What needs improvement with Broadcom Clarity PPM?

While Clarity is highly customizable, it could be better delivered as an agile solution out of the box. However, Broadcom has a separate agile tool called Rally.

The solution could improve the experience for the simple user by converging the comments and dashboards.

The architecture must be improved.

Among things to be improved, Clarity can really work on its SAP interface. The current interface lacks out-of-the-box connectors for different applicators in the system. Therefore, this requires external support, which is beyond our expertise. In-house development is done for the interface, but as the system becomes complex, there is a building need to maintain the necessity of updates. If the updates aren’t maintained, then the system might be compatible. Additionally, the report generation process using a different software poses difficulties, leading to the need for external consultancy to create specific reports. Certain features, also face compatibility issues with our existing system. Despite these limitations, we find the system satisfactory overall, although a learning curve exists, especially for those unfamiliar with its particularities.

Mostly, the collaboration could be improved as well as a little bit on the data analytics part. This is based on feedback coming from the customers. I don't have any issues with the tool, but these are the use cases where clients will probably want to see some more advanced features, and the feedback has actually gone back to Broadcom also. We work closely with them, so I think they are aware of it. Broadcom is working on those features, but compared to other PPM tools, those are some of the areas that PCR can definitely be improved upon. In the next release, I would like to have a little bit more functionality on chatbots in Clarity PPM, especially for support requests, such as for the most commonly used support tickets that people could resolve themselves. That's an area customers ask the most about. That's the common feedback, based on questions from them.

Setup could be made easier.

One of the things that have always been a bit painful is the integration with reporting utilities. The current integration is with Jaspersoft, and there are a number of difficulties with that. If you're using out-of-the-box fields and everything, it is a bit slow and clunky. It has a drag-and-drop interface for the users. On the backend side, there is a report designer. They haven't given or allowed me any training on it yet. So, it has been a bit limited in its features. On one of the earlier report utilities, they had one called Actuate, which had VBA as its base programming language, and you could do quite dynamic things behind the scenes, whereas the Jaspersoft interface seems rather locked. So, you're limited in your options. Being a programmer, you like to have room to be able to invent and create rather than just being limited to a few selection boxes.

Broadcom Clarity PPM could improve by adding advanced reporting in the tool. There are a lot of out-of-the-box reports, but I would like to see more advanced reporting.

One of the major pain points for me when it comes to Broadcom Clarity PPM is the new UI. The new UI is very good in terms of functionality and the drag and draw features, but it's not very responsive. When I say that it's not very responsive, what I mean is that sometimes, the tool is not very user-friendly. For example, a user saves a value on the form, but the tool doesn't give any indication to the user that the value has been saved. Some users are moving from the classic UI to the new UI, and end up getting confused because on the classic UI, when you click "Save", it'll save the information and you'll get an indication that it was saved. With the new UI, it auto saves the information, but it doesn't give an indication in the form of a popup box that "this form has been saved", or any type of message indicating that the information was successfully saved. It's been confusing for users who move to the new UI because of that. The users don't understand when the values are being saved or not being saved, even if there's an auto-save feature in the new UI. What I'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom Clarity PPM is fine-grained security control on the new UI, because currently there's free level security, but it's based on the group, and I would like to have access to the individual phase and the users to lock a specific phase. For that type of security, higher level security is required, which is available on the classic UI, but not available on the new UI. The new UI interface should also be a little bit more responsive. Currently, it's responsive and it's fast, but whenever it saves information, it doesn't show any notification, and that can be very confusing for users.

Whenever that second instance of Clarity came about, it was overwhelming even to people who were accustomed to working with program management tools. There were so many data fields that could potentially be leveraged, so many kinds of internal metrics. They actually brought in an outside consulting team. I can't recall the name of the team, and where they were from. I remember they were from down South. They were actually on-premises for a week or so. Then, they came back periodically just to fine-tune things. I interacted with them on some occasions, as they wanted to pick my brain on how I was leveraging it to track applications and to run high level reporting for management on just basic metrics and also initially on just program management. Overall, I found the tool to be fairly straightforward. That said, for people who did want to create their own reports, whatever instance we had, a lot of people found it difficult, and what they typically ended up doing is getting training. They're very, very smart, certainly smarter than me, where they would come to me as a resource and say, "Hey, you seem to have a knack for this tool. Can you create a report that kind of sort of does this?" I would say, "Sure." Then, I would knock it out and they would say, "Great." Then, they would have a customized report that met their needs, where they could kind of fire at will and run the report whenever they wanted it to. However, many people didn't find it as easy as I did. Many roles that I've had was the role of a financial analyst. There's been a number of sales organizations, sales organizations that I've supported over time. These are organizations that'll have anywhere from a couple hundred to as many as almost several thousand salespeople, the people who support them, et cetera. One of the organizations that I supported was the main sales force. These are like your rank and file sales representatives who go out and just sell equipment, that sells services, et cetera. It's everything from your entry-level sales reps, all the way to your highest-performing sales reps, all the supervisory management, and all the industry VPs and sales VPs, et cetera, right up to the highest levels of the sales organization for the United States. They had a variety of almost competing tools that were used to consolidate their prospects, and with their pipelines, et cetera. Salesforce had already been installed in Europe with great success. There, you have, obviously, different languages, you have different management styles, organizational structures, et cetera, and yet they were able to install and make use of, Salesforce quite successfully. They actually did it fairly quickly. For us, Europe included Eastern Europe, Russia, all of North Africa, and the Middle East - they all installed Salesforce and did so fairly quickly and successfully. However, there was great resistance in North America. The primary reason was that Salesforce was a cloud-based technology. There was tremendous resistance in both the Canadian and the US communities to have anything other than something that was internal inside of our firewall. The Salesforce people were saying, "We work with governments. We work with everything from defense contractors, to military organizations, to intelligence organizations. There's nothing to fear. This is the future." Yet there was tremendous resistance. It wasn't until someone at the highest levels of the corporation said, "We’ve got Europe covered. We got developing markets covered. North America, get together and get on board with Salesforce. That way, we have unified technology worldwide." Meanwhile, I was actually taking these two competing systems, where the sales reps focused on equipment and then secondarily services, as opposed to another sales organization that would focus on services and then would periodically think about selling equipment. There were competing philosophies and their prospects resided in two different systems. What I would do is developed a knack for taking these two data sets, exporting them out of the two systems, smashing them together, removing the overlapping or duplicate records, then being able to present to management, "You have anywhere between an $8 to $9 billion pipeline for the next nine months. Assuming that you close 20% to 25% of your deals, this is what this might be. You're in striking distance of achieving these types kinds of services, signings, or equipment signings." Management got really, really excited about this. Then, what I did after that was that became the basis, the underlying data, that smashed together data, became the data that we ultimately fed into Salesforce. The reason why I'm giving this background is one of the things that Salesforce did that was very, very clever, is allowed just four people to take data and create a shell. What they did is they said, when they were doing the introduction to our team, they said, "There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data fields that are used by our clients all over the globe, but what we're going to do, based upon the data set that you have in the present, we're only going to create this shell or this instance of Salesforce, and we're only going to use 75 data fields." That, to me, was very, very powerful. Even if they were data fields that were using different nomenclature, it was considered a standard naming convention that Salesforce was familiar with. As time went by, we began expanding, making use of a greater and greater quantity of data fields, and being able to slice and dice, if you will, data in greater levels of detail and complexity. It was easier for rank and file, whether you were finance, or information technology people, or salespeople, sales reps, management, whatever, everybody was able to get their heads around a tool that was becoming more and more sophisticated as the months went by as opposed to starting off with saying, "There are 300 possible data fields, and metrics, and calculations, or whatever, but we're only going to use 35 of them, or 50 of them, or whatever." The fact that everybody can see them is very, very intimidating. That was one of the reasons for the pushback in our organization when Clarity was rolled out. People could see all these data fields. Either the implementation wasn't good or the consultants that we were dealing with weren't very thoughtful. However, when people saw all the possible data fields that they had, it was overwhelming. That was consistent feedback that I heard through a variety of channels and there was resistance due to that. If there's any feedback that I would give is that it's one thing to say, "Here are all the possibilities." However, then, when the salespeople marry up with the folks who are going to do the implementation, they need to be able to say, "So what are your immediate needs? Maybe we'll throw some additional data fields in there to kind of spice things up." Then, as time goes by, reveal additional data entry options, either for people who are making the actual entries or what have you. That's something that I observed firsthand. I have seen interfaces that are much hipper, and much more intuitive. The layouts might have a more modern or current touch and feel. With the instance that we had, it seemed like it was just a little outdated. When you were clicking on hypertext links, as opposed to a button. Now, these are nuanced differences, however, having a menu where you'd see a header, underneath the header, you would see a blue font that was a hypertext link. Then, depending on whether you wanted to look at application data, whether you wanted to enter your time, or you wanted to look up specific projects and dig into those projects, into the sub-elements that make up all the different views within a given project, or you wanted to get to a data export function, or whatever, it was all a function of finding your overall category and then find underneath that the appropriate link. I don't know how old that interface was. Maybe it's still like that now, or a bit more modern, however, from my experience, a more modern interface would be a bonus.

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.

Broadcom Clarity PPM has some areas for improvement, particularly its dashboard, because it's too slow. The look and feel of the platform need to be enhanced. The UX or user experience of Broadcom Clarity PPM also needs to be improved, e.g. sometimes when you need to do something on it, you need to click three or four times for the action to go through, instead of clicking just once. An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom Clarity PPM is being able to communicate through the dashboard. If the dashboard enables us to communicate and shoot the message there, that would be amazing.

The solution could improve the way the workflow is developed. I think they could be more dynamic because they are in a way static. They're very powerful, but they don't have any interaction with end-users. In a future release, I'd like to see more stable chargeback procedures, because they are not as synchronized as they should be. Sometimes they do not provide real-time information. We have to use another solution to receive this information.

In terms of what could be improved, the end user interface could be improved to be more intuitive, because we sometimes have issues with customization. Sometimes we are not able to customize everything for the end user's interface, and they require more customization. We should be able to perform a deeper customization here. Additionally, I'd like to see more compatibility with the Active REST connection because we have worked with SOAP and WSDL but we need more compatibility with the Active REST connection.

Intake and demand management functionality could be better. In the future, I would like to see integrated Agile features and better integration with Agile tools. There are a lot of different teams that are using Agile tools and there is a demand for that.

The user interface (UI) needs to be improved. Right now, it's not the best. The usability at this point is terrible. It makes the product hard to use unnecessarily. It's not intuitive at all. I've had to force myself to learn it and it's been hard. We use an older version, so It might have been updated in newer versions. That said, everything needs to be fixed, including the font, colors, and navigation. It's literally every aspect that needs updating. The core of PPM is very complex. The solution needs more documentation. The technical support is not the best. It needs better support for Agile practices. It's very difficult to integrate anything with the product.

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.

It would be good for them to work on the user interface to make it more interactive. They started with on something, but the functionality is not yet in a state where I would say, "Oh wow, use that one."

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.