Broadcom Clarity Reviews

I am a consultant and I recommend and implement specific solutions for my clients. I am currently working on behalf of a company that implements this product for its customers.

Clarity PPM is a product that I have worked with personally. It is primarily used for project management, project portfolio management, and for reporting services.

The interfaces for project management, portfolio management, and reporting services are always helpful.

Intake and demand management functionality could be better.

In the future, I would like to see integrated Agile features and better integration with Agile tools. There are a lot of different teams that are using Agile tools and there is a demand for that.

I have worked with Broadcom Clarity PPM for more than five years.

Scalability is great, especially with cloud-based solutions. It makes the product very portable and users can access it on tablets, smartphones, and whatever device they have. This model makes it scalable.

The implementation is not complete and it is expected to take between four and eight months.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for time management, product management, resource management, and financial management. We use it for any type of governance that's needed for a project.

The solution has helped us with the finance aspects of our organization.

The solution is the best tool for portfolio and project management.

It's very good out of the box, without configurations required.

The user interface (UI) needs to be improved. Right now, it's not the best.

The usability at this point is terrible. It makes the product hard to use unnecessarily. It's not intuitive at all. I've had to force myself to learn it and it's been hard.

We use an older version, so It might have been updated in newer versions. That said, everything needs to be fixed, including the font, colors, and navigation. It's literally every aspect that needs updating.

The core of PPM is very complex.

The solution needs more documentation.

The technical support is not the best. It needs better support for Agile practices.

It's very difficult to integrate anything with the product.

I've been using the solution for five or six years at this point.

The solution is stable. There are no issues there. I don't recall having any issues with reliability.

The scalability is a bit complex. It's hard to modify things on the product, which affects the ability to expand.

I'm not sure of how many users are on the solution.

The technical support was terrible. We weren't too satisfied with their level of support.

When it came to getting help with integration, we really didn't get any support.

They also need more documentation. There's not enough to really be able to help clients.

We didn't previously use a different solution, however, Broadcom used to be CI Technologies.

The solution is not straightforward. It's complex. On top of that, the usability is bad, which makes the entire process even harder than it has to be. It requires a lot of knowledge.

With one client, with all the implementation and configurations needed, the deployment process took about a year.

I'm not sure how many employees were needed for deployment or maintenance.

I don't know of what the actual costs of the solution were.

I recommend PPM. I'd advise against changing functionality on the box, however.

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution, however, I believe it to be some aspect of version 12 - potentially 12.4. It's an older on-premises version.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

Working on the technical side of this CA tool for last 9 years with different different companies and clients.

The health report and all metrics of any project including KPIs are now available in a central location under the clarity project or project dashboard, replacing all those excel spreadsheets.

Time Entry, Resource Allocation, Interactive Dashboards, Risk Management, Integration with Jaspersoft reports.

The application memory management and responsiveness of this JAVA product can be improved, especially in the peak usage times. A better way to track, analyze and tweak the heap memory would be a great addition to this PPM tool

More than five years.

Occasional slowness of the product at peak usage times like Budget season, mostly due to poor heap memory management.

No. Its perfectly scalable and perfectly easy to implement the change.

Customer Service:

It's awesome 10/10

Technical Support:

It's very good 9/10

No

Yes, the installation/upgrade is complex. You will need many mock runs in non-prod environments before we try the new version in PROD. Each version upgrade can come with new issues and challenges. But from the latest v14.x versions, this has been simplified a lot.

In-house

We did some analysis on HP PPM. Found Clarity PPM better.

If anyone is looking for a Project and Portfolio Management tool, then I highly recommend CA Clarity PPM. Of all the PPM tools we had tried, Clarity PPM is the most robust, multi-functional and reliable tool.

Check out my other Clarity PPM detailed review at http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/ca...

Our primary use case is mostly for financial purposes. We have a finance team and it's used for time keeping as well. Those are the two major things that we use it for, financial budgeting and for time keeping. I am the tech support of our team so I'm responsible for keeping the servers working, upgrading the system and getting certain integrations and the like. I'm a software engineer. 

This is the first PPM tool I've used so I can't provide a comparison. It's technically fine, is very user friendly, and it's a good tool. We get pretty good support from Broadcom as well.

The solution is lacking in certain integrations but that's generally the way because each organization has different preferences. I feel like they could be using more updated technology, like EPA and things like that. I think those are the aspects that they might improve because we need to keep up with the times in order to be relevant with the current technology, and with what is happening in the world of technology. The standards are there and it takes a lot of time for every organization to move their core base to newer technology. I understand that aspect as well, but they could look into it.

There are many technologies that leverage JavaScript, for example, such as NodeJS and AngularJS and all of that and JSON as well. We're not using any of them which is understandable because they use Java. I'm younger, so in college I dealt with newer technologies like the NodeJS which I like. These are technologies that they may implement in the future.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is mostly stable. I'm not sure if other organizations follow this or not, but I always stick with one version below the latest to give the vendor time to catch all the errors and bugs. I don't have any complaints with the stability. 

We have a lot of Clarity users in the company and it already scales to a pretty substantial level, I would say.

We have very good technical support. 

I would say that the support and the community of Broadcom is pretty extensive and it's actually very good. I did not use it initially, but I would suggest that you should use the support and the community that is available for Clarity. We were lucky to have good initial support so I didn't have to struggle that much because I got enough knowledge transfer to get me through.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are using it mainly for project management, but also for topics like resource management and portfolio management.

The project management from CA PPM has been improving a lot. Also, we have been reviewing, once a year, the functionality to see how we can make adjustments to the IT configurations and improve our system.

The most valuable features are the project, resource, and portfolio management processes are combined in one solution. The data is possible to use either in the one or the other process, and we do not need to enter the data multiple times. Then, we use the information for multiple purposes.

It would be good for them to work on the user interface to make it more interactive. They started with on something, but the functionality is not yet in a state where I would say, "Oh wow, use that one." 

The stability is okay. We do not have any issues with it.

There have been no issues on our side.

We use technical support every so often. The competency and available support are quite good, therefore we do not have any issues with support. Every time that we have a case where we need support, it is clarified right away.

I was not involved in the initial setup or implementation.

We evaluate if the solution is the right one for us once a year, therefore we are compare different alternatives.

On our short list, there was CA which is the product that we have now. Additionally, we evaluated Microsoft Project. From a functionality perspective, both were very similar, but we already used CA products for several years. We decided to stay with CA because the integration effort would otherwise be high.

Think about processes before implementing the solution. Then, connect the processes with the solution and make sure the solution is supporting the processes, and not that the processes need to be adjusted to fit to the solution.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is to have a good balance between cost and functionality.

We use PPM for strategic portfolio management across our entire organization, and for managing all of our strategic projects.

We're on the latest release of 15.3, and so far it's performing great. It's meeting all our needs.

The benefits are that it creates visibility across our whole organization. People that were often left in the dark wondering what was happening with projects. Now have an easy solution to see all the information they want to see across the whole portfolio.

It's definitely improving our ability to make better decisions, and improving the quality of data that we have, to make the decisions for the strategic good of the company.

• Flexibility
• Easy user adoption

Those are valuable because the tool should be an enabler and not a barrier to people getting their work done.

Ultimately, I would like to see them keep moving in the direction that they are, and get everything over into the new UX, to modernized portfolio management; To get all of the project management capabilities moved over into the new UX. 

Also, they should continue to listen to their customers for influence and feedback.

I wish patches would be quicker since we're a SaaS customer, and just be a non-event, so we don't have to go through a whole - essentially - upgrade cycle, just to do a patch. As a SaaS customer, I'd like the patch to just happen.

We're a SaaS customer, so stability has been pretty much in line with our expectations.

Scalability has been good. We initially rolled it out just for IT, but it's been growing to other areas of our organization. So it's proven to be quite scalable for us.

Technical support has been helpful for us, in particular with the second-level support engineers. They've been very helpful. When we have problems, they're not typically the simple end-users problems that can be solved by front-line support, so the second-level support engineers have been very helpful for us. They are responsive.

We were running all manual processes, and using Excel spreadsheets, and investing far too much manual effort to try and run a process.

One of the main drivers in our choosing CA was that it was one of the recognized industry leaders. Also, we had an existing relationship with CA from other work that we had done with them in the past.

It was a long time ago. It went well. It was challenging because we thought we knew everything we wanted to get out of the tool, but we didn't know what we didn't know. So there are a lot of things, now, that we would have gone back and done differently, and made a lot simpler in the beginning.

Upgrades have gotten better each time. We just, a month ago, upgraded from 15.1 to 15.3. It's been the smoothest upgrade that we've ever done. Past upgrades, we certainly had some challenges, especially going from 14 to 15 or 13 to 14, but they've gotten better each time.

Last time, when we upgraded to 15.1, we had some challenges around Jaspersoft, and also some issues with supporting some of the complex process work flows that we had designed internally, that were affected by some changes in the process engine. But recently, with this most recent upgrade to 15.3 there were really no problems to speak of. 

We looked at CA and we also looked at Planview and HPE.

The new UX is great because it has helped remove some of those barriers, so that people who are not classically trained project managers can easily get up to speed in using the tool without having to learn a whole other tool set. It's very intuitive, and very collaborative, and very easy to adapt to their existing work styles.

Regarding choosing a vendor, for us the vendors need to understand how we do business, and understand our unique needs and requirements, and be responsive.

Start simple. We tried to do too much in the beginning. Just start simple and grow into the tool.

Project Management and timesheets.

For projects, having all of the relevant data in one location is helpful.

• Project Management, as it allows us to track all of a project's elements in one database.
• Reporting allows us to create custom reports.
• Dashboards are useful to review a large number of projects.

Needs Gantt to MS Project link.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate support a seven.

Multiple solutions. Switch was to pull data into one software package.

Complex. There was a lot of customization that was required to adapt PPM for our needs.

We evaluated other options, but I was not involved in that stage.

Consider your company's requirements and review the features of PPM against those requirements.

The communication aspects have greatly improved. Before it was a lot of just relying upon hallway conversations or picking up the phone, maybe sending out emails, and they may or may not get answered. Knowing that we have these workflows in place and that they are going through, and that our executive leaders have to take an action as well as our department managers and program leaders, that has been beneficial.

What has been valuable are the workflows that are there today in order to keep our executive staff informed as well as our program managers and department managers.

We have not migrated to 15.3. We are still on 14.4 and the look and the feel is a bit antiquated, but seeing some of the improvements that are in 15.3, it is catching up with the times.

The features, they are slowly rolling out. I like the collaboration aspects of what I am seeing with 15.3 to where your team can go in and have conversations that are captured versus going to some other field, clicking on a tab, and typing in your information there, then hoping others migrate to that area. It is improving.

We are in the SaaS environment. Within the SaaS environment (since CA is supporting it), it has been extremely stable and reliable.

It is serving our needs today, but there is certainly a lot more that we can be utilizing. As an organization, we are in an infancy stage of implementation. So, I see over the next few years ramping up and improving how we can utilize the tool.

They are extremely responsive. They can be very technical, whereas for my needs, I'd prefer if they scale down to layman's terms and explain things in other terms. We do work through the issues, and I know that they are well qualified and highly technical.

I would probably rate it about an eight out of 10, because there is always room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is more about the product and what it can provide for us as well as the professionalism of the organization and the staff. We rely quite heavily on their expertise and on their thoughts as well as their best practices.

The primary use case is managing projects.

Visibility to where we are on projects. It tells someone where we are; if we're in trouble or not. I do look forward to getting more Risks/Issues functionality. I think that will help it even further. But pretty well, it's visability.

• Easy to use, visually
• The new UX is intuitive, which is cool

The features I use the most are the planning, the Kanban layout.

Having everything in one solution. Right now I don't really have to bounce back and forth between the new UX and CA PPM, so that's a good thing. But, improve Resource Planning. 

To be honest, I'd like to see having it work internally. Catch up to the features that are available in the solution. I think it's more on our side than on the CA side.

No problems. Some in our company have mentioned have mentioned they've encountered small problems, but I don't see them.

I really haven't put that to the test yet.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup, I understand that it was not straightforward, very complex. We were told by our headquarters that this is the solution we're going to use. "Here you go. Here, figure it out."

Internally, it would have been easier if our headquarters had used it in the way it was intended, and then, shared that knowledge with us. I don't believe that happened. So, we did go outside and hire a consultant to bring knowledge in-house. It helped us better understand how to use the tool.

I think the new UX is going to be better for project planning. There are some features I'm looking forward to in future releases. Some of the stuff we saw in the roadmap: program planning, roadmapping, dependencies. The Resource Planning, I look forward to using that a little more.

When choosing a product/vendor the important criteria for me are

• easy to use
• quick results; being able to provide a status in two seconds

• having anyone else sign in, where I can display my screen, and they know what's happening with the project. That's important to me.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because it's "almost there" and it's probably the best solution I've seen in my career. It's not a 10 because I see what's coming and we aren't there yet. We use what we have now, but the next release will help move the needle further.

I don't know if I would give advice. I would just tell them how it's worked for us.