Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Manage projects, resources, and financials.

It's performing better with the new UI. The old UI is clunky and slow, but it's staring to get better.

It's pretty much the source of "the truth." Everything is together, everyone can see all the resources, financial projects, how long a project's going to take. Anybody can go in there and see any information they need about the organization as a whole.

Usability of the new UI. It's easier for people to go in there and know what to do. To train people, it's faster, more intuitive.

Also, managing resources. It's definitely the most important thing for managing your project.

Work Breakdown Structure in the Tasks: be able to drag and drop to a level three instead of just stuck at level two.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

Upgrading to 5.1 there was an issue, a syncing issue on the back end, that ending up getting fixed after about two weeks.

No issues with scalability. It seems we can have as many users as we need to. We've probably added around 50 full licenses but I haven't seen any issues with that in resources we have; a few hundred resources in there.

Tech support is good. A 10 out of 10. Everything was responded to within 24 hours, except for one issue where there was some miscommunication, but that ended up getting resolved in a few days just by sending an email to our rep.

Everything was through Microsoft Project, just the desktop version. People would get printouts or PDF's of them.

I was not involved but I think it was pretty straightforward.

Workfront was one of the vendors. We went with the CA solutions because headquarters was going with CA PPM, so we decided to move in that direction.

It has improved; 15.3 was a huge update. You have the Risks/Issues/Changes added to the new UX.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• usability
• functionality 
• making it easy for the end user to use. 

Make people want to use it. If anything's overly complex, people won't use it. People have a difficult time moving to a new solution so it just has to be easy, so a non-technical user should be able to feel comfortable, click around, and not be intimidated by the solution.

I would give it a seven out of 10, just because the classic UI is very cumbersome. It can do everything but it's hard to use. It's easy to use once you understand it, but it's intimidating at first for somebody to see the solution. With the new UI, CA is heading in the right direction, and fast. They're adding features, I would say major features, two times a year, which is fast.

I would recommend it, but are there better solutions out there for another company? Maybe. There may be easier solutions out there.

CA should go in the same direction, move forward with the UX and keep developing that. There are a lot of startups that already have the usability; it's easy for them. But they're missing features.

We're using it for project and for portfolio planning, and we're continuing to use it for financial investment planning in the future.

We've got four different instances on it, but we've only rolled it out in my area, corporate IT, and for 150 users. 

It performs well.

We've been lacking a project management system that we could easily pull data out of, as leads were putting it in. So the users were not updating the systems, whatever system they were using, as much.

It allows me to keep track of the projects, residual location, it gives me the ease of getting status reports out, and checking risks and issues.

I don't have anything specific to note right now. We're not using all the features, functionality yet.

It's stable.

Technical support is typically on par, gives you quick answers, and gets back with you relatively quickly.

There's always an issue or two that hangs out there, that does not get resolved, but for the most part we get good service.

We were using Artemis. We switched because it was not meeting our needs. They weren't using it in the way that they wanted to be using it. It didn't have the functionality.

We are using software service, so it's been pretty straightforward.

Oracle Primavera was on the shortlist as was Attask. But CA PPM is a more comprehensive enterprise type of solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is longevity.

I give CA PPM a nine out of 10 because there's always room for improvement, but they gave a good quality solution.

I would recommend it.

For us, it's about getting more information into CA PPM, which then allows us to drive more insights and provide that information to our leadership team and our executives to make a better informed decision as far as how they're investing, and how we're tracking towards our strategic objectives.

The value for Telstra is really around how we can manage strategic investments, so we've moved earlier this year to CA PPM Cloud. It's greatly changed our user experience for our 1,500 project managers.

I think the new road mapping feature that's coming out shortly - and available now, but obviously continues to progress - I think the product moving more to that grid base, so that Excel look and feel is how it's going. The app style of the new UI is absolutely fantastic. It's the right way to go. Our users will love it, so I think they should continue along that journey.

I think there's still a little bit of opportunity that we can do some stuff better in relation to the financial part of it; just that easier integration, that look and feel. Our project managers, and obviously finance people, love to interface and use of Excel. The more we can get CA PPM to behave in a similar way, which we're already starting to gain in that path, will be absolutely fantastic.

It's very stable. We've been very impressed with moving from on-premises to SaaS, and made the transition seamlessly. We could run the two systems in parallel, which is absolutely fantastic.

But just the speed. We were a little bit concerned initially about the speed of SaaS, considering the amount of security layers we've got to go through from our perspective, but the experience has been amazing, and the team absolutely loves it.

I think scalability is a big thing, especially around being on SaaS and on a cloud arrangement. That scale really sits with the CA side of things, so as we grow, CA are going to have to grow with us as far as that relationship. Of course, they can do that, considering some of their larger clients that they have in the US and other areas around the world. We're very comfortable that it leads into the future.

Tech support's been fantastic. We also have a partner that we use internally as well, so it's only their larger cases that we will escalate to CA, but turn-around-time has been fantastic. They work really well with our partner in relation to that as well, so we're very happy with the support.

We're also moving to the latest version for less than $20,000 for a major corporate system. It's just amazing.

There are a few things we looked at when we scanned the market for moving to a new PPM system. We've had CA since 2008, but we actually took a step back and looked at the entire market. For us, it's obviously the reputation that they have in the market, but more importantly today, really, around the cloud and the SaaS arrangements that you enter into. You also need to look at where you think that organization's going to take that product moving forward. For us, what gave us a level of confidence was the investment and the transparency that CA showed in relation to their product roadmap, and where they want to take it. 

To back that up, the fact that they were leading in industry evaluations, so being in the top-right, just reinforces also, as far as an independent body, that they're the right partner. They're already leading the industry. They're expected to lead the industry moving forward, so for us, that made the most sense, to partner with CA.

I would rate the product at an eight out of 10, and I would say that there's always room for improvement, and I think the team's already starting to improve that.

It's very hard with such a large complex product to actually get those new features in there. I've got empathy for how hard the teams have got to work to bring the new UI and new look and feel that we want. It's not just an app that you can quickly turn around, but I think they're striving really hard to do that as quickly as they can. An eight at the moment, and I think over the next 12 to 18 months, they'll be rating it much closer to a 10.

The key benefit that most of our clients see is the ability to ensure they have the right resources, working on the right work. It also provides the opportunity to pivot to meet new demands.

The ability to provide transparency through your investment portfolios at the top-level financial all the way down to the work that drives delivery.

Additional enhancements to portfolios with the new user experience. Because, while portfolios deliver a lot of the value-driven information, the new user experience really takes the view of the information to the next level, and it takes it from being a tired-looking feel to a new design approach.

Never an issue, stability.

As long as you have the licensing, we can scale.

Never an issue. They're always quick with an answer.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Nothing ever rates a 10. There's always areas, opportunity to improve.

It brings visibility and one central source of truth, as opposed to a bunch of different processes and tools. It helps us effectively enable our processes.

• Portfolio management
• Resource management
• Project management, of course

User-friendliness, I think that's the key. Right now it's really clunky. We're also looking to upgrade, but an upgrade is not going to fix everything. The new UX is good, but there are still a lot of limitations. Once they work through those kinks and get those limitations removed, we'll be able to upgrade.

One of the things we use is timesheets. In the timesheet UX, you can't do things like splitting time, managing overtime versus regular time, very easily. That would be helpful. 

Financials are okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement in financials.Financial plans, if those could be made so that you're not always grouping your financial data by predefined attributes, that would be helpful for us.

It's pretty stable. It doesn't crash, I would give stability a nine or 10 out of 10.

Earlier, there were major issues, but since 2015, when we moved to SaaS, there haven't been.

Scalability is pretty decent. We are on SaaS, so CA takes care of scalability.

Current tech support is much better than the previous technical support. Most of the time they answer our questions quickly, but it's hit or miss. Sometimes it does take some follow-ups and escalations, but 70%, 80% of the time they are quick.

Recently, what happened was we had a request to backup our database, so that the development team could start to move to production. But nobody ever got back to us, and they were supposed to. The team kept waiting, so I had to do escalate it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. They were pretty straightforward. CA took care of everything, we just did the testing.

I wouldn't be able to say there is one particular criterion that's important when selecting a vendor, it's a combination of all of them that we will look at, like 

• trust
• cost
• the value they're going to bring.

I would rate it eight out of 10, actually.

I would say definitely look at this solution but understand your business needs first. There is a tendency on the customer side to look for "one size fits all." That's never the case. So make sure Clarity is really a best fit for your business needs. Otherwise, you are just buying a fancy, glorified timesheet tool.

We are primarily using it for analyzing our projects. It is performing very well at the moment. We do want to expand our functionality to include resource management, portfolio management, and more of the financial aspects of it, as well.

Right now, it is the project management module.

It is allowing us to keep track of what our projects are doing, and the idea module, what projects are coming into the pipeline.

I like the new UX. I am hoping that we will move to it soon. I think it is a vast improvement. It is much easier and more user-friendly.

While I know it is coming in the roadmap, the risks issues and changes on the new UX would be amazing. However, the risks issues and changes are not in the new UX yet. 

I know that it is a stable solution. It has been around for a long time.

We are On Demand, so SaaS. We really have not experienced downtime with it. Everything is so secure through our sites and stuff. We do once in a while run into latency issues, but it is not that bad. Nothing memorable.

It is definitely scalable. 

We have used technical support a few times. It was just little technical glitches. A page was not displaying correctly, or something like that.

They do answer us very quickly.

CA Community: I take advantage of it. I use it all the time. They are a great community.

Prior to using CA PPM, everything was spreadsheets. There were a few different homegrown solutions out there. We wanted to roll them all into PPM.

I was not involved in the initial setup. While not involved with upgrades at this organization, I did do upgrades with previous organizations.

The very first upgrade we did was quite complex, because we were moving from 7.51. I have been working with the solution for a long time, since 2006. We were moving from 7.51 up to 8. That was a big jump. It was a lot more complex than we initially thought it was going to be.

Do your research, do your homework, and definitely, contact CA.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Product stability: It has been around for a while. It is not a brand new thing. 
• The reputation of the vendor
• Cost

We use it for project management, resource management and, to a lesser extent, portfolio management.

We are definitely doing well in resource management, although struggling to adjust to the agile environment. As far as project management, we are doing risks and issues, status reports, change requests, all your standard issue pin box stuff, and that is going just fine. In the portfolio management space, we are going to be growing our usage, and we are excited to see the stuff in version 15.

It is shifting as we go through our agile transformation. In terms of being able to do quarterly status reports, board reporting, resource reporting, and that kind of thing, that has been ongoing at Schwab for a number of years. As we are shifting into the agile space, and having some differences of opinion between our card carrying PMPs and our card carrying agileists about what level of detail needs to be where, our agile community wants to manage things in terms of stories and sprints, but upper leadership still wants to see the status reports that we have always done. So, how do we make both camps happy? That is not a tool specific issue. It is really an industry issue right now.

The ability to have all of the data in one place from risks and issues to resource capacity and actual utilization. We are currently undergoing an integration with our financial systems that will allow us to bring in financials into our cost plans and minimize the need for project managers to be going into both Clarity and the financial system. They will have everything all-in-one place, so that will be really beneficial to our users.

We are still on 14.3. We have not used the new UX. I did laugh at Kurt's presentation yesterday, because he said, "You know what? Three years ago, we were up here, and I was standing in front of a bunch of PowerPoint slides. Now we actually have the functionality behind it," because that was my observation. Two years ago, they were basically just screen mocks, and it all looked great, but what do you do?

My concern with the new UX is that my core users, the folks who are in Clarity day in and day out, are not going to get the full benefit of the new UX until we have OBSS and all of the other functionality available. I understand the need to tailor the new UX to make time tracking easier, make resource management easier, and do those kinds of things. I get that, but folks are going to track their time anyway, because they want to get paid.

The most vocal folks in my stakeholder community are those day-in day-out PMO analysts and resource managers. I struggle also from a maintenance and support perspective. Now, I am going to be maintaining both new UX screens, which the blueprints make look like it is going to be really easy, but we would still have to be maintaining new UX screens as well as classic views for those functionalities that are not yet available in the new UX.

I have this idea. We currently have the ability to allocate from assignments. Something that we are doing in our organization is we have created a report which we give back to the resource managers, "Hey, based on the last three months of actuals, here is what your work projection looks like." 

I would love to see that go the next step forward and just allocate from actuals. If you can look at it and say, "Okay, based on actuals for the last six months, here is what we think this is going to look like." That at least gives the resource manager a place to start, and a way to have a conversation. Particularly, as we get into agile teams, those teams are working on the same thing for extended period of time. It is not like they're on and off. It is more of the agile approach, where it is ongoing, continuous improvement, and deployment. That is something that I think would be interesting, and I do not know if it is something that CA has looked at before.

We have been quite stable. We are on-premise, so obviously any stability problems that we are having is on my infrastructure guy. He might be the better person to answer that question, but we have not had challenges. 

We are relatively new to Jaspersoft, and are running into some speed and performance issues (not necessarily stability issues), and also some unpredicted behavior. I think that we are on the initial release of Jaspersoft, so maybe some of these things have been addressed in later releases.

I will reference my last job where when I first started, nine years ago, working with PPM (Clarity), we started out with a PMO of about 20 people, and keeping track of IT resources in the couple hundreds. Over those eight years, we scaled to a PMO of 250 people and thousands of users. 

So, I have seen it scale up. I have also, unfortunately, seen it scale back down, which is why that is where I used to work. So, it is definitely a scalable system.

I have worked with CA Services in the past and felt they were knowledgeable. We have a few open tickets. 

In terms of tech support, I would refer you to my development lead. They do most of the work with tech support.

It was already installed when I came to work for my current employer.

In my previous job, I was doing a side-by-side pilot with PPM and a competitor. There were pros and cons to both. Nobody is perfect in the space. Some of the downfalls and frustrations are when, coming into a new organization, it has been over-customized or they have over-engineered things. So, keeping us safe from ourselves, while still giving us flexibility, would be a great way to do that.

No tool is going to fix your process problems. You better have a pretty good process in place, and know exactly what it is you are trying to do. Implementing a tool in parallel with implementing a process, you are potentially going to do that sort of over-engineering that I was talking about. The tool is not going to solve the problem. The tool can help you automate, but it is not going to solve those problems.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Being available when we need them, and leaving us alone otherwise. Being available to us when we need the assistance. It is great to have a relationship where you are not always trying to sell us something, but when you see something that is a good fit. It is sort of like crying wolf. If you are always trying to sell us new features and so forth, we are not going to want it unless we really need it.

I will throw another thought out there, which is I am getting a lot of pushback from my management about, "Hey, we need to upgrade, because this is coming end of life." We hear that a lot from our vendor partners. "This is becoming end of life. It is going out of support." The feedback that we get from my management, and what I am going to be asking my account team to tell me is, "Do not tell me it is going to be out of support and we have to upgrade. Tell me what it is going to do for me over and above what I currently have, then I can sell it to my leadership."

We are using it for project management, but really in a federal perspective which is acquisition management: Contracts are deployed for what the budgets were, how much has been appropriated against that budget, and managing the financial plans against projects. 

It performs great!

Basically, it keeps us on track financially. Again, we are federal, DOD. We budget two years ago, and the world changes. We have to keep track of where that money was acquired, where it got shifted to, what is been spent against it, and when we are running out of money. It is tracking that whole, what contracts have been issued against which projects, and when they are coming due. Again, it is managing the lifecycle, multi-year programs, and the people who do the work and the funding associated with that work.

Configurability.

The UX works really well.

I would love the ability to add my own functionality to the UI. Right now, I have to play with HTML portlets and have to pick the system out. I can't add a button on the UI to go do some work, so I am always working really hard around it to get extra feature sets.

They get a nine out of 10 rating, because they won't let me put a button on the UI.

It is very stable. We are on demand. With on demand, those guys keep it running. We occasionally have an outage here and there, but very seldom. Nothing memorable.

Scalability is fine. We run anywhere. We do not have the time sheet problem where everybody logs in on Monday. We have lots of users, about 300, not a lot but they are not timesheet users. They are all financial contract managers and PMs. We do not have the traditional " I have to do my time." 

We have what I will say is a different level of user, meaning they are in there to see if their projects are on, the date is up-to-date, and they are extracting stuff to feed the downstream processes. It is a different user type.

We have use technical support when we had questions or we have issues.

They have always solved what we had.

We have a test environment and a dev environment, so nothing moves to production until we are happy with it. We ran into issues early on about task naming IDs, etc., but it is all stuff once you know it, you can avoid it.

The tool that they had was not adequate, so we ended up inviting three different vendors in, did a down select, did a pilot, and it has been there since 2011.

We just had to learn it. It is straightforward once you figure it out. It was not anything too tedious.

Just make sure it handles all the business cases. Spend more time with the customer or the end users to get as many of the business cases and try to flush out "what ifs" with them, because it will make the configuration easier and you won't be backtracking. You do not want next year them saying, "They wanted that or we would have done this differently." 

Get upfront and mess with it, because it can do a lot of stuff. Join the communities, the CA communities, because you can learn tons. You can ask people questions. It is the best community that I have ever been in with lots of different software packages. Honestly, you can write a question, "Will this work?" and you get six people say "I did it," "It didn't," "Do it this way," or "Try this." Absolutely, the most active community I have ever been on. Good stuff.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It has to be a vendor that is on the GSA, because it is government. It has to be the GSA and it helps to have schedules. It typically has to be someone that has a good credit score as we have to have software maintenance, because you can't run a piece of software in the government without it being under software insurance as they call it. We can't just pick any vendor, but of the big vendors, we can pick pretty easily. 

The use case is for us to be able to use PPM for its "true" program and portfolio management. We have not used it like that in the past. We want to get back to using it the way it was originally designed.

I would say to date, because we are on version 14.4, it has been doing what we need for it to do. We are looking forward to moving up to 15.3 with more of the capabilities.

It is easier to use than most other products that are out there. It will provide us the transparency we need in our organization to see how work is being managed and moving along.

We are also trying to do an integration with Agile Central because we are moving into that transformation. For us, it will be interesting to find out how we use both systems: Who is in what system, who is in the other system, and how all that data will flow.

The most valuable feature is the portfolio management tool and the new project management, and the way it will all look from the user experience.

We are so configured and so not out-of-the-box that we have not been able to utilize a lot of the functionality because we are so customized. It does not work like we would like for it to work, but we know that we are mostly responsible for that. We want to move away from this and move back to industry standards.

If you want to transform to agile, these are the roles that should be in agile: 

• You need your scrum master.
• You need your team. 
• These are the ways it should be mapped into PPM.
• This is the data you will want. 

It is almost like giving us those little details that we all kind of scratch our head and go alright, how would we do that? They have tested this. They have gone through lessons learned with other companies. Share that, so we are not making the same mistake.

They should say, "Hey, we have companies that did this. It did not work. You might want to consider doing this." Almost like a little cheat sheet on how to bring the systems together and things to think about. Because, like our company, we didn't know what we didn't know yet, so we are taking very infant steps and we are getting stuck on some really simple questions that I am sure that CA has resolved. 

However, we want to know. Share them with us!

I do not see any issues. I think if you were to ask my application manager, she said they have had some downtime issues. I am not on that side, so I have not seen any problems.

There are some performance issues in our financial areas, but we are not using the out-of-the-box financials. We are using our own. So, we have to kind of rip that out and put ours in. In that specific area, we have been asking and we are trying to get some stuff optimized, because it just takes a long time to get data.

I know our application manager is working with the technical support team. They have been trying to look at doing some things, but I have not heard what solutions they have been coming up with.

In the community, I do not see a lot of answers. A lot of people asking lots of questions, but I am not seeing a lot of answers come through.

We were on an older version of Clarity, version 9.

I was there in the initial set up of our upgrade, so we upgraded to 13.4 and I was part of that.

It was not straightforward. It was complex because we pretty much upgraded from our old version. We could have done a lot more out-of-the-box functionality, but we chose not to.

It was hard. Even the lessons learned from CA were like, "Wow," this was a lot bigger than we thought it would be.

We have different tools that we use at where I am at, so we use different PPM tools, but the goal is eventually to move us all to CA PPM. It is just because we are using that as more of a global tool. Some of our other areas of our company use different tools, and we are just trying to get them off of that and really focus on using the PPM tool.

Make sure you have a really good roadmap of what you want the tool to do for project and portfolio management, which is really what it is supposed to be doing. From a financial, what kind of data you would think. From a resource management, what you expect. There are other systems, like PeopleSoft. A lot of people use PeopleSoft. That is your true resource management system. It should not be used as a PPM. For finance, a lot of people use Oracle, and other things. That should be your sources system, it should not be PPM, so do not make PPM more than it is supposed to be.

Use the other source systems to feed data into PPM to get what you are looking for from a financial transparency of the work that you are delivering. That would probably be the number one thing, because we did not do that.

Then I think the number two thing is you have really have to get with a partner that knows the industry and does not just say they know the industry. They can actually give you the data to back it up.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I need a vendor that will partner with us. Not just show us a new shiny tool, then walk away and we have to figure it out. I need somebody that will teach us to crawl first, then walk, and finally to run. Being there all the way with us. Not giving us a nice presentation and then we are on our own. That is where we will kind of get stuck.

The primary usage is for coastal location and project management. The performance is really good. 

I think with the solution that we have enough functionality out-of-the-box. We also try to use all of that functionality because it is aligned to our methodology and the way we use it for financial purposes. 

However, now we are turning to my next project with a giant framework, and maybe we need some agile functionality related to that.

For us, in Latin America, we use bookkeeping record because we have enough out-of-the-box functionality. 

Maybe we need to bring some financial executive reports to our directors and executives. Maybe we can improve the use of Jaspersoft.

We did have some trouble a couple months ago, but I do not know why because normally it is very stable. 

We did do an upgrade in the past couple of months to 15.1.

Yes, it scales well. In Latin America, we use just it alone. However, in Canada, we have another instance and they use it integrated with other solutions. 

The Latin American support could be better due to the language barrier. It is also a little bureaucratic. I know we have to put in a ticket, but we need immediate support sometimes; not in two weeks time, immediate support.

Not install, but I was involved in configuration of the limitations. It is a little complicated. A lot of fills. 

We were support by the CA team in Toronto, Canada.

We started evaluated some tools related to PPM. CA PPM accomplished our necessities, especially for Latin America.

We looked at HPE PPM. I can't remember why we did not chose them though.

Try the solution according to your necessities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Big name brand
• Proven solutions
• Theories
• Implementations
• Especially the functionality in their solutions.