Broadcom Clarity Reviews

The competitiveness of the product in terms of functionality is the most valuable feature. It has all the features that we and the people we work with need to do their jobs. The core features are PM management, resource management, portfolio management. Those are invaluable tools for anyone who needs to do IT governance.

The principal benefit is the ability to forecast demand and balance it against the capacity of the organization. That means the efficient use of personnel, minimal downtime, and maximum productivity.

There’s always room for improvement as business needs change. We give considerable feedback through the years to CA for product improvement, which should guide future development of the product. The needs of the end users are extremely important.

I have been a Clarity/PPM user for probably 15 years, since before it was called Clarity.

Extremely stable. It’s been out for many years, and although the version has changed, the core product is fundamentally stable. The code is configurable – you can configure it to make sense to the end user.

We have used CA Clarity/PPM from less than 500 to more than 100,000 and it scales perfectly.

They’re good at the fundamentals.

Out-of-the-box, it is straightforward, but every time you implement a new instance you want to change and configure it to meet the needs of your audience. It’s a strength of the tool that it can be configured that way – you don’t have to do things the way the developers want you to do it. You can design your own workflows and processes which makes it much more effective to use.

There are three things that are important when dealing with any vendor: support, support, support. There are lots of products out there that have similar features and functionality and wonderful interfaces, but if a software vendor is going to throw a bunch of CDs at you and leave you alone now that they’ve got your money, it’s no good. It’s how they support the product after you buy it.

I’ve evaluated the other PPM tools and competitors and found that CA PPM is heads and shoulders above the rest. The functionality is robust because of the partnership – CA partners with their user community to support the product.

It provides the functions you need to do governance in the organization which makes it best in class, in my opinion. It does a lot very well, but there’s always room for improvement. If you hit 10/10, the competition is going to leapfrog you and you’re done.

Talk to companies in their industry that are using PPM tools and find out what they like. If I’m in the banking industry looking for a PPM tool, I'd ask other banks.

The most valuable features is the broad spectrum ability to pull in all of our portfolio information and drive that down to where the end result outputs to our financials. This allows us to close books each month.

We're a private company, so we do a lot around CapEx from the perspective of revenue and how all that is driven from a financial perspective, so by having a broad overview of bringing things in through ideation and portfolio management and approvals for money spent, we're able to keep a pretty good control over that from a holistic, enterprise-wide perspective.

Particularly in our technology department, we get approvals for projects, expenditure for each project, and when the projects are approved, we're able to track them on the portfolio down to the project-level.

This is from a global-perspective too, as we're headquartered in Nashville but we have heavy usage over in Asia, Hong Kong, and our Tokyo office. CA PPM is pretty good in getting a really granular, line-item overview of where we're at, pretty much almost real-time from expenditures.

They've got to come up to the year 2015 on user interface. It's really just not there. We've recently been looking at other products, wondering if we want to make a move. We don't really think that's the right answer, but at the same time we're hoping to see something here to help us with what we're doing.

They've really failed to innovate on the user-interface perspective. The complexities of the product are it's strength and it's weakness. We have a poor level of user adoption right now, just because it's so hard for people who who go in just once a week to do something. It's difficult for project managers to go in and remember how to do it, get through things in the user interface. We're kind of hoping to see something here at this conference, future road maps for user interface improvements, HTML5, whatever, to lessen some of those qualms.

Deployment has had no issues.

Stability’s fine. It's feature-rich, and that's fine.

No issues whatsoever.

I don't believe that we've had any instance that made it outside of our internal support in recent memory.

We recently upgraded to 14.2, and that was smooth and issue-less.

It's functionality is way up there at a grade of 9-8 out of 10. It's the industry leader in what you can do with it. The ability to get in and do that stuff, for people maybe with a lower technical aptitude than guys like us at these conferences, the user interface would make it a 4.

Make sure you have a PMO in place that is a very strong center of knowledge for your project managers. Also, make sure you're providing solid training on the usage of the tool. If you elect to go with a more agile model where you're kind of doing away with PMO, then what happens is you lose that center of knowledge about the use of PP MCA, and as I mentioned before, the complexity of the use of it is it's weakest point. We're experiencing a lot of problems with that right now.

We are mandated by law to rigorously manage change to our systems and to ensure zero or very minimal impact to our customers. Given the systems that we had in place -- and we've got thousands of users and thousands of projects in major systems, comprising a large part of the economy -- we could no longer use disparate systems to govern all of those things. So we implemented Clarity PPM to enforce a standard change management protocol.

However, what we have found is we are leveraging the data behind it to do more portfolio management, which really boils down to, are we working on the right things? Are we using the right people? Are we getting return on investment? Are we utilizing our resources and it has opened up a level of transparency into our change delivery efforts and costs that we've never had before?

The answers are, yes. It's an amazing solution.

It has been severely disruptive in a good way, which is exactly what I had hoped for. Although we manage projects well, our practices were immature. But we didn't manage portfolios well. There was a lot of room for improvement and now that we're migrating to be a more data-driven organization with strategic alignment and execution and quality and performance and those kind of measures, it's changing the paradigm of project management in our organization.

Typically, a portfolio management tool or project management tool is bought by people that need to govern the process, but it is used by people who have to get the work done. It's nice to actually see a transition to the governance space to the user base because you will enable teams to collaborate, giving you better performance and better quality if you focus on the end users rather than a strict governance command and control model.

Even using basic functionality, capturing all the data, and standardizing simple practices has literally in the last 12 months lead to the behavior change that we wanted to see. It helped us accomplish our goals. It did that for us. We would not have been able to do it without this tool and/or the support.

I'd like to see improvement in broader portfolio management. It still seems to kind of be a specifically separate module from the project management and we really are aggregating a lot of data to make higher-level strategic decisions. Now that we're in that space, our executives want more. Specifically, they want to see high-level reports. They want to see the underlying data that supports it so that we can build that trust. So combining the portfolio and project management aspects would go a long way towards that.

I'm more of a super user on the business side of adoption. We are constantly in contact with our sales rep about challenges we have in maturity adoption and what pieces of the tool will support what types of strategic adoptions. I know that we had a technical resource on site to help us configure. I'm very happy with the level of support we've got from CA.

I'm actually leading adoption efforts and was part of the team that reviewed and implemented the tool. Adoption is always difficult. Change is hard and it's never really a technology-type thing. It's more of a human behavior-type exercise. We were challenged. We were absolutely challenged. We found our champions early. We set some minimum baselines and adoption. We reported on adoption and quality of data to motivate people to clean their stuff up. We let people innovate and go farther ahead and as they they pioneered some of the functionality. That's the hardest part of the whole thing, is getting people to adopt.

The thing with software is it can do anything but you can't adopt anything. Know your audience, know your internal customers. Start small. Keep it simple. Get the blocking and tackling and the basics down pat. You will see change. You'll see lasting change but you've got to stick with basics and build upon them.

Obviously, the project management aspect itself is valuable to us, but we're also using it for portfolio management and financial planning. The combination of these three functions makes this a great tool.

We used an old, in-house system and we configured CA PPM to look and feel like the old one. This didn’t benefit us and we should have probably used PPM as it came.

There were some bugs in the old version that were supposed to be fixed but are not. Some features that needed to be added have never been added.

After assisted implementation, we haven't had issues with deploying it.

The solution has up until this point been stable.

It has scaled well so far.

Online support would be an 8/10, but it depends on the person, and the first level is not good as the next level.

We got support for our implementation so that made it easier.

I only recommend to use it the way it was designed and to minimize custom configurations.

It allows us to manage our products with all its features, like configurability, filters, add-ons, third-party app integrations, etc.

In our company, we have several projects for which PPM really helps us. It mainly helps us track dates and deadline, and makes sure we're within budget with project costs. All this is very important as we deliver projects for our customers. We're also able to track projects for out customers.

Right now, we're also seeking CMMAI certification, and PPM is helping us with that.

The user interface is a little outdated. But nothing is perfect, though it has all components that we need.

We've had no issues with deploying PPM.

It's been very stable for us.

The tool has supported our scaling without issue.

We aren't using technical support.

Initial setup was totally straightforward.

Just buy it and use it as the tool and all its features are very, very good.

I like using the on-demand feature as it requires a lot less maintenance for me. Once you understand the product, it’s easy to use. It's initially challenging, but it does what it’s supposed to do. At this point, we can't ask for much more.

We upgraded from a previous version, and the reporting feature has made that aspect of our work easier. Other than that, I wouldn't say that it's changed the organization too much.

I think the user interface could be more user friendly. For people who don't use it as part of their daily routine, it can be challenging at first. You get used to it, but it could definitely use some improvement.

I've used it for eight years.

The system is extremely stable.

It has adapted well over time and handled everything we have thrown at it.

The support is excellent and very easy to work with. They are responsive, very nice to talk with; we have a long-term relationship.

Our previous version needed updating. There’s nothing more to say, we simply needed to update.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself and it was very easy.

Take the time to understand your desired outcome. You get so involved with what you want, but be sure to have a roadmap and game plan with using PPM.

For us, it’s all about resource management and schedule management. Without this, we would be in trouble. This solution has it and more.

It’s driven global consistency and the management of our projects. We have used it a long time and are seeing great benefits by sticking with the product.

We have not deployed the latest version, but a problem we are seeing is the inability to get data out of the system and into Excel. This is a feature we want and need.

We have been using this solution since 2003.

It has been consistently stable over the years. This for us is critical.

In terms of scalability, it has adapted well. We use it for both small projects and very large projects. I think it’s great that it handles both kinds of projects with equal power.

They're very knowledgeable, and there have been times in which we have had big issues which we call show stoppers. When this happens, you need a different level of support, and, thankfully, we are on first-name basis. Therefore, all is resolved quickly.

We did not have a global solution and we needed one. This was something we needed internally and now we have it. You need to really understand what the business needs are going to be; this is essential. Also, I recommend going out and evaluating, both personally and from people in the industry.

It's valuable for us to be able to get data across the enterprise. We focus a lot on resources, so being able to get the actuals by project is big. We do reporting at the enterprise level and are focused on the portfolio management side of things, so communicating, aggregating, and analyzing are important. We are married to Business Objects InfoView.

In our organization we are very siloed, so our executive management doesn't always see the value in sharing data across the enterprise. We feel that the business isn’t using it to its fullest extent, although it does give visibility as enterprise projects are moving through different regions.

It allows us to collect all of the projects for which people want visibility across different lines of business, but we have a lot of leaders who don’t understand a lot of the value of the information and what we could be doing with it, which is a business problem – that has hindered out ability to leverage the functionality with the tool and therefore some of our project managers aren’t fully engaged with the solution. It’s a top-down problem, but the tool is fine.

We’re happy with it. Very few performance issues.

We have not been overwhelmingly happy with that. We had the dedicated resource option, but it was challenging for us when we ran across problems during times of upgrade because we didn’t seem to get the assistance we needed. The documentation wasn’t always correct or thorough, or necessarily updated from version to version. There are some basic documentation problems, so we have found more valuable information for troubleshooting in the communities.

We get a lot of “I don’t know” or “let me find that”, but with nothing in the documentation, so we have ended up going with a third-party to help us as they had more expertise.

It was already in production when I joined.

We haven’t leveraged the full functionality of the solution. The tool is pretty great, and we have implemented some unusual things and not implemented some of other functionality that would enhance our use case. There are have been some challenges on the reporting side with maintenance, and that adds to our frustration when we go through upgrade after upgrade.

The main thing is defining your requirements – don’t let the tool drive your requirements. Understand what your goals are, so you can track that and really get the value out of the tool. It would be smart to use the functionality that exists within the tool in the out-of-the-box state, and only customize as necessary. Take your requirements and match up with OOB functionality and do the gap analysis to make decisions. When we first implemented PPM, we tried to make it into a previous tool that we had, which was terrible, so we turned PPM into the same type of tool.

Also understand what resource constraints you have in your organization to decide whether it needs to be on-premise or on-demand. Understand what level of control you really need in your environment because there are some limitations in the SaaS environment that you need to be aware of.