Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We're using it for project and for portfolio planning, and we're continuing to use it for financial investment planning in the future.

We've got four different instances on it, but we've only rolled it out in my area, corporate IT, and for 150 users. 

It performs well.

We've been lacking a project management system that we could easily pull data out of, as leads were putting it in. So the users were not updating the systems, whatever system they were using, as much.

It allows me to keep track of the projects, residual location, it gives me the ease of getting status reports out, and checking risks and issues.

I don't have anything specific to note right now. We're not using all the features, functionality yet.

It's stable.

Technical support is typically on par, gives you quick answers, and gets back with you relatively quickly.

There's always an issue or two that hangs out there, that does not get resolved, but for the most part we get good service.

We were using Artemis. We switched because it was not meeting our needs. They weren't using it in the way that they wanted to be using it. It didn't have the functionality.

We are using software service, so it's been pretty straightforward.

Oracle Primavera was on the shortlist as was Attask. But CA PPM is a more comprehensive enterprise type of solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is longevity.

I give CA PPM a nine out of 10 because there's always room for improvement, but they gave a good quality solution.

I would recommend it.

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.

The primary use case for our product is definitely the project management and portfolio management part of the tool, in that we have never really had anything like this before at our company. Previously, it was a lot of shoot from the hip, not a ton of follow-up on major projects, or at least proper follow-up. It has just been a way to prioritize for us, if adding project x, what does that do to projects a, b, and c at the front-end. 

We are still learning a lot with it. It is definitely a big culture change for our company in that we have never really had to do this before. I would say it is the accountability piece. There are just a lot of the pieces that we have tried to do and we have tried to do unsuccessfully, so we are using this product and so far it has been a success, but we still have not really pushed it out very hard yet. So, more to come.

We are still learning what it is going to do and how it is going to help. We have goals for how it is going to help. It has a lot of the lookback and a lot of the analysis of where our funding going, is it going there properly, and are we stretching our people too thin? 

There is still a lot to be determined but it brings everything back full circle to make sure we are properly managing everything from the finance side to the people side.

The new UX is very user-friendly and simple. The new user interface has been great, I think it has been easier. It will be an easier way to get the product out and used more frequently and more real-time, whereas mainly a lot of only the IT people were able to use the old interface well, just from their background. With the new user interface, it will help a lot.

I am still wrapping my head around the whole process. This is still a newer aspect for me compared to what I have done in the past. I really can't comment on this, because I am still learning all the features that are available within this and using them well and efficiently. I think once I get my head around it and how it will work for our organization, I would probably be able to give a better comment.

Still to be determined. I would say so far so good. I do not really have any complaints about it, but I probably can't give a very detailed answer.

Scalability is massive. It is awesome. It is definitely something we have never done at our organization. It is just steering the ship that way. If the product is a 10, we're probably only using it at a one or a two right now with everything that is available. So, it is still to be determined.

Our old solution was pretty much Excel, and we really did not have it. For a health system, we are now facing a lot more cost pressures, and needing to spend our dollars way more efficiently than we ever had to. Other organizations or sectors have already cut a lot of their costs. Healthcare has lagged behind in this, mainly because we did not have to in the past, and now we are at that point. In looking at that, and really analyzing what we do and how we spend, we need to be more on our forefront now. That is why we ending up investing.

It seemed pretty straightforward.

It was based on our enterprise manager's recommendation from another system that we had talked to. I do not really know all of the background that went behind that, but I know this came to us. This was really one of the only products we had looked at.

It was just the next step where we as an organization needed to go. We were very impressed. It was really getting our organization to buy into the process more than the product. The product, having all of the features which are available, is the reason that we wanted to go that route.

I would absolutely recommend this product. Just the capability of it is really blowing my mind so far. It is more than anything we have ever done. We have worked with Microsoft Project and used Excel spreadsheets in my department. So, this is just blowing our minds, everything that we can pull together, and how much more efficient it is.

I am the backup for our project management office in that I assist our project manager, getting out and helping all our project managers, and everybody from IT. I am in our innovate office, which is basically, project management. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Accessibility would be my number criteria. Helping us out and getting us going.

Primarily we're using it for 

• project management
• status tracking
• resource allocation tracking
• and timesheets and resources for our project management team.

And we're just starting to actually roll it out to our legal team. Yes, that is correct. Our legal team is actually going to use the Project Object in PPM for tracking their litigation cases.

It has performed well.

It's a kind of one-stop shop repository of all of our project statuses and what everybody is doing. So we don't have multiple systems that have to track time and status, and risks and issues.

I think it's very configurable. However we want to change something with out-of-the-box configuration, it's pretty simple to do.

The expandability of the new UX for the majority of what we can do on the classic UI side.

Stability is very good.

We haven't really tested scalability yet. But we will be with this little "legal team" project, and we'll see how it scales to a completely different demographic of users using the interface.

Technical support is very good. I'm happy with the response time and they are definitely knowledgeable.

We didn't have any centralized PPM solution. Everybody was just using Microsoft Project for their own thing. We needed an overarching solution to give visibility on what everybody was doing, and what we can do as an enterprise.

Complex.

We probably should have bitten off a little bit less of the sandwich to begin with. Our implementer was more of a solutions expert and a consultant than they were a trainer. I think we were looking for more of a trainer than somebody to just tell us how we need to set it up. It was less collaborative than I would've liked.

I was not a part of that evaluation. I'm going to say "yes", we evaluated other solutions, but I don't know who they were.

I have two words regarding the new UX: Love it.

When evaluating other vendors, the most important thing is a lot of the professional services, because my organization is not inherently a technical organization. We are a restaurant company. We don't staff a lot of technical folks. So probably the number one priority is that technical professional services offered.

I give the solution an eight out of 10 because I think the classic UX is a little bit clunky. Obviously the new UI is taking over. But also obviously, everything we can do in the classic UI cannot be done yet in the new UI. So we're waiting.

In terms of advice, have your specific requirements of what you need upfront. That way, you're not going to be swayed by all of the cool little gadgets that you could use. Know what you do want to use upfront, and then all the cool gadgets can come later.

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.

For me it's the Project and Portfolio Management tools within PPM, the portfolios. The functionality within there, and now we're starting to use resource management to tie into that as well.

It has improved things very much so. They're just starting to full-fledged adopt it right now. Gives them better visibility across the organization.

I don't know if it's missing or not, but I'm anxious to learn more about Agile and using the tool with Agile. We're starting to use that methodology more and more within our organization. So how do we use the tool more effectively for that?

Also I'm looking for some more enhanced portfolio management capabilities.

Stability is good. Haven't had any problems.

We have scaled it. Scalability is very, very good.

I haven't used it.

At another company I used HPE PPM. I like Clarity CA PPM a lot better. It's more user friendly, easier to figure out if you don't have the significant training that you need. Pretty intuitive.

At my current company they previously used a home-grown solution but I'm not sure how they decided on CA.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came to the company after it had already been set up.

I think the important criteria when choosing a vendor are 

• reliability
• innovation
• the ability to listen to their customers. 

I think those are the key.

Don't customize it right out of the gate. Understand its capabilities out-of-the-box.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support experience varied over the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its strength is all the different features it offers. It's kind of a one-stop shop solution for project managers, resource managers, and finance department personnel. There are a lot of different uses for the tools; and it enabled us to consolidate our list of tools from five or six tools down to just PPM. We're managing one tool with one person managing it as an administrator, instead of having two or three administrators for each tool, with manual processes, and so on.

It is much more streamlined, with a lot more automation, and it’s just easy to use.

A benefit of the SaaS version is not needing to deal with any of the standard on-premise issues that you have. We can rely on the vendor to do a lot more of the upgrade work and things like that. I don't feel like we're pressured, like we would experience with some of the other SaaS providers out there, to be on the latest version or pick up any other applications that go with it.

It just costs much less, and it's as reliable as if it were on-premises. We don't have to pay for the hardware cost. We don't really have to support any of that. It's just a matter of giving them a call and asking for whatever it is we need.

When you look at it, it saves us a ton of money. Fewer FTEs to manage the different products or tools. As I've mentioned, it's a one-stop shop. As a project manager, I can go in and do all the administrative work that I need to do; instead of doing it manually over spreadsheets, uploading it to SharePoint, and so on. It's just a lot more straightforward and convenient.

We're actually releasing two different funding portfolios. Right now, I think we have between 10 and 13 in the company. As we're going through each of the funding portfolios, we're evaluating what they're doing today. We're not only just making them use PPM, but we're streamlining some of their processes and weeding out some of those things that we used to do solely because they are used to doing it that way. The funding portfolios are becoming much more efficient. We're re-evaluating what the value is of everything that we do today. As we streamline it, we put it in the PPM.

It needs to provide a more mobile-friendly user experience. There could maybe be a little bit more around Jaspersoft reporting. I know Jaspersoft is kind of decoupled from PPM, but reporting is one of the big draws for us. It would be nice to be able to do all our project management, and then report on it, using the same tool. If they could keep building out Jaspersoft, that would be great.

We have no issues with stability.

We're going from a few hundred users to several thousand in a few months. We haven't done any stability testing, or anything like that, with around three thousand users; but we know that there are other companies which do use that many people; so we're not too worried about it. We aren’t experiencing any issues today.

Technical support has been average. We do a lot of investigation on our side before we use CA support. Our assumption is that if we can't figure it out, they should probably be able to. A lot of times, it takes a couple of days before we even get a decent response, or something that gets us closer.

It almost seems like we need to rely on some of the contractors that we use, such as Regal Consulting to answer some of our more in-depth questions.

Their whole support model seems to be a little bit fractured, I guess. Depending on the issue we have, we have a completely different experience. I would say there are some frustrating aspects of that and we're not always confident that we're going to get an answer to any of our questions.

We hope the expertise will improve. As we get more and more in tune with PPM, we're answering more of our own questions. I'll be honest.

We didn't have any real solution in place. We saw the need for a tool to take on all these different responsibilities, and PPM just happened to fall into place.

I wasn't around for the vendor selection. I know we looked at a Microsoft product and then there was one other one. I think what it came down to was this: Microsoft was cheaper because of the deal we have with them, but CA PPM fit more of what we're looking to do in terms of our long-term vision. It was going to fit a little bit more. It was more aligned with what our company was looking to do.

My advice would be to make sure that you understand the tool before you start fitting everyone or moving everyone to it. If you don't understand the architecture, it can cause a lot of rework in the future. Truly understanding the tools is important while having experts that understand the tools is critical.