Broadcom Clarity Reviews

• The detail available in the financial costs and forecasts
• The comprehensive resource planning views
• The portfolio planning capabilities

All of these show not only the current state, but also integrated views of the impact of proposed changes across the organization in terms of resources and costs.

CA PPM provides an integrated view of the total set of projects in the organization. It also has the ability to see data by multiple slices: by department, project type, objective, resource type, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Since it is all in a common database, there are no longer questions about the data sources, or how current the information is.

• Some of the legacy configuration in the system can use some updating. In particular, providing configurability in timesheets, fiscal periods in resources, and project planning.
• The provided reporting tool is inadequate.
• Structured reports are too difficult.
• Security administration is immature.

I have been using this solution for twelve years. I began with much earlier versions.

There are no significant issues with stability. Unplanned outages are extremely rare and brief.

There are no issues at all with scalability. The system is capable of supporting tens of thousands of users globally.

Technical support is variable. The core product support is very good, typically with quick response times and very helpful engineers.

The support for the reporting tools is much less effective.

Support for infrastructure related issues, i.e., how the application is affected by the operating system, browser, and related external elements is variable. Some are quickly resolved and some drag on.

I am personally familiar with a number of other solutions, but my current organization has been using this software since I have been associated with them.

Most other organizations that I am familiar with who switched solutions, did so to take advantage of the comprehensive feature set, the ease of use, and the easy configuration.

The product itself is easy to set up and configure. Whether that is complex or not, depends on how complex the organization is.

If there are a lot of business rules that need to be incorporated, then those need to be accommodated and it will take more time.

In some cases, the real implementation timeline is around managing the change to a new system internally, and not in preparing the system itself.

Be sure about what kinds of functions you will want your users to perform on the system. That will impact the type and cost of the license based on the licensing model that CA uses.

This is an enterprise PPM solution, so it will have functional aspects that extend into many corners of the enterprise.

The focus should be on the functionality that is needed, and not on small differences in cost. There will rarely be a significant cost difference between systems that are competing at this level.

This product was in place when I joined the organization.

Take the implementation as an opportunity to simplify your business processes and not simply to try to replicate existing processes into a new tool.

The out-of-the-box functionality has a lot of power and capability and should be used wherever possible.

If you do have a few critical, must-have processes, have them demonstrated before you commit to the tool. Be sure that they are real needs and not just legacy “that’s how we have always done it” items.

It's about integrating the allocation of resources, assignment, into the investment management, so we can actually look at not only how well we're doing, but if we have enough resources, if we're using them appropriately.

We don't need on-premise hardware. The expense of the hardware is not a big issue, but it's the administration of the hardware, the administration of the backup solution. SaaS provides us more freedom.

Transparency is one improvement to the organization. The solution we provide not only to our technical staff and for IT project management. We're starting to integrate it into the other areas, like HR for HRIS, and the business is now doing projects through it, so transparency's one of the big key factors. Because we now use it for that piece, it provides the main topic and the main context for our strategy committee sessions with the department leaders.

From a transparency perspective, we're now showing all we're doing. From an overall perspective, we're able to help enable the business by showing where we're spending the money, how we're spending the money, how the investments are moving, what's the benefit and the value. Every department, even within IT, be it the application development, the infrastructure guys, they were all doing their own thing. We really didn't see, not necessarily how they're spending, but how they're utilizing the resources. Now, because we're not siloed, because we're all utilizing one single application, one source of truth, we've provided some really good collaboration now and lessons learned from all these other projects that we didn't really have before.

I would like to see more simplified interfaces for reporting development. The Jaspersoft function is very cool, but it requires a bit of skill. More object-orientated, less database management, I think would help for report writing. That would be the most helpful.

The solution is fairly stable, a bit slow, especially from a SaaS perspective. We have heavy security where I come from, so that slows it down even more, but from a stability perspective, it's quite exceptional.

It's very scalable, not only for the product itself, but integrating service management and other functions of CA. The more we get comfortable with it, you move from project management to portfolio management. You're not just doing asset allocation, you're also doing, and so on and so forth.

I would say technical support is excellent, and I use them daily.

We knew it was time to invest in a new solution because of all the silos. We had to integrate everybody into one centralized point. It's just good governance.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are years of experience, accuracy of calculation, scalability, SQL back end, interoperability with our existing applications, and familiarity.

From an asset management perspective, from time sheet management, project management, from a summary nature, we wanted to move towards portfolio, and that’s where we saw CA PPM really shine. You start with your asset allocation, your resource administration; you move into your project management. Now you can see portfolio management, because you have that good initial data. You know: Garbage in, garbage out. Now that we have good stuff in, we're getting great stuff out.

From a user perspective, user experience, when we first put CA PPM in place, we found it very difficult, not very intuitive, a very uncomfortable user experience. Moving towards the next version, which is now 51 – which we're just utilizing now, we just started about two months ago – the end user experience is much better, facilitating adoption.

We had a few solutions on our shortlist. One was the Microsoft Project Server solution.

We chose CA because it was simplified with the SaaS and the company we hired for integration, it just made better sense.

From my perspective, usability, you get exactly what you put into it. With that comes issues, but the functionality and being able to display holistically to our executives and our department leaders, I think, was the key feature of why we chose CA.

Start slowly. Look at it from a module perspective. Do your resource utilization piece first. Go to project management. Go to portfolio management after that.

I love the time tracking module. That's what I'm most familiar with, at this time: being able to go in and actually break it down; see what everybody is doing; how they're allocating their time; see who's underallocated, overallocated.

It's really helping us with our resource management; being able to pull people where they need to go; get additional help where help is needed. It helps us collaborate with our project management teams, our PMO, all across the company, shared services.

Overall portfolio management is something that we would like to improve on.

The company has been using it for several years now. Personally, I've only been using it for under a year.

In my experience, it's very stable, especially compared to other applications that we've used in the past. I have no complaints whatsoever.

At this time, it's meeting our scalability needs. We are looking to build out other areas, so we are assessing the different components to build out in.

From what I understand, from my technical person, the support is excellent.

I actually don't have a lot of experience with the initial setup; however, we are right now just beginning to upgrade. It seems to be that it's going to be fairly easy. We're going to be able to get it upgraded in less than six months; 3-6 months.

Personally, I have not evaluated other options. I come from a different area, and we have other ways of doing things that are not as streamlined.

I have a finance background so when I am selecting a vendor, I definitely want someone reliable, someone who is affordable, can answer all of our questions, who can bend and flow with the organization's growth. Or, if we sell pieces of the organization, we need to be able to flex, so I'm looking for a partner that will be able to do that.

I don't like to give anything a perfect score because I don't know enough about every aspect of it; however, from my experience, it's been a great tool.

Flexibility is probably the most significant feature that we take advantage of. Being a large company with a lot of customized solutions, migrating from our legacy applications into PPM obviously has been a major challenge. The flexibility of PPM, our ability to customize it and configure it to our needs has been a big selling point of the tool.

Probably the biggest reason for going with SaaS is the thin footprint. Obviously, not having to engage our internal resources to basically support the infrastructure for PPM was a big selling point. The ability to essentially upgrade without a lot of involvement from our staff was another big selling point for us. Obviously, the vision is essentially to have transparent upgrades for the tool with minimal effort on our side. Certainly, going with the SaaS solution has allowed us to basically upgrade the application in a matter of weeks rather than spending months planning for the upgrade.

The major benefit is, with our legacy applications, right now, we have approximately 600 IT projects, spanning 12 different portfolios. In our old world, we had essentially a number of different solutions supporting the 600 projects and 12 portfolios. The vision that PPM has allowed us to take advantage of is, now, we have consolidated all our portfolios and projects under one tool, instead of a multitude of solutions.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and business strategy because we all now talk the same language, if you will. In the past, with everybody having their own spreadsheet-based solution, when you essentially try to talk about project status, you really had to understand what their solutions were for managing their portfolios and their projects. By having everything consolidated under PPM, now everybody has a unified way of looking into their projects. When you talk about what's red, yellow and green for your project status, it isn't essentially this grab bag of, “Well, that depends on how you measure it.” We're all now being measured by the same tool, being PPM. When we talk about our status being red, yellow or green, we all know exactly what that means because, essentially, it's all PPM speak and not essentially some homegrown solution supporting the various portfolios.

We're really looking forward to the integration of Agile Central into PPM. Obviously, we now have a solution that services the needs of our project managers and our portfolio directors. Being able to integrate Agile Central into our solution base here, obviously allows us to extend the reach of PPM from the project management and portfolio managers all the way down to the actual development teams. Obviously, bringing everybody under a consolidated umbrella will help unify the beginning-to-end lifecycle of our projects.

The big improvement for us would be timesheet management. We have a legacy timesheet management solution that we're moving off of into PPM. It goes down to the activity level for the recording of time. In the current PPM solution, while they handle the reporting of time to the individual task and your project plans really nicely, breaking it down to the individual activity level such as requirements, design, different support activities, the tool doesn't necessarily play in that space really nicely. Certainly, we'd like to see them do a little bit more with regards to taking that time recording down to a lower level of detail. Of course, for us it's all about analytics and, of course, project management thrives on analytics.

It is very stable. We have not had a single issue with the SaaS solution for PPM since we've been on board. We came on board live in production about a year ago. We have not experienced a single outage with SaaS solutions since we've gone live. Obviously, knock on wood, we understand that, in the IT world, downtime is a fact of the way things work but, as of a year in production, we have yet to encounter an outage that has impacted our user base.

Indeed, we have used technical support, more so from a development perspective, though, not from, obviously, an issue with a production outage or issues with our production environment. Being that we're looking to configure the tool in different ways to satisfy the needs of our various portfolios, we've actually had some conversations with CA support to help us understand how we can essentially move from the vanilla PPM to something that obviously suits the needs of our business. They've been very responsive with regards to answering our questions on how exactly we can move from today's world to what we need to do in the future.

We had a plethora of solutions and, of course, they all did things a little bit differently. When we tried to take a look at the overall portfolio of all our IT projects, there was really nothing to unify everybody under one common solution. Essentially, if you talk to one portfolio, they manage things in a certain way. A different portfolio would do it completely different. Of course, when you tried to look at the overall IT budget, it got to be a very complex solution. Of course, if you try to take a holistic look – you have resources and projects, and you have your planned budgets – nothing was under the same umbrella. It was a hodge-podge, and a lot of manual time and effort went into basically having just a simple conversation on, "Hey. What do we want to do next year?"

Bringing everything into PPM, now, the conversation’s about what we want to do next year and the whole what-if scenarios that come out with regards to, "Hey, what if we do this? What if we do that?" Instead of taking weeks and months to have those discussions, we can now have them in real-time, right here and right now.

We actually employed an implementation partner. With PPM, there are a lot of consulting firms that specialize in PPM implementations. We actually picked an implementation partner who helped us through the various questions and considerations to evaluate before we went live.

Certainly, doing it ourselves would have been a little intimidating, but with the help and assistance of CA services and the implementation partner, actually, the migration from our legacy solutions to now a PPM-based solution has been relatively painless.

We did have five other vendors on our shortlist. We did take an exhaustive look at all five of them. In the end, it really came down to CA PPM’s flexibility and the ability for it to basically configure itself to meet the needs of our organization and its ability to be a SaaS solution rather than an on-premise solution. Certainly, we're looking to have a unified solution that we can essentially standardize the company but still configure it so that it's specific to our needs, and yet, obviously, have it hosted at an external site, where we don’t have to necessarily spend the time and energy to make it happen.

I definitely recommend going to CA World and talking to all the other companies that have implemented PPM solutions to see how they did it. One thing we definitely learned at a previous CA World, when we were doing our evaluation of PPM, everyone we spoke to had accolades about how they love the tool and what they are doing with it. Of course, when you hear all the stories of how they basically move from their legacy solutions to a PPM-based solution, you quickly realize that it can do everything you need to do, more and more.

It's definitely met and exceeded all our expectations with regards to the tool. We knew we'd have to make some concessions with the tool. Obviously, if you're moving from your completely customized solution to one that's more of a package-based solution, we figured we’d have to give up on some things with regards to our process, but we found with PPM, it's so flexible and so configurable that everything that we had customized for the homegrown solutions, we were able to actually port it directly into PPM. Now, essentially, we've got a standardized solution across our whole entire organization that still has all the benefits of our homegrown solutions that we had in the past.

• Detailed project planning, showing the updated project status and its most useful KPIs
• Detailed project financials and cost, defining detailed budget plans and updated management and view of taxes, fees, expenses (transactions)
• Cost and financial investment hierarchy, obtaining the real aggregated cost of a service and of the whole IT investments. Possibility to show investment hierarchy aggregattions in diferent currencies.
• Apply strong workflow actions and methods, powered by scripting modules, to implement your processes
• New Data Warehouse instance and new advanced reporting provided by Jaspersoft Reports

The organization can obtain, from only one solution, a consolidated view of its project and portfolio management with the real cost of its projects and services, and the aggregation of all the IT investments.

It could be a real improvement to change the UI behavior, to work more in the foreground. This should allow implementing of input data controls, popup messages, etc. At the moment, the UI behavior works totally in the background and it’s a handicap to designing and implementing some UI and data form controls.

Summaring, UI enhancements in front-end ITSM modules, could position better CA PPM as unique IT solution

I have been using it for four years.

You could receive some error during the install/upgrade process, but the workarounds and iterations in this process in case of error are well documented

You shouldn't encounter stability issues if you have well-dimensioned environments and scheduled maintenance reboots. Without these reboots, you’re likely to have memory issues in Windows environments.

You shouldn't encounter scalability issues in well-dimensioned environments and configured with the vendor best-practices

Technical support is effective, based on a deep KB. The technical support responses are based, mostly, on KB articles.

Initial setup needs expertise level for some functionalities or modules. For some of these modules, you need previous knowledge of how the solution works, and there’s no clear step-by-step guide.

It seems obvious, but it’s strongly recommended to stay close to the standards and to use the OOTB functionalities (and to customize them if it’s the case), instead of implementing custom parallel functionalities. You will avoid future compatibility issues or complex product upgrade processes.

• 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.

The ability to identify business value associated with the financial management of projects.

Just the ability to capture the project scope and the cost associated with it. It adds to the business value.

Not sure which release we are in right now, but we're going to use the next release with Jaspersoft integration. I'd like to see their collaboration.

When looking for a vendor, I look for stability in partnership. For this price and for our use of the tool, this is an effective enterprise solution.

The most valuable features of this solution are the portfolio management and the resources. Resources are key for us.

The benefit is to prioritize which projects we need to really focus on throughout the calendar year, and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

We're on a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. It would be great if we could somehow, some way access the database through that.

Stability is good. We support over 300 users and I haven't seen any problems at all.

I think it could handle a vast amount of data, a vast number of users that are using the tool simultaneously.

I have not used technical support for the solution.

We weren't using any sort of PPM tool at the time; it was all through spreadsheets.

Initial setup was straightforward; just using the tool, navigating it, what to do, what not to do. That sort of thing.

You should really look at the tool itself because it's a really 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.

I have rated it as such because of a lot of the project-related stuff it solves. Right now, we're just figuring out how to use the resources.

Even though I didn’t really make the decision, the most important criteria for me when selecting vendors, in general, are knowledge; experience; willingness to walk the customer through their issues; really understanding what problems they have; and how they can help them achieve their goals.