Broadcom Clarity Reviews

The most valuable features are project management, resource management, and idea management.

I run a PMO with a portfolio of initiatives, and we have to report on those to upper management to keep them abreast of the health of the products, critical issues, things that need to be escalated. To get the reporting, I need to ensure that the tool is easy to use for project managers.

It's really improved our organizational transparency. It gives us visibility into all of the projects and programs people are working on. That covers the health of the projects, financial health, resource allocation, etc.

The biggest area of improvement is reporting, though that’s going to be fixed in v14.3, which we’ll move to. There aren’t enough out-of-the-box, standard reports. The tools weren’t there for end users to write or create their own reports.

The user interface isn’t very intuitive for someone who’s not living in the product day in and day out.

Very stable, probably the most stable of any company where I’ve used it. It’s never gone down.

It’s very scalable – probably the most scalable for an enterprise that really wants to manage their portfolio of projects across the enterprise.

I’ve been working with it for about 15 years since it was Niku, then Clarity, then PPM.

We use our own technology team to support the solution, and if they can’t solve the issue they go to CA support.

I wasn't involved in the implementation.

It’s a very robust tool and really does everything we need it to do as a PPM tool, but the reporting has held back its adopting, as has the user interface. People tend to find folks who use it because they’re forced to be compliant and not because it’s their tool of choice.

Most obvious piece of advice is, don’t underestimate the effort in implementing a tool like this. Understand the maturity of the people in your organization relative to project management and discipline. The more mature they are, the easier it will be to sell. Make sure you’ve got the process down before you try to implement the CA PPM solution.

The most valuable features are resource management and portfolio management. We have too many projects in our organization and not enough resources, which PPM allows us to manage.

Right now, it’s supporting project prioritization. That’s why we brought it in. It lets us get a holistic view of what the projects are and whether there are deficiencies in a given area and whether we are short on something. We’re not quite there yet in utilizing its capabilities, but it’s getting better.

Anything that enhances portfolio management will help us out, but we’re still struggling internally to fully utilize that capability.

Pretty good. There are some hiccups in terms of our understanding of how the product works, and CA support understanding the problems as well. We didn’t understand that there are two components to PPM – in terms of the PPM solution and then the reporting is handled out of business objects. In our situation in on-demand if you run a report and then leave it up in business objects the time-out on the BO side is not the same as the time-out on the PPM side and it doesn’t synchronize and come across.

How that manifests- when it times out it makes my reports unavailable and can’t report anymore. We have a workaround for the moment. It took one or two months to even understand what the problem was, and CA didn’t understand either. CA provided a solution that was for on-premise versus our situation which is on-demand (cloud-based).

Not seeing any issues, but we’re only at 150 users. It could handle many more if we needed it to.

There were some misunderstandings when we set up our account in terms organizational differences within our business units, which we still need to straighten out with CA.

CA directed us to a systems integrator who may not have been completely skilled in the product, or maybe our timelines were too tight. Our product knowledge is still incomplete in some of the areas.

It’s a big robust application that does lots of things that we don’t use or need to use. Because it’s so configurable, in that way it is very complex.

Reporting has been an issue for us, so what I would consider a fundamental report that links financials to actuals. Do due diligence around time entry and allocations because that’s really the engine that drives resource scheduling and management. In order to get the tool to work there has to be a lot of underlying data that have to be good. Getting resources to put in their allocations, getting resources to make sure their time sheets are completed, and getting PMs to allocate and assign resources are all key.

It’s deployed corporate-wide and has a heavy user-base, and we provide custom modifications to the solution. I also do all the deployments for seven different environments with each having three servers.

I’d like the install to work a lot better and to be more tailored. It also needs to support a forced functionality of the install.

It’s not bad, though we have intermittent issues with services going down. It’s a background service that runs reports, which seems to hang every so often, so we need to be pretty diligent in keeping our eye on that. When it goes down, users aren’t able to run reports so we have to bounce the reports server. But overall, it’s fairly stable.

It’s pretty easy to throw into any environment.

Usually their tech support isn’t very good. We usually end up fixing it ourselves or writing our own XML code. But, they try their best.

If I call support, I don’t like getting a middle person, which I frequently do. I try to figure it out myself before I call them. Escalations are usually very good. We had an issue with a recent upgrade so we created a P1 ticket and escalated it after day one and they were right on it. They worked well with me and they were there with me for a 17-hour day to get the system up.

They’re getting better and have been better recently than in the past.

The installs never go smoothly. You can have all your system requirements met and all your ducks in a row. The CA XMLs won’t work.

We recently did an upgrade which took over two weeks to get up and running, which was an incremental update.

The install packages are the worst I’ve ever seen.

Overall it’s a very good, powerful product. It’s one of our two or three major products. It’s used by everyone, and it’s easy to customize. It’s fairly reliable once it’s deployed, it looks nice, the reports look nice, and it’s easy to move around. The only gripe I have is the install.

With any solution, you need to be able to customize and tailor it. You need to modify and add your pipelines and any other custom attributes you need, fairly easily and fairly quickly. It needs to be able to deploy from one environment to another fairly easily, which the CA PPM solution does.

The most valuable part is the ability to report efficiently across the globe how the company is doing. This is the biggest advantage to me.

Standardization across large company standard operating procedures. The biggest are financial reporting, task management, work breakdown structures, risk and issue reporting. As all of this can be done from one place. We can manage it all with change management.

I want to see trends and how things change over time. Now, you only see what’s live in the system, and there's no way currently to see what yesterday’s project was and how it's changed. They don’t have snapshots in time.

Also, I'd like flexible reporting that can be done quickly. Right now, we pull everything into Excel, and the length of time for reporting can be long.

We've been using it for 11 years. I joined five years ago and they had already had it for six years by then.

There's been no issues. There are occasional problems, but these are quickly resolved either internally or with the help of CA.

It scales well, but the problem is cost.

I haven't used it internally as our in-house IT team deals with them.

I wasn’t involved in the setup.

Buying in large quantities is more cost effective than a one-to-one basis. Periodically, we try to figure out how much we need to avoid buying one-to-one.

Look at the support as that's important, not what's in situ. However, things like trend analysis and flexible reporting are missing, which are weaknesses.

Take advantage of out-of-the-box functionalities. We made the mistake of doing a lot of customization when we set up 10 years ago, and it doesn’t play well with certain newer abilities or other output. So use as much out-of-the-box features that are already there as possible, as you never know what you want.

Product management and time management are the most valuable features for us, as it’s far superior to Microsoft Project, and the others are worse.

It's helped us with holding the staff who use it accountable. If we are tracking time, for example, you can determine whether employees are over/under loaded, etc.

An improvement would be location tracking to see where employees are.

I’ve heard a lot of good things, and for me it’s been fine.

We're small so we've had no problems.

We've never had to use them.

We previously used Microsoft Project, but this is better because our clients are using it as well.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

We were looking for a solution that had good testing space and SOA, and compared it to Microsoft Project.

Check other CA technologies, and see if you can integrate the technologies as they work well together.

Capacity and demand management allows me to know if I have enough resources for all the projects that I have to do. It helps to drive the whole budget of the department.

It allows me to easily keep track of and report costs for the company in order to reach our profit and loss objectives. It’s a good tool to manage capacity and demand which ultimately impacts the profit and loss.

This is the first time I’m using a partition (one installation for the holding company which includes a partition for my company and our sister company). It would be nice to have more configuration options at the partition level. Resources are at the system level and for an administrator, which can become confusing when troubleshooting issues.

We started the implementation last year, and are still doing this.

I have used CA PPM in three separate companies. I have never had an issue with stability. However, I have always used on premise and not SaaS. In general, I’m not a fan of SaaS. If there are stability issues, I know it’s on our end.

I do not have any scalability issues.

Currently, my implementation partner (R2) has only used technical support when we ran into an issue during implementation.

I've always been using this and I wanted to continue. I implemented a Microsoft Project Server at a prior company, and it was not as good. Where I am now, I got to pick so I chose this.

I am currently using a CA Partner (R2) to assist with the implementation.

I look at usability. As a resource, I want to do the least amount of clicks and streamline processes. I have looked at other products, however, CA PPM is the only solution that will keep a managed service provider plan in sync with timesheets when a Project Manager deletes a task that has actuals on it. This was the best feature and a huge selling point for me.

Let your employees understand the benefits of CA PPM and show them how much it will help them to do their work. A tool should be used to make their lives easier and not treated as an annoyance.

It gives us complete visibility of resource allocation on a global team.

It forced the organization to implement standard project management practices.

Make transitions easier to implement, e.g. if a new portfolio comes along, it should be easy to integrate to the existing portfolios.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's good.

It's good.

No previous solution was used.

We used a vendor team.

We've not measured it.

We also looked at SAP PPM.

Plan, plan, plan. Make sure you understand your organizational needs and you know the process forward and backwards. The software is just a tool, if you do not understand what you're fixing, there is no way the software will help