for time reporting. It was not a centralized one; only the Canadian people were using it. The US office was using Primavera. We wanted to collaborate everything into a single domain and that is why we selected the CA PPM tool.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor was more flexibility in the CA PPM tool. They were more approachable, so that was another reason.

Depending upon the environment you are in, whether you are on SaaS or on-premises, take the decision based on which environment your company wants to be in and not just get any product. Talk to other banks or any other customers who are in SaaS and have similar requirements. Based on that, make your decision. Since on-premises has some benefits and on the other hand even SaaS has its benefits, so based on that you can select your solution.

I used to work for CA Technologies. After that, I worked for CA Partners. So I have some experience implementing these solutions. As an architect, I have designed solutions. 

We work with projects. We have integrated the solution where we open tickets into them, and change management. We open tickets, we track all the tickets, we re-work all the details, then we turn it into an idea in PPM. Then we convert it into a project and manage portfolios. We work with all Service Management administrations and then we have to work with the project solution.

We work with IT service desks. We have worked with financial services, as well. We have here in Mexico some construction enterprises working with the solution.

We have an integrated Service Management with third party solutions, with discovery solutions, with asset management solutions from other brands of their solution, and monitoring solutions, and with in-house solutions. We also integrate this Service Management with SAP financial solutions.

In terms of how Broadcom Clarity PPM has improved our clients' organizations, our users are working better with the solution because the first level of attention is now in charge of our configuration in Service Management. So we don't have any analyzed work with the first level of attention. With the second level, yes, the experts are working with the solution, but we were able to optimize the first level for this kind of attention. The first attention for the end user is now in charge of the solution.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the XFlow, that interface is pretty cool. We have worked with IT PAM with the first two commissions. We have mainly worked with those companies, because we work a lot with process automation, to perform workflows to optimize everything within the organization.

In terms of what could be improved, the end user interface could be improved to be more intuitive, because we sometimes have issues with customization. Sometimes we are not able to customize everything for the end user's interface, and they require more customization. We should be able to perform a deeper customization here.

Additionally, I'd like to see more compatibility with the Active REST connection because we have worked with SOAP and WSDL but we need more compatibility with the Active REST connection.

I have been working with Broadcom Clarity PPM for about six, seven years.

I think Broadcom Clarity PPM is a pretty strong tool. We use a lot of components to increase functionality, and with their latest versions, I think things have improved. I think we sell their roadmap - a wide roadmap to cover that.

Broadcom Clarity PPM's scalability is okay. Obviously, it could be better. But now we have great scalability with Service Management.

Our clients are medium and large enterprises. For example, I implemented for a company in Columbia which had about 3000 users.

I think that the solution's usage has been decreased because the solution has a lot of competition right now. For example, Service Now is improving the end user interface and the final digital interaction and I think Clarity Service Management is not. I feel that Service Management is not developing more functionality to cover the end user's demands.

In terms of technical support, from one to 10, I think it is a seven, because lately the support agents take a lot of time to give an answer. Sometimes we have issues and the attention is not as fast as we need. We have to wait for a long time to get a response.

I'm currently using ServiceNow and Service Management with some monitoring solutions from Broadcom.

Most users that switch from other solutions to Clarity PPM were using open source solutions. Maybe they were using BMC Remedy, but it would be kind of weird that they jumped from ServiceNow to Clarity Service Management. I haven't seen that. They switched from open source to Clarity Service Management, and from BMC to Clarity Service Management, but I've never seen from ServiceNow to Clarity Service Management.

The initial installation is kind of simple, following the research, but the complexity begins when we need to customize part of the structure. For example, when we need to create a new field on the system we have to stop services and that's not possible in a protected environment. In a quality assurance environment, we need to open a change request ticket just to create one field within the database. That should be easier to manage and to handle. We haven't been able to create one internal field effecting the services.

We have performed deployments that take from two months to six months. It depends on the customer size, because we have customers with many customizations, so we have to change some things within Service Management. This is because out of the box, it's not possible to cover all the customer's demands.

The most important solutions here in Mexico are BMC, ServiceNow, and Broadcom. Five years ago, Broadcom was one of the most important solutions in Mexico, but now we made a transition from CA Technologies to Broadcom. They lost many customers here because they were not able to renew their licensing. Maybe Broadcom lost a lot of customers because of the service.

The main differences, pros and cons, between Clarity PPM, and ServiceNow are that Broadcom Clarity PPM is easier to use and easier to manage. Clarity PPM has a more composite structure. That means that displaying, making changes, and performing customizations are more difficult for the end users. The consultants can deal with that, but sometimes the customers are not able to identify some components and to identify some configurations that you can perform in Clarity Service Management. Whereas in ServiceNow, you can do that with only a button. That's the difference.

Just to be clear, when we are designing and recreating the solution design, we have to be fair with the scope. We need to use all the components to improve the functionality. We have to use all the components available. XFlow, IT PAM, all the tools that can be used to improve the functionality, because competition is getting very hard. This makes it very difficult because I have 12 years working with CA components and CA technologies. So for me to switch from CA, from Broadcom, is sometimes kind of hard because I am a Broadcom implementer.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Broadcom Clarity PPM an eight.

The user interface should be improved to be able to receive any challenges from the users. They expect an easier interface, an easier way to find the sections, and an easier way to find the menus. I think that would be the biggest improvement.

Project and portfolio management for our CA PPM. We have traditionally run all of our projects through waterfall, but now we are transitioning to agile. So, we are starting to use CA Agile Central for that, and we are looking at integrations between those two tools.

Just being able to have everybody to see the work that needs to be done, provide the detail level for the teams, and show the roll-up level for those at the management level. 

We are able to track budgets, and with timesheets, actuals against budgets.

Resource management: It is our primary use now. 

Agile Central is a kind of a scrum tool for the teams to be able to do their work. We are just now starting to leverage the functionality to give a more portfolio view. 

CA PPM is a mature product. We have used it for years, but we have had some challenges. Maybe it was the way we implemented it. 

I do not think I can add anything to Agile Central, because we are new to it. I think we are really just trying to learn and leverage the functionality that is there, so I do not know yet.

I am not aware of any stability issues.

I am not aware of any scalability issues. 

We have an internal support team that I would go to first. They would then go to vendor, so I do not have to.

I typically only contact them for education, possibly.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I think Agile Central is an industry leader in the agile methodology. I would look at it. 

The most valuable features of this solution are the portfolio management and the resources. Resources are key for us.

The benefit is to prioritize which projects we need to really focus on throughout the calendar year, and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

We're on a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. It would be great if we could somehow, some way access the database through that.

Stability is good. We support over 300 users and I haven't seen any problems at all.

I think it could handle a vast amount of data, a vast number of users that are using the tool simultaneously.

I have not used technical support for the solution.

We weren't using any sort of PPM tool at the time; it was all through spreadsheets.

Initial setup was straightforward; just using the tool, navigating it, what to do, what not to do. That sort of thing.

You should really look at the tool itself because it's a really powerful tool. It can do a lot of things, cover a lot of ground quickly and it can easily be picked up, as far as skill sets go.

I have rated it as such because of a lot of the project-related stuff it solves. Right now, we're just figuring out how to use the resources.

Even though I didn’t really make the decision, the most important criteria for me when selecting vendors, in general, are knowledge; experience; willingness to walk the customer through their issues; really understanding what problems they have; and how they can help them achieve their goals.