Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

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.