Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Resource management is probably one of the most widely used features of this product and it is what we are using now.

One of the other features that we have started to step into but haven't really done yet, is portfolio management. It is a direction that we are heading in order to leverage it more deeply.

We mainly use resource management for resource forecasting which basically helps us to manage our resource capacity. In this way, we can understand our availability overallocation and that is really where we are using this tool most in our company. We definitely want to broaden our use of the features of this product.

The main benefits of using this tool as a service platform are leveraging CA to handle availability and stability of the platform. Also, they carry the load in terms of execution of any product upgrades. We need to be ready for the upgrade and help test the upgrade, but they keep us on the upgrade path. These are some of the primary advantages.

The organization is not benefiting as much as we would like it to. That is not necessarily a tool shortcoming but an adoption shortcoming. Basically, we need to shift and mature some of our business processes to leverage the tool's capability more. We are having some challenges for people in our organization to adopt this tool. The reason being that people get grounded in a comfort zone as to how they do things today or how they handle things outside of a tool. It could be inertia or people are just comfortable doing things the way they are doing them now, so change is hard.

In terms of projects, this solution has helped us to have one place where project statuses are kept. We have done some work with the standard status report format, so that helps in terms of everybody being familiar with how things are going to be reported. For timekeeping standards, we have one tool and do things one way.

A direction we are heading in, as we are not using the tool, is to do portfolio management or even to do some of our strategic planning; that is the direction we want to head in next.

Some of the things I was planning to look into while I was at a recent CA conference is how other people would implement features like portfolio management, resource capacity planning, financial management. That is what I went to learn more about.

There is some room for improvement in the UI. Some of the folks that use the tool, sometimes they feel it is cumbersome navigating around it.

We don't have any major issues with the stability of the product.

I am not aware of us having any scalability issues. As a matter of fact, I don't think our user base would be considered huge compared to other CA clients. We have around 2500 users, so it is not huge.

I haven't personally used technical support.

PPM being an industry, CA PPM is an industry-leading product and we certainly keep utilizing it. We don't have a compelling reason or business case to move away from it. In fact, we want to invest in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It happened before I joined the company.

Think about your business processes along with the tool’s capability. The tool has a lot of capability but you need to make sure your business processes are aligned to leverage that capability in order to maximize it.

The problem is leveraging the organization; it is hard to get people to adopt it. We need to shift some business processes so we can leverage it more. We have partnered with CA and they are doing what they need to do.

The project management part of it is definitely the most valuable part of it to us. We don't get a lot of value out of resource management or portfolio management yet. It really helps reporting on overall statuses at an aggregate level that we have going on. It's really the best part.

The way we're structured, we support a lot of different organizations. If marketing wants to see the status of all things marketing, along with their impacts on other organizations, we're able to whip that together pretty quickly. In all our previous tools, that was always a black box.

It changed the way our departments talked to each other. Particularly, IT became a delivery organization along with everyone else. They didn't talk before, and now they do; so all the data is front and center. They're starting to tear down some of those walls. They're sharing data now, as opposed to just hoping everything's OK.

It comes down to the shared space aspect of it, particularly when you start talking about code releases, alignments, and things like that. It seems to be that everybody is on the same page. There are a lot of things that get exposed because they're now sharing data. Some of those risks can now be mitigated ahead of time, as opposed to last minute. That was a problem we had back before PPM.

The whole business transformation thing that all industries are going through is very big right now. Those are the higher priority projects that we're able to dedicate money, resources, time, everything to those key initiatives, as opposed before when everyone had their own priority.

• Considering that agile is a big buzzword these days, I don't really like that PPM is so strictly tied to CA Agile Central. There are a lot of other tools out there that people use.
• We're a JIRA shop. There's not a whole lot right now. Everything as far as a PPM JIRA solution is homegrown, and all over the place. I'd like to see some more industry standards applied to the tool.
• I really hate Jaspersoft, so I would like to see a better reporting solution, or perhaps some improvement around Jaspersoft.

It's pretty stable.

It's scalable, but not great. We're a pretty large implementation. We have 120,000 active resources in the tool. We see a lot of performance impacts, particularly in the newer versions with Jaspersoft and things like that, so that part has been pretty disappointing. But, you know, it still gets the job done. It's just a little slow.

We brought in some people from Services (back when there was a Services) to do health checks and things like that. We were constantly opening up tickets, particularly with the newer versions and Jaspersoft and things like that.

We were using PTC Integrity. We outgrew it; and it didn't handle customizations very well. Of course, we overcustomized to the point where it wasn't usable. Something had to go. It was more of a workflow engine; and so, it worked for IT. But we wanted a space where we had business, IT, and other groups all in one space.

I've been there from day one. The initial setup was pretty easy. I was kind of surprised that just getting the app installed, up and running, was pretty simple. The complexities usually came with stakeholder requirements. That's where things got a little nuts; but just getting it up and running wasn't bad.

We also considered HPE. PTC was on our list early on. They had a newer version, and that just didn't do it. There were a handful, but it was six or seven years ago.

The most important factor in choosing PPM was the usability of the tool. CA was good about helping us getting it set up initially with some of the earlier requirements. We had to redo a bunch of that due to shifting business needs; but their assistance was a big factor.

Don’t overcustomize it. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. We would've been better off if we could go back in time, roll it out of the box again, and use it for a predetermined amount of time before determining what we needed to customize.

We’re using the on-premise version.

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.

We are mostly using this tool for financial purposes, moreover for financial reports. The reporting is based on the CA PPM tool; thus we mainly use it for finances.

Although we have integration with different payroll systems such as AP and FA, at the end of the day we are getting the financial information from GL for our accounting purpose. This is our main purpose for using this tool.

It has definitely improved the working of our organization. Now we have a controlled PPMO that is handling or managing the projects. They have proper guidelines and can apply proper SOX compliance. We have governance for PMs and RMs. Monthly, they review this stuff and they can report on that.

There are some challenges that we are facing in terms of Jaspersoft software. I talked to the product team and they are seriously working on that. I am hoping that another 6 months from now, there will be improvements in the reporting and performance areas that will be very helpful for the user community.

It is too early to discuss stability because we are just going live in the first week of December. Let's see for the next 6 - 8 months how it is working and then it will be more relevant.

We are using it not just in one department but at the enterprise level; also in both our geographical locations, i.e., Canada and the US. The product is scalable.

We have used CA support and they are perfect. They respond back on time and give us the required solution. Even if they are taking more time, they will inform us beforehand. We are okay with their services.

Before this product, we had 3 or 4 legacy systems. One was used for time reporting. It was not a centralized one; only the Canadian people were using it. The US office was using Primavera. We wanted to collaborate everything into a single domain and that is why we selected the CA PPM tool.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor was more flexibility in the CA PPM tool. They were more approachable, so that was another reason.

Depending upon the environment you are in, whether you are on SaaS or on-premises, take the decision based on which environment your company wants to be in and not just get any product. Talk to other banks or any other customers who are in SaaS and have similar requirements. Based on that, make your decision. Since on-premises has some benefits and on the other hand even SaaS has its benefits, so based on that you can select your solution.

For us, it's the ability to feed payroll with accurate timesheets and capitalize project hours.

It provides accurate reporting for our investors who are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So we must have absolutely accurate financial statements.

They just introduced Jaspersoft in 14 and some of the security around Jaspersoft is very difficult to use. You cannot really assign security group permissions for specific reports. It's very difficult to do, so I would really like to see them work on the security aspect of Jaspersoft reports.

I think it's very stable for the most part. We run into periodic issues, especially with Microsoft Project and its integration; but it’s always difficult integrating with a third party app.

I think it's very scalable. We just acquired another company. My company primarily does the lottery, and the company we acquired primarily does gaming. It is the same industry, but with very different practices. I think it really fits both because it's very flexible.

I love technical support. I love them. They're awesome.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I think it was fairly complex. We'd never done anything like that before. There was another team that did the initial setup. It is just that through attrition, we lost them all; so I became the technical support.

Technical support is your friend. Technical support is wonderful. They're very helpful. They're very knowledgeable; and they can get you through most anything unless, of course, it’s a bug. In this case, they have to report it to their people.

I think the most important thing when you select a vendor is that it fits the business need. If the business isn't happy, it doesn't matter how much or how little you spend.

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.

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 financial portfolio management portion is valuable. It's really valuable for our executive leadership in order to make decisions on projects and portfolio funding.

It has provided visibility to finances. Where they are, how they're spent, as far as projects are related.

The solution is limited in terms of project management, collaboration, and things like connectivity to other applications. It's very limited in that functionality, unfortunately. We would love to see a better set of collaboration tools. We would love to be able to integrate more easily. I am very technical, as is my co-worker, and we can configure it as long as the availability is there. We would like to be able to connect more easily with SharePoint, maybe JIRA, and other collaboration tool such as Microsoft Project. We would love to be able to have that kind of platform so that we can do that inter-connectivity between all those applications.

It's a very stable product and a good solution. It’s limited in what it can do but for what it does, for what we need, it does just fine.

We're hosted, so as far as scalability goes for us, it's just a matter of user licenses. The user licensing itself could use a little bit of a revamp. Instead of giving everyone the same license, we should have read-only licenses and things of that nature.

I think the previous solution was homegrown. I don't think they had a solution, but rather they had a lot of little solutions. It is the same now, but at least we've consolidated the finances into one.

I wasn’t involved in the setup. From what I gather, it wasn't that complex because it was pretty base. It was all hosted and it was relatively turn-key.

Take a good hard look at what you need as well as where you may see your product needing to be in five more years. Then take a look around you at the market and see where things are moving. Even if you are not going there now, it doesn't take much to turn on a dime. You might need that expanded capability package later.

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.

I like to be able to keep track of all our project work in one place, so I don’t have to go get information from three different places. All the info is right there.

We are using the SaaS version of PPM. We don’t have to maintain the servers. We don’t have to keep up with all the hardware, and so on. It’s all taken care of for us.

The biggest benefit really is that we can easily find out the status of all project work in terms of the lifecycle of the project, how well it’s going, and who’s involved in any of the projects that we have going on across the company. It’s in one place. It’s easy. It’s simple to get all that good information. We need that every day, so we’re not chasing it around all the time.

There is a collaboration feature on each project. All participants in the project can share documents and share discussions. They can communicate with each other through actions items that they can get, emails, and so on, directly from the product. That’s the one-stop-shop we have for all of our collaboration on our projects.

We set up portfolio plans, and we create scenarios for our portfolios. We can determine if we decide to move this project out, or bring this project up, what the overall picture is going to look like in terms demand on resources and everything else. That’s all there. It’s all in one spot. We don’t have to gather a bunch of information from different places, and then try to compile it all. CA PPM does that for us.

There are always things that can be improved. There are always opportunities to make it do more things than it does, and it seems like CA does that. Every time they bring out a release, we’ve got improved features and new features. The sky is the limit on what they could do, really.

They have a different product for Agile management, for example. They could merge these two together, and come up with one product. That would be awesome. Even though they integrate, it would be even better if it was just the same product.

It’s very stable. We’ve yet to experience any downtime because of system crashes, or anything like that. It’s become more stable over the years as a matter of fact. In older versions, there was already a process engine and processes to help automate some activities. There have been significant improvements in that part of the application. It’s much more reliable than it used to be, and it’s very good.

It’s very scalable. No matter how many users we throw at it, it still works. It still performs. It still does what it needs to. The number of projects it handles just continues to grow, and it doesn't blink an eye. It keeps up with everything we give it.

CA technical support has been invaluable to us with this product. For upgrades, and for any kind of general technical questions that we might have, CA support has been outstanding.

Initial setup is a little complex, to be honest with you. Again, it’s improved significantly over what it used to be, so they’re continuously improving that whole process and the product itself.

Spreadsheets were not efficient. It was a real pain. We did not really consider any other vendors. We knew that CA PPM product was the right product for us.

The alternatives all fall short in some areas. CA PPM has a very robust portfolio management capability, for example. I have not seen another product with anything quite as robust as what CA PPM provides. Resource management is another area that CA PPM excels in, but other products just come up short.

We know CA. We’re closely associated with CA. We understand a lot about CA that maybe someone else wouldn’t if they were just coming in blind.

I think the Gartner Group information that’s provided, their magic quadrant report, and so on, is really helpful for understanding why you would go with CA for a product like CA PPM. CA PPM just outshines all other products in the Project Portfolio Management space in terms of capabilities, what it can do, and how it works. It’s really a good product.

Save time. Manage your projects in Clarity and in CA PPM.