Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

The valuable features are the ability to manage our portfolio of products and initiatives that we're working on.

The PPM tool has allowed us to move from project management to product management without upgrading or changing the tool. That means cost savings. Just working with the vendor and being able to use the tool in different ways as we grow and scale has been beneficial.

I would like to see the advent of personas and making the tool more customer-centric. My needs are different than the next person's needs and the tool should know that and adjust the content that it shows me. That flexibility in the tool, that marginalization, would be very important. It meets our needs, but we're changing and evolving and the tool is coming along but it's kind of playing catch up.

Stability can be a challenge at times, but we've got an account rep and a support team with CA that helps us work through those issues.

I think it scales well. We're probably one of the largest organizations in the world and probably one of their biggest customers so it does scale well

I think customer support has been a challenge at times to get to the right people who can help us with problems. If we raise an issue, it should get to the right people who can help us address it. We don’t like to resubmit and say that the issues haven’t been fixed yet. Overall, technical support has been a challenge.

I was involved with the installation of the last version. Our last upgrade was pretty straightforward, largely because we didn't customize the tool to a point to where upgrading was complex.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know that that can support our scale. The size of the company, the ability for them to support us. Our large size is a burden for a lot of companies. I want to see their set-up process and their ability to support us, not only from a support standpoint, but from a feature standpoint as well. I want to know if the development team is nimble enough to adjust and be responsive to what we need. Are they going to fit our needs today and then tomorrow we have to go buy something else, because they can't keep up? That flexibility and size is important. Depending on those needs, I would say the tool is robust to handle portfolio management at scale, but depending on where a company is and their maturity, and if they're still Waterfall or Agile, for instance. If they're more Agile, I would point them to something else until this tool can catch up. In terms of just core basic PPM requirements, I think the tool does a good job.

CA PPM is an amazing product where you can evaluate anything, from concept to cash, all the way. It's not just project management, it's everything: enablement, managing, tracking, and controlling work.

CA PPM lets you forecast cost, effort, and identify capacity risks. It essentially tells you where your flaws are, and where you need to improve. You can manage your pipeline, your backlog can be groomed using portfolios, and you can use the waterline feature to do your annual planning.

It shows me my pipeline, my backlog, what my customers needs, where the demand is. It shows me where I have capacity, and what's my risk. I can rank my investments to deliver maximum benefit to the organization based on all these different controls. It usually provides a very good forecast: what you want to execute the next fiscal year based on your available capacity, demand, funds, and everything else. Also from a strategic alignment point of view, it can show you what kind of roadmap you have as an organization. What do we have committed? and things like that.

We are using the SaaS version of CA PPM aka on-demand. With SaaS, we are always current with the versions and everything else. We’ve given our heartache to somebody else for managing the server, uptime, SLAs, and everything else. We don't have an internal team that's always on call to make sure your mission-critical application is online. The SaaS version has a unique SLA established by the OEM to the customer to ensure it is up 24/7, and provides the highest quality of service.

There could be some additional enhancements, especially on closely integrating with CA Agile Central. Our CA Agile Central, formerly called Rally, is as an execution agent where Scrum teams are actually working on the product, which was planned and proposed in CA PPM.

We take the idealization backlog we established in CA PPM, define your features, and then take it into Rally to execute them. If I were to redo this whole thing, both of them would be one product, not two separate products. There's a lot of opportunity to merge them together to maximize the benefit to the customer.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

They're family, so they're very good, amazing.It is a collaborative effort.

Initial setup is fairly straightforward.

I'm end-to-end with Project and Portfolio Management software. I eat, breathe, and drink PPM.

Take baby steps. Go with a crawl, walk, run approach. The organization will never be ready to adopt any change, so user adoption is critical. Get a feel for your change. It should come from senior management. At the end of the day, we should show what's the value to each and every individual. What's in it for me? Then, yes, we can implement PPM anywhere without any stress.

Important things in picking a vendor are the support structure, and an orientation to reaching out and delivering value. CA Technologies always put the customer first and are factual, and deliver solutions that exceed customer expectations.

The Project Portfolio Management software helped get all of your projects, all of our project costs, and all of our people working on those projects gathered together in one single place so we know what we're working on, and where we're spending our money.

The main benefit of using the SaaS (software as a service) platform is that everything is taken care of for us. We don't need to buy the hardware. We don't need to do the installation. We don't need to do the upgrades. That's all done for us. It's just handled.

It gives us a better sense of what people are working on and where we're spending our money. It also lets us know what things are actually costing. So sometimes projects that aren't valuable are costing a lot of money. It gives us that information. It lets us know if we have enough people to take on additional projects, or if we don't have enough people, and we've got to make some hard decisions about those projects.

It's a single database, so all the information goes in one single place, and there are common workflows and processes, common forms and pages to fill out. We have the same information on these projects across business units and business divisions, and then within given teams, and we have that same common repository to view information.

Resource management is the key, so making sure we have the right people working on the right projects, and we have enough people to manage those projects. It gives the ability to add some prioritization and ranking of those projects as well.

So the only thing that’s missing is that the dashboards do not go into enough detail. The user interface and the user experience can be improved.

One of the things they're doing now is they're putting that new user experience in, a new user interface which is very simple and easy to use. It's something that people can understand easily without training, but it's still very limited. It only covers a little bit of the product. It covers just very basic project and task management. You cannot go as deep into it into the more detailed task management, or more projects, or in idea management, and so on. I'd like to extend that user experience into other areas and deeper.

It's stable. It's been around a long time.

It scales as far as you want to go, so there are no issues.

My impressions of technical support are a little mixed. You can get some very good people, or you can get a little less junior people. So sometimes you get your answer right away; sometimes it may take a little bit longer, but you can always get your answer. There are a lot of good resources out there. There's a great community, so you get a lot of good information and answers from the user community.

It's a very good solution. You get a lot of value out of it. If you're bringing it into an organization, the software is only part of the challenge. There are also the people and processes that you already have. Go in stages. Start with a step, and then take a bigger step. Don't try to do it all at once. Try to do a phased implementation.