Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We use it for both portfolio and project management, as well as time tracking and resource management.

It has highlighted areas in our company that were deficient in resources. It has allowed us to hire, then realize more benefits regarding the number of projects we can get done.

• The portfolio management
• The waterline functionality
• The data that we can get out of the timesheet information.

One of the things that was highlighted that is coming was the top-down planning functionality and that looks pretty compelling. 

If there is support or guidance around how to take a more waterfall-based shop and transition it into an agile-based team framework within the tool, that would be good as well because it is definitely different in how you manage and execute projects.

The integration needs to be improved with Jaspersoft and Microsoft Project.

It seems fine. We have not had any issues.

We are a fairly small shop, so we really do not run into any scalability issues.

Their online documentation is okay. It is not great. It is hard to get to some of the answers to the things that we may be running into, such as use cases that we are trying to fix. So, frequently we have to put in tickets. 

Sometimes they are great and exceed expectations, and sometimes, they take a little longer than I would anticipate.

The one that we had at the time, Microsoft Project Server, which was pretty basic in the data that you could get out of it. It did not have near the functionality around portfolio management that this CA solution does. So, that was really one of the reasons why we were evaluating new tools.

As with any fairly complex tool, there were a lot of things that you can't solve for. You can't write a 100% of the requirements and expect to roll it out. So, we ended up with some gaps. One of the areas that we would improve upon is not necessarily with the tool, but having more tips/tricks on adoption. How to get people outside of the PMO to use the tool and get the information.

We looked at staying with our current solution, which was Project Server, and seeing how we could leverage it. We also looked at Innotas, then CA. So, those were really the three. Innotas had a great portfolio functionality, but its project management was very basic. Its resource management was kind of non-existent. So, CA had the full package. It really had everything that we wanted.

I would give them advice that the learning curve and the adoption curve for an organization, which is attempting to bite off this much functionality and complexity, is a lot longer than they will think. Put some serious energy into how to get the groups involved into driving adoption. Then, knowing that the new OData connector is now out, finding ways to quickly leverage data, so you can start telling business stories and showing the value of the tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Stability in the marketplace. We definitely wanted to go with something that was going to be around for a while, and they were constantly improving.

I don't specifically have a use case, I'm more on the sales end, of going to the federal government. For the federal government of Canada, this has been selected as the tool of choice for PPM solutions.

We find specifically in the federal government space, absolutely, the visibility is the number one thing. They can see where the bottlenecks are, they can see what their project statuses are, why are things being held up, etc.

I think specifically, with a couple of government departments, visibility - when they bill their clients back, when they do a cost recovery - from the financial specifics they can have something tangible and real to say. "Okay, this is how we spend most of this time, this was a net new requirement, this was maintenance, etc. So they can bill back appropriately and when the client questions them on it, they have that information available to them.

Reporting visibility for projects and on the resource management side as well.

We're just helping them start to roll out 15, so no comment here.

Stability is good. In the federal government of Canada there's a central hosted instance of the solution. It's been very good as far as maintenance and outages, there's nothing really negative to report.

Scalability has been good. The federal government of Canada is not enormous. We'll see use cases here this week, at the CA World conference, of JP Morgan, Chase, or huge organizations. We've worked with organizations with IT shops as low as 200 people, all the way up to probably 10,000 people so it's worked out very well.

I wasn't involved on the technical side of setup, but as far as assisting my clients with getting service base, making sure we had all of their organizational structure ready to go into the system, I was involved.

We're the consulting arm, so if it was complex or straightforward, we're either doing good or we're doing bad on our end. So I'd like to say it's good feedback. Straightforward.

I give it a ten. Like I said, the scalability is great. It has a small amount of competition in the space but for me it's an easy sale because it's been the selected software for that space in the federal government of Canada.

It's performing how it is. And I think the more they come out with new versions, they're closing those gaps on anything that does exist.

Our primary use case is for doing portfolio and project management. Our engineering group serves a lot of different markets. We have a live events market, we have commercial market, we have transportation market that we serve. There are all these different requests coming in and hitting engineering, and it really becomes a question of, "What's the most important thing for engineering to be working on?"

We really needed a good way to prioritize that work and make it visible so that, not just our management, but also our engineering group can look at that and say, "Yes. This is the most important thing. This is what we're supposed to be working on."

We were doing all this in a spreadsheet. We were in Excel and it was a nightmare. It was really just, "Get off of the spreadsheet and get something centrally located and available to everyone." 

We are planning on integrating that with our work item management system. We currently use TFS but we're looking at VSTS. So we're looking at doing integration there and tying that portfolio and project management into our work Item management system as well.

I think the most value that I have seen is the the team management, the resource management. We have flexible scrum teams, we have developers that will serve on one scrum team for a few sprints or for a project, and they'll switch around. Being able to track where people go, and making sure that our teams are fully staffed, and well staffed, so that we can be successful on the projects we're trying to do.

We've only been users for about a month, so I can't really say what is there and what isn't there. 

Some people have expressed interest in how are we doing the time tracking stuff because we have a separate time tracking system. And then within TFS we also track hours and our effort levels there. It seems like that is maybe a direction we could go, unifying all that under one system.

I've not had any complaints or heard of anything, so it seems to be perfectly stable from what I can tell.

Scalability is great. We've got literally hundreds of engineers. We've got a lot of teams working on a lot of different projects. It seems very scalable to me.

The step from spreadsheet to this... We knew we were in a bad spot with the spreadsheet. We said,"Okay, let's take a good first step and get off of that and then we'll go from there." It's really exciting. I'm hoping to see the tool mature and see how it really benefits organization in the future.

The initial set up was handled by a couple of their engineers but someone came from WinMill and did a training with us and a bunch of our engineers. That was really helpful to get introduced to the system: This is what we can do. This is what we can't do.

I wasn't involved in the setup but I keep hearing the term "configured", like we did some of our own configurations, not customizations, but certainly the platform seems very configurable to suit our needs, and that was very helpful for us.

In terms of the new UX, we've only been on the one version. That is the UX. We've never seen anything else. I just came out of the 15.3 session though, here at the CA World conference, so I'm curious to see what happens. I don't think we're on that version yet. I'll be curious to see what my organizational feedback is once that goes live.

It's still pretty early, like I said, we've only been users for a month, but I would give it an eight out of 10 overall.

We use our product for the following:

• Time-tracking
• Project and portfolio management
• Resource management, which is part of the timekeeping. 

Our organization, being a utility organization, does a lot of projects in two different methodologies. Being able to track all of the projects with all of the details of those projects, and being able to move projects along from a process perspective, that is really beneficial. Off-sheet would be much more difficult.

In the version that we are in, it has been able to collect all the data, and in some ways, provide dashboards of aggregated data. 

We are not currently using the existing version. I think we have a need for more portfolio management and intuitive resource management, which are met with that next version. We are just not there yet. 

I do not know if I can answer that as I am still new to using the product.

Scalability is great. It is very manageable and can scale in different areas. One of the limitations would be mapping our current agile processes in the same tool set without obviously integrating to a different type of tool set within the same portfolio.

I have not personally used the technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have used some of the other products on the market before, and some of those are a little bit more user-friendly, but again that may be solved with the newer version.

From what I have seen, the new UX is pretty impressive, which meets that user-friendly, more adaptable, or agile, user-friendly solution. 

I believe firmly in process management, so from an organizational perspective understand your processes, then be able to look at this tool and know the full capabilities of the tool before you just install it. Sometimes companies will install a tool to handle the basics and not ever grow to its full process and tool alignment, which could be beneficial.

Project and portfolio management for our CA PPM. We have traditionally run all of our projects through waterfall, but now we are transitioning to agile. So, we are starting to use CA Agile Central for that, and we are looking at integrations between those two tools.

Just being able to have everybody to see the work that needs to be done, provide the detail level for the teams, and show the roll-up level for those at the management level. 

We are able to track budgets, and with timesheets, actuals against budgets.

Resource management: It is our primary use now. 

Agile Central is a kind of a scrum tool for the teams to be able to do their work. We are just now starting to leverage the functionality to give a more portfolio view. 

CA PPM is a mature product. We have used it for years, but we have had some challenges. Maybe it was the way we implemented it. 

I do not think I can add anything to Agile Central, because we are new to it. I think we are really just trying to learn and leverage the functionality that is there, so I do not know yet.

I am not aware of any stability issues.

I am not aware of any scalability issues. 

We have an internal support team that I would go to first. They would then go to vendor, so I do not have to.

I typically only contact them for education, possibly.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I think Agile Central is an industry leader in the agile methodology. I would look at it. 

We manage projects, financials, labor actuals, timesheet entry, and cost plans for the entire company.

It makes the whole lifecycle of project management a lot easier than using legacy systems, which we are retiring every few months because of PPM. We have taken archaic reporting, Excel reporting systems, and are replacing them with PPM functionality in old timesheet entry systems with PPM timesheet entry and labor actuals, which are being calculated directly in PPM.

• Timesheet entry
• Cost plans
• Calculating labor actuals and financials
• Forecasting

I really like this roadmapping, which is huge. It is like the future of cost plans, making it all Excel-like, grouping and all that fancy stuff. 

It is getting better. Once in awhile, PPM will go down. It does not go down very much at all, and now that we have over close to 7,000 users logging in, it has only gone down once in several months. So, it is pretty good.

CA Communities need a lot of improvement. I like the support desk. They try and answer our questions quickly and efficiently, and usually they do a pretty good job. I would give them a B. 

I think CA Communities could be greatly improved. I would give them a C minus. 

We are On Demand, so CA does the setup.

Go for it. I like PPM. I love the fact that it is very flexible. I am the lead engineer with enhancements, development, developing new portlets, anything that has to be added on, and integrating data, such as ETL processing.

We are working on the development for CA PPM, building a couple of portlets, a couple of objects for better usability for CA PPM users in our company. We try to provide automation of CA PPM and easy access, easy usability. Also, easy reporting for our users.

It's really performed well. I personally started from CA PPM 7.5.3 to PPM 15.2. There has been great innovation regarding the development, regarding the technologies.

I see the benefits for the organization in the Resource Management. No more Excel sheets for resource management, no more Excel sheets for financial management, no more data retention for reporting purposes. It is pretty quick in calculations for the managers and financial teams, and getting them the data.

The financial management part because it calculates, it retains the data, and everything is pretty much cool about the reporting part for financial. For PMOs it has some cool reporting and a dashboard. That is a good part of CA PPM. 

I want to see the mobile product. And, if possible, integration for SMS functionality.

In terms of stability, along the journey from the Clarity 12.0 to 15.2, it has become a good, stable product now. They are bringing a lot more performance improvements to the product, and the database side also. So now it is pretty much a stable product.

In terms of performance, I would say scalability is around an eight out of 10.

The support guys are pretty much technical. They respond back to me as soon as there is a ticket with them. The conversation is good and we've had a lot of quick solutions.

No, we didn't have a previous solution. But in terms of managing projects, when we saw a lot of complexity in the managing of projects, we realized we needed to go for a PPM and try it once.

It is pretty much cool. And I would say the setup and the upgrade capabilities from CA, the way they have it implemented and prepared the end script is pretty much cool.

Only CA PPM.

Moving ahead, I am looking forward to CA PPM mobile technologies, the mobile app for PPM users, that would also be a good addition to the user experience.

The new UX is pretty cool. I would rate it about an eight out of 10. I joined in the demo for a couple of users for the new timesheet UI. They feel a little bit cool about it, and I have put one idea forward for the timesheet UI and that is with CA. But the new UI is pretty cool, and the "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down" approach for the approval or rejection of the timesheets is a pretty cool approach.

I would say the criteria for investing in a vendor would be how complex the implementation would be for financial, how complex implementation would be for the projects, how complex the implementation would be for Agile.

I rate it a seven out of 10 overall because they are still using SOAP functionalities. I want them to move out of SOAP and go for REST APIs.

Go for the PPM product, try it once, you will see it makes a big difference and you can get a lot of benefit from CA PPM.

The primary use case for our product is definitely the project management and portfolio management part of the tool, in that we have never really had anything like this before at our company. Previously, it was a lot of shoot from the hip, not a ton of follow-up on major projects, or at least proper follow-up. It has just been a way to prioritize for us, if adding project x, what does that do to projects a, b, and c at the front-end. 

We are still learning a lot with it. It is definitely a big culture change for our company in that we have never really had to do this before. I would say it is the accountability piece. There are just a lot of the pieces that we have tried to do and we have tried to do unsuccessfully, so we are using this product and so far it has been a success, but we still have not really pushed it out very hard yet. So, more to come.

We are still learning what it is going to do and how it is going to help. We have goals for how it is going to help. It has a lot of the lookback and a lot of the analysis of where our funding going, is it going there properly, and are we stretching our people too thin? 

There is still a lot to be determined but it brings everything back full circle to make sure we are properly managing everything from the finance side to the people side.

The new UX is very user-friendly and simple. The new user interface has been great, I think it has been easier. It will be an easier way to get the product out and used more frequently and more real-time, whereas mainly a lot of only the IT people were able to use the old interface well, just from their background. With the new user interface, it will help a lot.

I am still wrapping my head around the whole process. This is still a newer aspect for me compared to what I have done in the past. I really can't comment on this, because I am still learning all the features that are available within this and using them well and efficiently. I think once I get my head around it and how it will work for our organization, I would probably be able to give a better comment.

Still to be determined. I would say so far so good. I do not really have any complaints about it, but I probably can't give a very detailed answer.

Scalability is massive. It is awesome. It is definitely something we have never done at our organization. It is just steering the ship that way. If the product is a 10, we're probably only using it at a one or a two right now with everything that is available. So, it is still to be determined.

Our old solution was pretty much Excel, and we really did not have it. For a health system, we are now facing a lot more cost pressures, and needing to spend our dollars way more efficiently than we ever had to. Other organizations or sectors have already cut a lot of their costs. Healthcare has lagged behind in this, mainly because we did not have to in the past, and now we are at that point. In looking at that, and really analyzing what we do and how we spend, we need to be more on our forefront now. That is why we ending up investing.

It seemed pretty straightforward.

It was based on our enterprise manager's recommendation from another system that we had talked to. I do not really know all of the background that went behind that, but I know this came to us. This was really one of the only products we had looked at.

It was just the next step where we as an organization needed to go. We were very impressed. It was really getting our organization to buy into the process more than the product. The product, having all of the features which are available, is the reason that we wanted to go that route.

I would absolutely recommend this product. Just the capability of it is really blowing my mind so far. It is more than anything we have ever done. We have worked with Microsoft Project and used Excel spreadsheets in my department. So, this is just blowing our minds, everything that we can pull together, and how much more efficient it is.

I am the backup for our project management office in that I assist our project manager, getting out and helping all our project managers, and everybody from IT. I am in our innovate office, which is basically, project management. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Accessibility would be my number criteria. Helping us out and getting us going.

Primarily we're using it for 

• project management
• status tracking
• resource allocation tracking
• and timesheets and resources for our project management team.

And we're just starting to actually roll it out to our legal team. Yes, that is correct. Our legal team is actually going to use the Project Object in PPM for tracking their litigation cases.

It has performed well.

It's a kind of one-stop shop repository of all of our project statuses and what everybody is doing. So we don't have multiple systems that have to track time and status, and risks and issues.

I think it's very configurable. However we want to change something with out-of-the-box configuration, it's pretty simple to do.

The expandability of the new UX for the majority of what we can do on the classic UI side.

Stability is very good.

We haven't really tested scalability yet. But we will be with this little "legal team" project, and we'll see how it scales to a completely different demographic of users using the interface.

Technical support is very good. I'm happy with the response time and they are definitely knowledgeable.

We didn't have any centralized PPM solution. Everybody was just using Microsoft Project for their own thing. We needed an overarching solution to give visibility on what everybody was doing, and what we can do as an enterprise.

Complex.

We probably should have bitten off a little bit less of the sandwich to begin with. Our implementer was more of a solutions expert and a consultant than they were a trainer. I think we were looking for more of a trainer than somebody to just tell us how we need to set it up. It was less collaborative than I would've liked.

I was not a part of that evaluation. I'm going to say "yes", we evaluated other solutions, but I don't know who they were.

I have two words regarding the new UX: Love it.

When evaluating other vendors, the most important thing is a lot of the professional services, because my organization is not inherently a technical organization. We are a restaurant company. We don't staff a lot of technical folks. So probably the number one priority is that technical professional services offered.

I give the solution an eight out of 10 because I think the classic UX is a little bit clunky. Obviously the new UI is taking over. But also obviously, everything we can do in the classic UI cannot be done yet in the new UI. So we're waiting.

In terms of advice, have your specific requirements of what you need upfront. That way, you're not going to be swayed by all of the cool little gadgets that you could use. Know what you do want to use upfront, and then all the cool gadgets can come later.

We started looking for a tool to manage our resources, that was our primary driver. Resource capacity utilization, resource management. But of course, the other features that are available, portfolio management, project management, we definitely wanted to use those as well. So, primarily, resource management, but project management and portfolio management as well.

It's an excellent tool for resource management. I really like the new interface, the user experience, which is coming out soon. Right now, it's something of a legacy format, and it's a little bit - I wouldn't say difficult to navigate - but people are used to very intuitive interfaces. Currently it looks like, "Ah, it's a legacy interface." But with the new one, I think it's making a really big impact. We have not started using it yet, though. We are currently using 15.2, which has some of those features. So we are waiting for 15.3 to start making use of them. 

For resource management, it's a very strong tool, has all the features that you would desire in a resource management tool, so we're very happy with that.

Basically everything. 

• You can identify resources by roles.
• You can manage by skill level.
• You can manage your capacity by roles.
• Assigning to projects.
• Booking resources in Soft Book, Hard Book.
• Gives you visibility into who is currently working on something else but may be available through the Soft Book feature.

I like every feature that's in there.

A little bit better financial management. Right now it is more accountant-related, the financial management - of course, it's finance, it has to be financial. But it should be a little bit easier for project managers.

To give an example, if you have a non-labor cost that you're tracking, let's say a software expenditure or license subscription, tracking that you need to manage as a resource in the project plan, that adds a lot of effort for product managers to maintain. If they can come with ways of simplifying the cost and financial management, that would be one thing that we would really like.

Never had any issues with a CA product.

In terms of scalability, it is a little bit slow. Right now we have about 200 users, and we are bringing on our European counterparts as well - our company acquired another company - and we are trying to bring them on. It is slow. We've created a support ticket, and hopefully they'll respond. I think for regular day-to-day operations, it's okay. But when you get into Jaspersoft reporting, it is slow. And nowadays, people don't have patience, I don't have patience.

Technical support, they're good. They get back to us pretty quickly. Never had any issues with them either. They get back to us quickly, they try to resolve the issue. They are definitely knowledgeable.

We were Microsoft Project Server users. I think about seven years ago we started using Project Server with the same goals of a centralized repository and collaboration for project managers and team members; also, resource and financial management. We never got to the resource and financial management part of it, because I think on the time sheets side we were aggressive, and that did not go well with the resources, so we started using it only as a project repository.

We were in it all the time, and every year when there was a new demand for projects, and we were trying to set the portfolio for the next year, the question always was, "Okay, who's available to take up which projects?" And every time it was a spreadsheet, and I was working with 50 resource managers bringing their allocations and merging them; it was a nightmare. 

And at any point in time, especially when a new demand would come in during the middle of the year, if you wanted to inject that project into the portfolio, we didn't know what the impact of that would be on other resources. Again, it would be another big round of, "Okay, call all the resource managers." 

So that was our key need for the PPM tool.

I think our decision was the right one. We went with the minimum configuration. We wanted to use it out of the box as much as possible. A CA consultant came and I think we had him for about three months. They came and gathered the requirements and configured it a little bit to suit our requirements and I did some additional fields here and there, but mostly out of the box. He was very knowledgeable, he helped us in setting up easily. 

Right now we're in the adoption mode, and our timesheet compliance is around 92%. We're just about three months into it, and I really like it. We have still yet to use all the other features that come with CA PPM.   

We are focusing for now on project management, and generating reports, out of that: status reports, timesheets, reporting on actuals. We want to get to the next phase where resource utilization capacity is accurately defined in CA PPM as well. Financial planning, it was initially out of the scope, but I think as soon as they started seeing actual costs in the system, everybody wanted to see, "Okay, what's the budget every month? What was the planned cost?" and things like that. So we're trying to put that data in, and set up processes for keeping it up to date and things like that. So far, so good.

Regarding the new UX, it's very good. I wish it would come out faster, but I know that it has to be developed, tested, and rolled out. I like the way they're doing it in something like an Agile format, giving you some features and then gathering feedback and improving them, instead of trying to wait for a big bang, which I think might take couple years for them to finish. So, I like that. Could it be faster, is the only question.

When selecting a vendor, when our company is looking at vendors, we develop the RFP, gather our requirements and it has multiple sections: 

• The financial stability of the vendor
• Where are they in user ratings, are they in the top quadrant? 
• How long they've been in the system?
• Are they the industry leader? 
• Are they committed to this product? We don't want to deal with a small company which has really good looking reports right now, but you don't know whether they're going to be in the business or not. 
• How much they meet our requirements, obviously. 
• We also look at how big they are in terms of supporting us.
• We want to make sure they have a broader customer base.
• They are constantly working on product improvements and things like that.
• And that they are there if you need help in implementation. Are resources from their side available to come and help us? We typically prefer people who are in the U.S., but not necessarily.

In terms of advice to others, there are a lot of players in the market. This is a major transition for our whole industry. You have DevOps coming in, you have Agile, you have a lot of other things automated - data creation and the like. You want to pick a vendor who can help you in all those things. 

PPM is one part of the tool. There is also the argument about whether product managers will be there in 2020? So you want to look at something that is more current and has all these new technologies incorporated. If they're not incorporated, at least that they have those planned, so later on you can start to bring them on board.

And during the implementation, I would definitely say start simple. Start as simple as possible. Give as little additional work to each of your resources as possible. Then slowly, once you start to prove the value of the tool, you can slowly start to make more and more improvements on the new features.