Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We have some deployments of Broadcom Clarity PPM on the cloud and others on-premise.

We have many use cases for Broadcom Clarity PPM. We have some customers that are in government, they use it to manage IT projects. We have other customers that are from the petrochemical industry, they use the solution for investment management and capital management.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is robust and flexible, and all the functionality sets are in one place.

Reports generated through Jaspersoft could be more integrated into the solution. Today, by default, users must navigate out of their context to run a report or a consultant must create a special portlet to bring reports into context. This could be an OOTB functionality. 

There should be support for contract management. Clarity manages all kinds of investments very well, but there is no native functionalities to manage contracts between the companies regarding these investments. 

I have been using Broadcom Clarity PPM for 17 years.

Broadcom Clarity PPM is stable.

The scalability of Broadcom Clarity PPM is good.

We have approximately 10,000 people using this solution.

I rate the technical support from Broadcom Clarity PPM a four out of five.

The initial setup of Broadcom Clarity PPM is complex.

There are different licensing models with Broadcom Clarity PPM. With the software as a service model, you pay as you go, and if you are on-premises, you can buy a perpetual license and an annual fee for maintenance.

I rate the price of Broadcom Clarity PPM a three out of five.

For people new to the solution, I would advise them to keep it simple and start using default functionality.

I rate Broadcom Clarity PPM a nine out of ten because it has a lot of functionality, is very flexible, and is highly stable.

We manage projects, financials, labor actuals, timesheet entry, and cost plans for the entire company.

It makes the whole lifecycle of project management a lot easier than using legacy systems, which we are retiring every few months because of PPM. We have taken archaic reporting, Excel reporting systems, and are replacing them with PPM functionality in old timesheet entry systems with PPM timesheet entry and labor actuals, which are being calculated directly in PPM.

• Timesheet entry
• Cost plans
• Calculating labor actuals and financials
• Forecasting

I really like this roadmapping, which is huge. It is like the future of cost plans, making it all Excel-like, grouping and all that fancy stuff. 

It is getting better. Once in awhile, PPM will go down. It does not go down very much at all, and now that we have over close to 7,000 users logging in, it has only gone down once in several months. So, it is pretty good.

CA Communities need a lot of improvement. I like the support desk. They try and answer our questions quickly and efficiently, and usually they do a pretty good job. I would give them a B. 

I think CA Communities could be greatly improved. I would give them a C minus. 

We are On Demand, so CA does the setup.

Go for it. I like PPM. I love the fact that it is very flexible. I am the lead engineer with enhancements, development, developing new portlets, anything that has to be added on, and integrating data, such as ETL processing.

We do project management and resource management in PPM and we use mainly that piece from it, right now.

It's been performing well. There are some drawbacks, some features we can't really utilize considering our GAAP business process. So we face issues sometimes with that, that we can't fully utilize CA PPM resource management.

Provides an overall picture, it gives you the ability to store your capex, capital and expense budgets, on projects. You can really drill down with their new utilities, you can use Clarity. You have Allocation Editor and Assignment Editor that give you more flexibility in entering the data.

You get rid of Excels, that's the main point. We are so used to, in the old days, capturing data in Excel; people are really use to doing that. In general we were working in Excel workbooks. We were doing things like ETC assignment, how much they will be, how many hours you're assigning, what the cost will be at the end of the day. With CA PPM we have really gotten rid of those Excels and are utilizing the resource managem

ent and Project Management pieces.

I'm interested in something that would give you flexibility in loading the data to PPM. We have some other utilities, which CA is providing, but sometimes it takes time for users to enter the data into Clarity, the resource management piece. 

They need something so that if we, say, send some sheets to users, or for the scenario where not everybody has access to Clarity, but are part of planning; those people should be able to upload data directly to Clarity. 

We are using another tool to do reporting, or load data inside Clarity. If CA provided that, that would be great. 

The reporting piece is really slow right now, with Jaspersoft. CA is doing a lot on that. They have opened a port that we can connect from an outside tool to the Clarity data warehouse, database. But it would be great if they could do something on Jaspersoft because sometimes it takes 20 minutes to for a report to show up; not all, but some do.

Stability is going well. I'm really hoping for the new UI. I heard it's going to be something like Excel, so we can really do a copy-paste, drag and drop things. I think we will be utilizing it more and longer.

In terms of scalability, I can't say much. We're trying to use different features in it, because we had so many customizations. Actually, we revamped Clarity in the last couple of months, where we're trying to use more out-of-the-box functionalities, so I'm hoping that will be pleasant.

It's okay, right now. It used to be very good. The responses are not really quick. You don't get a response immediately, you have to do a lot of follow-up. We already brought this up, and we might have a support person specifically for us with whom we can work. 

In the past it was very good, but now I see it is weak, we have to follow up a lot.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we're actually trying to not have more vendors, because CA is now providing the different utilities. We have another system - there are a lot systems that are integrated with our Clarity environment right now. I have heard about a lot of things which we did in past, buying products from another vendor, CA already has those utilities so we are looking at that.

I haven't used any other products so I can't really compare with anything else, but I gave it a seven out of 10 because it's not customized per client. Sometimes we want to do something but we are stuck because Clarity doesn't allow you to do it. There are a lot of restrictions in some areas and, considering we are on SAS, we run into a lot of restrictions. It's a generic product, so sometimes it doesn't follow our business rules. And there are some scenarios in which is Clarity is not behaving the way it should. We asked about it, but I didn't get any use-case for it. So there are some areas which need some improvement.

We don't use the Portfolio Management piece, but I'm really happy with Project Management and resource management. So if you're looking for something with granularity, Clarity can do it.

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.

What we find valuable is the ability to bring all the different projects that we have into a central location. We have visibility into their status and the work that is going on. We can see whether the status is red, yellow, or green and can immediately identify how well the project is going on the dashboard. On the storyboard, it gives us a one page snap shot of the risks and issues, which can be brought to the attention of management in a quick and easy way.

It has helped to facilitate weekly program meetings. We can quickly review all our projects together and collaborate regarding where we need to work together and which projects need some help that we can rally around.

I think for us, we're still pretty immature from an organization standpoint in rolling it out. What we need is assistance from CA to help us roll out other features of the product that we already have and to utilize them to get the full value.

CA PPM is not easy to use. I'm a project manager and I have to use it every single week. Navigating around the menus to find what you're looking for is quite difficult. It takes several clicks to get to where you want to go.

We have been having some bugs and we are working with the vendor. But, we have not been able to solve why our financials for our project costs are not calculating correctly.

We haven't really had to test scalability. With our organization, we usually don't have more than 40 projects going on at a time and we only have about a dozen highly active users on it. I don't consider that too large of a scale.

We have tried to identify the bugs we have, but so far technical support hasn't been able to solve the issue with the project costs being calculated correctly.

I came in after it was already set up.

We haven't explored that yet.

I think it will give you a good 360 view of your project once you can roll out the other features. If you can incorporate your resource management so you can then track what people are working on, as well as the project financials, I think there would be value in seeing that holistic view.

If you're going choose that, make sure that you understand what you want to get out of the product. There's a lot to it and if you don't have a direction or strategy on how you want to use the product, I think you're not going to get the value out of your investment.

Clarity PPM's strongest features are project and resource management.

Clarity PPM would be improved by developing better support for the Agile framework.

I've been working with Clarity PPM for around seventeen years.

Clarity PPM is very stable across different purposes.

Clarity PPM scales very well.

Broadcom's technical support is good - you raise a ticket with the support team, and they immediately assign a consultant to you.

The initial setup is very simple, and Broadcom provides you with an installation guide.

I evaluated Planisware, but Clarity PPM is more scalable, its focus is built across resource management, project management, and time sheets, and it can be integrated with Microsoft Project.

Clarity PPM is an open design tool that you can design the way you want. I would give Clarity PPM a rating of nine out of ten.

The primary usage is for coastal location and project management. The performance is really good. 

I think with the solution that we have enough functionality out-of-the-box. We also try to use all of that functionality because it is aligned to our methodology and the way we use it for financial purposes. 

However, now we are turning to my next project with a giant framework, and maybe we need some agile functionality related to that.

For us, in Latin America, we use bookkeeping record because we have enough out-of-the-box functionality. 

Maybe we need to bring some financial executive reports to our directors and executives. Maybe we can improve the use of Jaspersoft.

We did have some trouble a couple months ago, but I do not know why because normally it is very stable. 

We did do an upgrade in the past couple of months to 15.1.

Yes, it scales well. In Latin America, we use just it alone. However, in Canada, we have another instance and they use it integrated with other solutions. 

The Latin American support could be better due to the language barrier. It is also a little bureaucratic. I know we have to put in a ticket, but we need immediate support sometimes; not in two weeks time, immediate support.

Not install, but I was involved in configuration of the limitations. It is a little complicated. A lot of fills. 

We were support by the CA team in Toronto, Canada.

We started evaluated some tools related to PPM. CA PPM accomplished our necessities, especially for Latin America.

We looked at HPE PPM. I can't remember why we did not chose them though.

Try the solution according to your necessities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Big name brand
• Proven solutions
• Theories
• Implementations
• Especially the functionality in their solutions. 

I don't specifically have a use case, I'm more on the sales end, of going to the federal government. For the federal government of Canada, this has been selected as the tool of choice for PPM solutions.

We find specifically in the federal government space, absolutely, the visibility is the number one thing. They can see where the bottlenecks are, they can see what their project statuses are, why are things being held up, etc.

I think specifically, with a couple of government departments, visibility - when they bill their clients back, when they do a cost recovery - from the financial specifics they can have something tangible and real to say. "Okay, this is how we spend most of this time, this was a net new requirement, this was maintenance, etc. So they can bill back appropriately and when the client questions them on it, they have that information available to them.

Reporting visibility for projects and on the resource management side as well.

We're just helping them start to roll out 15, so no comment here.

Stability is good. In the federal government of Canada there's a central hosted instance of the solution. It's been very good as far as maintenance and outages, there's nothing really negative to report.

Scalability has been good. The federal government of Canada is not enormous. We'll see use cases here this week, at the CA World conference, of JP Morgan, Chase, or huge organizations. We've worked with organizations with IT shops as low as 200 people, all the way up to probably 10,000 people so it's worked out very well.

I wasn't involved on the technical side of setup, but as far as assisting my clients with getting service base, making sure we had all of their organizational structure ready to go into the system, I was involved.

We're the consulting arm, so if it was complex or straightforward, we're either doing good or we're doing bad on our end. So I'd like to say it's good feedback. Straightforward.

I give it a ten. Like I said, the scalability is great. It has a small amount of competition in the space but for me it's an easy sale because it's been the selected software for that space in the federal government of Canada.

It's performing how it is. And I think the more they come out with new versions, they're closing those gaps on anything that does exist.