Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We are in the business management office. We use it for our portfolio and project management and planning activities.

We are using an older version. Therefore, it is fairly limited, but I think what we are seeing in the newest version addresses a lot of the concerns that we are having.

We are still in the older version. We still have a ways to go. With the new UI, I think we will get through some of our adoption problems.

That in and of itself will help drive adoption, because the problems that we are having right now are that we do not have a great level of adoption or voluntary adoption. It seems very much as a top down enforcement type of thing. If people are not using it in the day-to-day, then your data quality is not very high. If your data quality is not very high, then you can't really leverage the tool for much more than the bare minimum.

In the new solution: It is good for us. 

• We can have a centralized view that we can have in our delivery and business organizations.
• Collaborate on certain levels.
• On priorities, investments, and those kinds of things, it is very helpful. With some of the things that they are rolling out with a bit more of the collaboration and social aspects, that that will help drive that even more.
• I love the new UX. The problem that we have had around adoption has been pretty much around the clunkiness of the old interface. So, we were encouraged by what they started doing with project management and personas a year or so ago. Now, seeing it flow through the rest of the tool is very encouraging.

I like what they are doing with the UI. I am interested to see, with the purchase of Rally, what they are doing with agile and integrating some of that.

I am greatly encouraged by some of the integration with the third-party BI tools. We have not been a Jaspersoft adopter. For us, the value in this data is unifying it with our other corporate data.

Jaspersoft really does not enable us to do that. I would like to see a more flexible user-friendly way for users to do some of their own visualizations, not having to understand Jaspersoft. We are looking at a tiered reporting architecture, where if I have a project manager in the tool to do their project management, it is not just an out-of-the-box status report. Can they do some sort of Jaspersoft customizations and do that all on the tool rather than having them go to a back office reporting solution? 

Our back-end business management, finance teams, and program owners probably will live more in the back-end reporting solution because it has our other data elements, our corporate workforce plans, and those kinds of things in it. Therefore, they can do the bigger picture reporting that we need for executives.

Putting a little bit more ad hoc reporting in the tool for the boots on the ground type people would be good, and they are doing more of that, essentially with the task boards and some of those things. I think to take those additional capabilities and turn those into things we can status, report, or leverage outside the tool would be good. 

With this next release, they are simplifying the connection to the back-end data warehouse stuff. This is good for me, but they are putting a lot of things now in the tool with task boards and the social things that it would be nice to see if you are doing a status report. You could pull up your out-of-the-box status report and pull in some of those comments from the task board or something else to illustrate where you were at the project. Pointing to what is going on with your dev lead saying this is the problem here rather than having everybody retype things.

To build more capability and unification into the reporting. They will get there. They are just building the capabilities now.

We have not had too many problems. We are getting ready to transition to a SaaS solution. I think we have got some concerns there, because we are all used to owning our own things, touching them ourselves, fixing them, and monitoring them. However, I have been doing some networking around it and I have not heard too many concerns about it.

In the end, we are not necessarily mission critical. So, we do not have to be 24/7.

We have had some issues in the older version on-prem with some of the back-end database stuff. That has all been addressed and we will be doing some changes going to SaaS. 

I think we will be fine. Plus, we hold onto everything all the time. So, it is partly our own issue/downfall. We are sort of our own worst enemy at times. I am fully acknowledging that.

I have not used technical support. I am on the business owner side, but I know my development manager has used them quite a bit.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have not looked at the competitors lately, but it seems to me that CA has made some significant advances. They were already sort of in the top tier in the industry anyway. So, it is good to see the investment that they have put in the last couple years. It seems to be just accelerating the feature sets.

Understand your business processes first, in great detail. Then, understand your data structures and you will be home free.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

Since we are a global, multinational company, we require all of the following:

1. They have got to be on our preferred vendor list, before we are allowed to talk to them.
2. Relationship
3. Price
4. Support.

We look at how can we leverage the product and how can we get pricing and scalability across the whole enterprise.

Within my company, resource capacity management. That's the PMO's goal for it at this time. Hopefully in the future we will manage portfolios in addition to using it as a prime entry system.

Some people are not used to managing through the tool, but as far as the tool goes, it works very well.

With that goal of gathering time from resources, and being able to predict out whether or not they'll have some capacity, it's a great improvement over what was there before, which was essentially an embedded spreadsheet within a SharePoint sight.

In addition, the reporting tools are superior to what was there before, which was someone crunching through an Excel spreadsheet. I've been able to do status reports through the projects, which has given visibility to my manager, and that's an improvement.

It has improved communication vertically, with some amount of data to be able to show that more resources are necessary, or why projects aren't moving as fast as management would like. That sort of communication makes my job a lot easier.

Within my environment, being able to give status reports to my manager is very useful, saves me a lot of trouble. 

I enjoy the Risks/Issues section. I wish that they were combined into the same module. I use that to raise things before they happen. 

I do appreciate the report that shows how utilized a person is set to be within the coming months. I use that feature a good bit.

The only real improvement from my side - I'm spoiled by things like Trello, with the very easy user interface, things like Basecamp - it's very much a static software project. If I was to focus on something it would be that user interface; making that something that is a joy to use, instead of something that feels like data entry.

If there was more drag and drop type functionality that would be fun, but it works well for what it's supposed to do.

The second thing - and this is specific to our company - integrate it with CA Service Desk Manager so that, when you have time for a ticket or when someone gets assigned a ticket, in PPM it automatically shows that they have to account for that: they would both enter time in the past and, also, that this is going to take them time in the future.

As far as a tool that communicates with resources, with individuals - what they're supposed to do next or what action items came out of what meeting - it's not really used that way. Probably I could envision a way that it would be used that way. Until it's as easy as sending an email, it probably won't be utilized by the resources in that manner.

We host internally, so it's not like it goes down. I haven't seen a ton of bugs. I bug-tested the heck out of it when they initially deployed it and got some things fixed, but they also had some custom code.

We use Service Desk Manager as well. We have a custom tool to integrate the two. One of the reasons why PPM was chosen was because, "Well, it must integrate with SDM, because they're the same company." But that was not the case. So, they got a custom tool in. Whenever something happens with PPM, where there's an update or anything like that, it breaks that tool. That's probably not tenable. That's not really my area, I didn't manage the deployment, but I could imagine that that's eventually going to be a problem.

I imagine that the scalability is there. The problem is, at this time, my company is only looking to give IT workers and project managers access to the tool, and they're trying to get buy-in to expand beyond that hundred-person group.

It has to be able to support a greater amount, and I imagine that the value would be there, but they haven't gotten to that point yet.

I have not used technical support. I haven't had any technical problems.

It's better than an Excel spreadsheet, and that's what was used before.

They brought me in to comment on it's Agile functionality and they said, "We have this Rally product." And I said, "Does that integrate?" They said, "It could." I said, "Don't worry about it."

I use Trello today, I used JIRA, I used Team Foundation Server. I talked to some people here at the CA World conference and I said, "Are any of those tools worse or better than Rally?" They seemed to like those tools more. I haven't used Rally to tell you the truth.

Regarding the new UX, at this point I feel like there could be more done to make it a more fluid experience. Five years ago, seven years ago, that sort of windows and records click was standard, and there wasn't much else out there that was better. Nowadays, things are, across software packages, just a little bit more fluid.

Is that a bad thing that it's like that? No, it's just that's where they could go next.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, first, that they meet the requirements that we set ahead of time. Second, that they are willing to answer those questionnaires. If they're not, then it's my opinion that they are not ready for prime time and we wouldn't even talk to them. And suitability, that's above everything else; that's above costs, that's above relationships, or how well known they are.

I would advise a colleague to look at the nature of the work they are trying to do, and what is the end goal they are trying to achieve. If your end goal is to ultimately get to the point where you can report up, then it might be a very good product to look into. If your end goal is either greater communication with your team, downward, or being able to have a clear idea across the organization of what needs to be done in a project, maybe look at another tool.

The primary use case is about demand management and understanding where our resources are allocated and who is over or underallocated. Often we find that our shared services organization is caught blindsided when demand comes their way all of a sudden, and they have no previous inclination of that. 

Something like CA PPM would really mitigate some of that as we forecast our demand for the next six months, or whatever. Shared services would know ahead of time as to be able to balance, not only the work, but even make some hiring decisions ahead of time, as to be not caught by surprise.

IT just rolled out the tool. Therefore, we are in the process of rolling out the tool. That said, I have worked with CA PPM in other companies. It definitely has met the use case of performing well. Although in other companies, the bigger use case was really around portfolio, scenario planning, and long-range business planning in large companies, like Boeing.

It is about bringing about that transparency. Once you bring about that transparency, what happens is, you can use data to encourage people to pivot in a certain direction. If I just go with a gut-feel, I do not get anywhere. If I have data and I have our investments captured, and I have my resources captured, I can let the data speak for itself.

The data should be able to make decisions. Use the data as the catalyst, if you will, and I am just the messenger.

Transparency and just having the ability to procure information that is pertinent. Not just the execution of programs in a more systemic way, but also from a strategic perspective; to understand the big rocks in the organization and how much money are we putting where our mouths are.

1. I would really like a modern UI. I do not want to get on a user interface and feel like I am in the 1990's. Today, at least prior to 15.3, that's the case. Even 15.3 does not really do it for me. When you look at the new UI, where they are looking at light project management and resource allocation, those are very compelling and modern interfaces.  
2. It would be just seamless to integrate with some of the industry standard tools that are out there. I know they are making some headway with Power BI, Tableau, ServiceNow. JIRA, and others, but it just seems like they are just getting started. I would have thought that being 30 plus years in the industry, that they would have figured this out long ago.

We are going with the SaaS solution now.

I am hoping that it is going to be stable, because again, we have not hit production just yet at F5. However, in a previous life, we had on-premise CA PPM deployments, and they have all been pretty stable.

We are targeting a February launch.

It has worked for organizations the size of Boeing, which is 160,000 people. F5 is 4,000, so I do not see a scalability issue.

I have not used technical support yet.

We did not have anything before. We did not have a PPM software at all, let alone a process behind it. F5 is a pretty young company.

We have been in business for about 20 years and grown leaps and bounds. The focus has primarily been customer-driven features, products, and services. Now, I think we are pivoting more towards, "Hey, we better get our act together to be able to compete in the marketplace." 

I think the attention is shifting more towards internal process maturity.

Nothing is straightforward, especially when it is company-wide. There is a lot of organizational change management that goes with it. There is a lot of, "Who moved my cheese-type of discussions?" that you have to have, but I think none of that is unexpected.

I would say there were not any unknowns that really came our way. I think the organizational change management takes the cake in that.

There were two others. They fell short in a few things that were absolute must-haves. Although, they were working on getting those features available, they were not there, and we just could not move forward with them.

Look at the needs of your organization first. If you can meet that need with a scalpel, do not go with the sledgehammer. CA's outlook has a pretty broad spectrum in terms of being able to meet the needs of varying organization sizes. However, focus on the need that you have at that point in time and do not cast such a broad and wide net, because chances are your organizational change management is going to limit you anyway. 

Take a look at what your needs are. Choose a product that is modern and cloud-based. Do it in phases. Do not try to bite more than you can chew.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is the ability of the vendor to really understand where we are coming from in terms of our pain points and our requirements. Not using the book and opening to chapter 17, paragraph three. I do not want that. I want vendors to really feel the pain, relate, and be part of the team. 

There should be a seamless integration between full-time or contract people. Be honest, open, and transparent to the biggest extent possible without giving up any proprietary information. That is not what I am after. 

Just be upfront and honest about dealings and capabilities. Winning the trust of clients probably takes care of 80% of the headwinds that contractors and vendors face.

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.

Project and portfolio management.

It's performing okay, I would say. There are no issues with the performance, but I think we are not using it at capacity. 

I would say the Project and Portfolio Management, its potential. If you talk about any other tool for PPM, I think CA PPM has the most potential.

It gives us all the projects in one view where we can drill down into our portfolio and see the potential benefits at the end of the day.

I am not sure what features they could add but, personally, what I have seen is that last year when I came to CA World, PPM was on version 15.2 and this year, after 365 days I am here at CA World again and CA is still on 15.3. Within a year only a point release. It looks like CA itself is driving it slowly and they should do something. It says something, that after the whole company worked hard they are still only coming up with a point release. It is something doubtful.

I think CA is already doing the work, probably, by going to the new UI. I think they are on the path. But they need to take a risk and go. Their initiative started, I think, two years back about going to a new UI. It's showing progress but not at a pace that I would like to see.

Since we moved to version 14, we haven't seen stability issues.

We haven't had issue with the scalability yet.

At times it is good but it is not always the best.

Response time is a bit slow in some cases. In some cases it is frustrating that we have to escalate, we would prefer not having to. But at the time, if there is an urgent issue and you get frustrated, you have to escalate it. It doesn't give you a good feeling about getting support that way. After you escalate, you get support. You get everything you want but, at the end of the day, you still feel that it would have been great if CA would have helped us during our first attempt.

I was involved with PPM setup from scratch. It's not straightforward but it's not complex either, if you know the product.

We are using version 14.3 but we would love to go to 15.3. We have seen the new UX and it's looking good so we think it is a positive change.

I would say go with PPM with SaaS. I would suggest that any customers or new customers use Clarity PPM at its default values, not customize it terribly. It has a lot potential using the product out of the box rather than making your own product.

CA has been working every year to provide a product upgrade, and if you can't use the latest features immediately, or in the near future, you are missing out on a lot. Use the regular settings, or at least most of the product out of the box, and leverage or grow from there, rather than making your own changes.

The competitiveness of the product in terms of functionality is the most valuable feature. It has all the features that we and the people we work with need to do their jobs. The core features are PM management, resource management, portfolio management. Those are invaluable tools for anyone who needs to do IT governance.

The principal benefit is the ability to forecast demand and balance it against the capacity of the organization. That means the efficient use of personnel, minimal downtime, and maximum productivity.

There’s always room for improvement as business needs change. We give considerable feedback through the years to CA for product improvement, which should guide future development of the product. The needs of the end users are extremely important.

I have been a Clarity/PPM user for probably 15 years, since before it was called Clarity.

Extremely stable. It’s been out for many years, and although the version has changed, the core product is fundamentally stable. The code is configurable – you can configure it to make sense to the end user.

We have used CA Clarity/PPM from less than 500 to more than 100,000 and it scales perfectly.

They’re good at the fundamentals.

Out-of-the-box, it is straightforward, but every time you implement a new instance you want to change and configure it to meet the needs of your audience. It’s a strength of the tool that it can be configured that way – you don’t have to do things the way the developers want you to do it. You can design your own workflows and processes which makes it much more effective to use.

There are three things that are important when dealing with any vendor: support, support, support. There are lots of products out there that have similar features and functionality and wonderful interfaces, but if a software vendor is going to throw a bunch of CDs at you and leave you alone now that they’ve got your money, it’s no good. It’s how they support the product after you buy it.

I’ve evaluated the other PPM tools and competitors and found that CA PPM is heads and shoulders above the rest. The functionality is robust because of the partnership – CA partners with their user community to support the product.

It provides the functions you need to do governance in the organization which makes it best in class, in my opinion. It does a lot very well, but there’s always room for improvement. If you hit 10/10, the competition is going to leapfrog you and you’re done.

Talk to companies in their industry that are using PPM tools and find out what they like. If I’m in the banking industry looking for a PPM tool, I'd ask other banks.

The communication aspects have greatly improved. Before it was a lot of just relying upon hallway conversations or picking up the phone, maybe sending out emails, and they may or may not get answered. Knowing that we have these workflows in place and that they are going through, and that our executive leaders have to take an action as well as our department managers and program leaders, that has been beneficial.

What has been valuable are the workflows that are there today in order to keep our executive staff informed as well as our program managers and department managers.

We have not migrated to 15.3. We are still on 14.4 and the look and the feel is a bit antiquated, but seeing some of the improvements that are in 15.3, it is catching up with the times.

The features, they are slowly rolling out. I like the collaboration aspects of what I am seeing with 15.3 to where your team can go in and have conversations that are captured versus going to some other field, clicking on a tab, and typing in your information there, then hoping others migrate to that area. It is improving.

We are in the SaaS environment. Within the SaaS environment (since CA is supporting it), it has been extremely stable and reliable.

It is serving our needs today, but there is certainly a lot more that we can be utilizing. As an organization, we are in an infancy stage of implementation. So, I see over the next few years ramping up and improving how we can utilize the tool.

They are extremely responsive. They can be very technical, whereas for my needs, I'd prefer if they scale down to layman's terms and explain things in other terms. We do work through the issues, and I know that they are well qualified and highly technical.

I would probably rate it about an eight out of 10, because there is always room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is more about the product and what it can provide for us as well as the professionalism of the organization and the staff. We rely quite heavily on their expertise and on their thoughts as well as their best practices.

The most valuable feature is work flow management. We really work with the business to make sure that we have an end-to-end reporting of the work flow tool for delivery for implementation and design for our customers.

We've been live now for three years, so now we're just really starting to get some really good data, which is helping drive head count, budgets, and cycle time. That data is probably the most important thing to us right now. It took us a while to get to the user adoption phase and get that data in there, but I would say that the output of it and then managing it to drive the business direction from this point forward is probably the most important aspect for us.

From an admin perspective on the business side, one thing I'd like to have is a drag-and-drop feature. I think that anytime you can maximize your effort and try to automate it, it definitely makes the admin user perspective a little bit better. 

Also, I would say the intuitiveness needs to grow even more exponentially than it has, and I think with the project hopper and things like that, you're going to see that type of vision grow. 

From an admin perspective, it needs to be more predictive. It's not as predictive as I would like to see.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We just upgraded to 14.2, and when we went from 13.1 to 13.3, we were very buggy. There were a lot of browser issues, performance issues, lag time, but this upgrade has been virtually seamless. A couple little tweaks here and there, but not in this version.

We started with a very small pilot in the central area. We expanded to the continental United States, and then we just brought on Canada, and also then looking to expand to Latin America. Within that, we have different groups that are using the tool in different ways, but still trying to report on a holistic view. I would say the scalability is definitely growing in an upward fashion.

I wasn't involved in the original setup, but the upgrade was much more simplistic than the first round. From a business perspective, it wasn't difficult.

I would look at ROI and really try to assess what type of information is going to drive the success of your company. If PPM could assist in doing that by either reducing cycle times or giving you real data in order to drive the direction of your business, then go with PPM.