Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

The most valuable features are time compliance, capacity and demand, and resource management; knowing who is allocated to what task, what projects, what activities, and if they're on track or not. We have time compliance goals, where we have to complete time sheets and we have to have one-on-one meetings with our leadership. That's another value: making sure that we're compliant with those.

Cost and agility; it helps with that.

We use the SaaS version. It is really good because we don't have to be responsible for the platform; the hardware, upgrading hardware, upgrading the software, or any of those things. It enables us to have fewer developer hours supporting the product.

I don't know what I need right now, but we're implementing a lot of tools and we need to make sure that we can integrate. So, I’d like to see more APIs and maybe some improved UI with the Jaspersoft Business Objects Reporting side of it, to increase customer adoption.

I have not given it a perfect rating because of the UI of the reporting in Jaspersoft; just some UI issues, I guess.

We've had good stability with it.

Scalability is good. It's a licensing model; you just upgrade your license when you need to add more users. That's good.

They provide good technical support. We don't have a lot of issues, but we've had success with getting feedback from them and getting resolution to our issues in a timely manner.

We were previously using Primavera.

We decided to move to CA PPM because we had an ELA with CA and we needed to get to a tool that we could integrate with other systems. Also, Primavera was legacy. We had it for a long time, so we needed to get a better tool.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is partnership, collaboration and working together to provide the best solution.

I wasn't involved with the initial setup. I wasn't responsible for the product until just before it was implemented in production. I've been supporting it since then.

From what I’ve heard, initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had some issues with resource management APIs, but I don’t think that's any different from others. It was data related.

It takes time; it's not done overnight. It takes a year or two to implement.

It's an integrated product. We can do project management, strategic management, and resource management all in the same place. We don’t have to get sources from everywhere. This helps us make decisions faster.

The main benefits of using the SaaS version are its availability, and that we don't have to think about maintaining the systems.

We are just starting our implementation. We deployed it about a year ago, so we're still waiting to see what the benefit will be. Now that everybody is using a single tool, we'll hopefully get some data that will help us manage our resources better.

We could use expanded reporting capabilities because right now that is fairly limited in what it does. I just heard that in 15.2, they have more reporting capabilities; so that will be great.

It has been good so far in terms of stability.

It is highly scalable.

We use CA tech support all the time. They are very accessible. When I need them, they are available to address any issues that I have.

We had about 5 or 6 different ways to record time for work that we do. That is reason enough to move to a single solution.

The most important criteria when we select a vendor are their reputation and their strategic direction. I think we chose CA primarily because of their reputation.

I wasn't involved in the original set up. I think it's pretty simple because we're on SaaS.

Do your research. Make sure you understand what the business requirements are before deciding on a tool because a tool itself is just a tool.

The most valuable solutions for us are being able to share data across the organization to help use technology to drive our processes. We are trying to use it as our system of record for reporting, integrating with Salesforce and SAP so all of our reporting will come out of the system. That's the plan.

I love the grid-like portlet.

It allows us to share data because that's the whole point of having a solution like this. You can run a business out of Excel, but you can't share that information. So this is the best way to do upward reporting to executive management, and to have an integrated platform with both project management and resource management.

I think it's helped us become a little bit more standard globally.

We're looking at using it as a forecasting tool but we're still making steps in that direction, we are not fully using that capability.

I would love to see skills-based capacity planning. We're pretty mature in our resource management. We decreased the number of roles that we are using, but this actually hurt our perspective for forecasting capacity planning. Now, we can’t drill down to the levels of proficiencies within a role. There’s no way to incorporate that into the portfolio, so it doesn't really help us. We would like to be able to drill down to the skills level better.

We would like to see skills built into the Portfolios. This way we could do accurate resource and capacity factoring in the skills of our resources. Not all resources are alike in terms of ability and we do not want to over burden ourselves with multiple roles to distinguish skill level.

Scheduling needs improvement. If we look at our demand and capacity in Portfolios, all we have to go off of are roles which do not accurately tell us how many resources we have to do the work.

Stability is fairly good.

I think it’s scalable. We're looking to expand, bringing on several new groups, so we'll likely go from 300 users to 800 users pretty soon. We've been cleaning up things as we go along. We ended up removing multiple financial entities to merge them into a single entity. This was a big project for us, but I think it's going to help us scale.

I was involved in one aspect of the setup, but not the entire deployment. I think it was fairly complex, but what I did was more on the business side, not the technical side.

We did not consider any other vendors.

Understand how your business works, and know that the PPM tool can only do so much. You have to develop your processes to go along with the technology.

Working on the technical side of this CA tool for last 9 years with different different companies and clients.

The health report and all metrics of any project including KPIs are now available in a central location under the clarity project or project dashboard, replacing all those excel spreadsheets.

Time Entry, Resource Allocation, Interactive Dashboards, Risk Management, Integration with Jaspersoft reports.

The application memory management and responsiveness of this JAVA product can be improved, especially in the peak usage times. A better way to track, analyze and tweak the heap memory would be a great addition to this PPM tool

More than five years.

Occasional slowness of the product at peak usage times like Budget season, mostly due to poor heap memory management.

No. Its perfectly scalable and perfectly easy to implement the change.

Customer Service:

It's awesome 10/10

Technical Support:

It's very good 9/10

No

Yes, the installation/upgrade is complex. You will need many mock runs in non-prod environments before we try the new version in PROD. Each version upgrade can come with new issues and challenges. But from the latest v14.x versions, this has been simplified a lot.

In-house

We did some analysis on HP PPM. Found Clarity PPM better.

If anyone is looking for a Project and Portfolio Management tool, then I highly recommend CA Clarity PPM. Of all the PPM tools we had tried, Clarity PPM is the most robust, multi-functional and reliable tool.

Check out my other Clarity PPM detailed review at http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/ca...

Our primary use case is mostly for financial purposes. We have a finance team and it's used for time keeping as well. Those are the two major things that we use it for, financial budgeting and for time keeping. I am the tech support of our team so I'm responsible for keeping the servers working, upgrading the system and getting certain integrations and the like. I'm a software engineer. 

This is the first PPM tool I've used so I can't provide a comparison. It's technically fine, is very user friendly, and it's a good tool. We get pretty good support from Broadcom as well.

The solution is lacking in certain integrations but that's generally the way because each organization has different preferences. I feel like they could be using more updated technology, like EPA and things like that. I think those are the aspects that they might improve because we need to keep up with the times in order to be relevant with the current technology, and with what is happening in the world of technology. The standards are there and it takes a lot of time for every organization to move their core base to newer technology. I understand that aspect as well, but they could look into it.

There are many technologies that leverage JavaScript, for example, such as NodeJS and AngularJS and all of that and JSON as well. We're not using any of them which is understandable because they use Java. I'm younger, so in college I dealt with newer technologies like the NodeJS which I like. These are technologies that they may implement in the future.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is mostly stable. I'm not sure if other organizations follow this or not, but I always stick with one version below the latest to give the vendor time to catch all the errors and bugs. I don't have any complaints with the stability. 

We have a lot of Clarity users in the company and it already scales to a pretty substantial level, I would say.

We have very good technical support. 

I would say that the support and the community of Broadcom is pretty extensive and it's actually very good. I did not use it initially, but I would suggest that you should use the support and the community that is available for Clarity. We were lucky to have good initial support so I didn't have to struggle that much because I got enough knowledge transfer to get me through.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

It brings visibility and one central source of truth, as opposed to a bunch of different processes and tools. It helps us effectively enable our processes.

• Portfolio management
• Resource management
• Project management, of course

User-friendliness, I think that's the key. Right now it's really clunky. We're also looking to upgrade, but an upgrade is not going to fix everything. The new UX is good, but there are still a lot of limitations. Once they work through those kinks and get those limitations removed, we'll be able to upgrade.

One of the things we use is timesheets. In the timesheet UX, you can't do things like splitting time, managing overtime versus regular time, very easily. That would be helpful. 

Financials are okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement in financials.Financial plans, if those could be made so that you're not always grouping your financial data by predefined attributes, that would be helpful for us.

It's pretty stable. It doesn't crash, I would give stability a nine or 10 out of 10.

Earlier, there were major issues, but since 2015, when we moved to SaaS, there haven't been.

Scalability is pretty decent. We are on SaaS, so CA takes care of scalability.

Current tech support is much better than the previous technical support. Most of the time they answer our questions quickly, but it's hit or miss. Sometimes it does take some follow-ups and escalations, but 70%, 80% of the time they are quick.

Recently, what happened was we had a request to backup our database, so that the development team could start to move to production. But nobody ever got back to us, and they were supposed to. The team kept waiting, so I had to do escalate it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. They were pretty straightforward. CA took care of everything, we just did the testing.

I wouldn't be able to say there is one particular criterion that's important when selecting a vendor, it's a combination of all of them that we will look at, like 

• trust
• cost
• the value they're going to bring.

I would rate it eight out of 10, actually.

I would say definitely look at this solution but understand your business needs first. There is a tendency on the customer side to look for "one size fits all." That's never the case. So make sure Clarity is really a best fit for your business needs. Otherwise, you are just buying a fancy, glorified timesheet tool.

We use it for both portfolio and project management, as well as time tracking and resource management.

It has highlighted areas in our company that were deficient in resources. It has allowed us to hire, then realize more benefits regarding the number of projects we can get done.

• The portfolio management
• The waterline functionality
• The data that we can get out of the timesheet information.

One of the things that was highlighted that is coming was the top-down planning functionality and that looks pretty compelling. 

If there is support or guidance around how to take a more waterfall-based shop and transition it into an agile-based team framework within the tool, that would be good as well because it is definitely different in how you manage and execute projects.

The integration needs to be improved with Jaspersoft and Microsoft Project.

It seems fine. We have not had any issues.

We are a fairly small shop, so we really do not run into any scalability issues.

Their online documentation is okay. It is not great. It is hard to get to some of the answers to the things that we may be running into, such as use cases that we are trying to fix. So, frequently we have to put in tickets. 

Sometimes they are great and exceed expectations, and sometimes, they take a little longer than I would anticipate.

The one that we had at the time, Microsoft Project Server, which was pretty basic in the data that you could get out of it. It did not have near the functionality around portfolio management that this CA solution does. So, that was really one of the reasons why we were evaluating new tools.

As with any fairly complex tool, there were a lot of things that you can't solve for. You can't write a 100% of the requirements and expect to roll it out. So, we ended up with some gaps. One of the areas that we would improve upon is not necessarily with the tool, but having more tips/tricks on adoption. How to get people outside of the PMO to use the tool and get the information.

We looked at staying with our current solution, which was Project Server, and seeing how we could leverage it. We also looked at Innotas, then CA. So, those were really the three. Innotas had a great portfolio functionality, but its project management was very basic. Its resource management was kind of non-existent. So, CA had the full package. It really had everything that we wanted.

I would give them advice that the learning curve and the adoption curve for an organization, which is attempting to bite off this much functionality and complexity, is a lot longer than they will think. Put some serious energy into how to get the groups involved into driving adoption. Then, knowing that the new OData connector is now out, finding ways to quickly leverage data, so you can start telling business stories and showing the value of the tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Stability in the marketplace. We definitely wanted to go with something that was going to be around for a while, and they were constantly improving.