Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Within my company, resource capacity management. That's the PMO's goal for it at this time. Hopefully in the future we will manage portfolios in addition to using it as a prime entry system.

Some people are not used to managing through the tool, but as far as the tool goes, it works very well.

With that goal of gathering time from resources, and being able to predict out whether or not they'll have some capacity, it's a great improvement over what was there before, which was essentially an embedded spreadsheet within a SharePoint sight.

In addition, the reporting tools are superior to what was there before, which was someone crunching through an Excel spreadsheet. I've been able to do status reports through the projects, which has given visibility to my manager, and that's an improvement.

It has improved communication vertically, with some amount of data to be able to show that more resources are necessary, or why projects aren't moving as fast as management would like. That sort of communication makes my job a lot easier.

Within my environment, being able to give status reports to my manager is very useful, saves me a lot of trouble. 

I enjoy the Risks/Issues section. I wish that they were combined into the same module. I use that to raise things before they happen. 

I do appreciate the report that shows how utilized a person is set to be within the coming months. I use that feature a good bit.

The only real improvement from my side - I'm spoiled by things like Trello, with the very easy user interface, things like Basecamp - it's very much a static software project. If I was to focus on something it would be that user interface; making that something that is a joy to use, instead of something that feels like data entry.

If there was more drag and drop type functionality that would be fun, but it works well for what it's supposed to do.

The second thing - and this is specific to our company - integrate it with CA Service Desk Manager so that, when you have time for a ticket or when someone gets assigned a ticket, in PPM it automatically shows that they have to account for that: they would both enter time in the past and, also, that this is going to take them time in the future.

As far as a tool that communicates with resources, with individuals - what they're supposed to do next or what action items came out of what meeting - it's not really used that way. Probably I could envision a way that it would be used that way. Until it's as easy as sending an email, it probably won't be utilized by the resources in that manner.

We host internally, so it's not like it goes down. I haven't seen a ton of bugs. I bug-tested the heck out of it when they initially deployed it and got some things fixed, but they also had some custom code.

We use Service Desk Manager as well. We have a custom tool to integrate the two. One of the reasons why PPM was chosen was because, "Well, it must integrate with SDM, because they're the same company." But that was not the case. So, they got a custom tool in. Whenever something happens with PPM, where there's an update or anything like that, it breaks that tool. That's probably not tenable. That's not really my area, I didn't manage the deployment, but I could imagine that that's eventually going to be a problem.

I imagine that the scalability is there. The problem is, at this time, my company is only looking to give IT workers and project managers access to the tool, and they're trying to get buy-in to expand beyond that hundred-person group.

It has to be able to support a greater amount, and I imagine that the value would be there, but they haven't gotten to that point yet.

I have not used technical support. I haven't had any technical problems.

It's better than an Excel spreadsheet, and that's what was used before.

They brought me in to comment on it's Agile functionality and they said, "We have this Rally product." And I said, "Does that integrate?" They said, "It could." I said, "Don't worry about it."

I use Trello today, I used JIRA, I used Team Foundation Server. I talked to some people here at the CA World conference and I said, "Are any of those tools worse or better than Rally?" They seemed to like those tools more. I haven't used Rally to tell you the truth.

Regarding the new UX, at this point I feel like there could be more done to make it a more fluid experience. Five years ago, seven years ago, that sort of windows and records click was standard, and there wasn't much else out there that was better. Nowadays, things are, across software packages, just a little bit more fluid.

Is that a bad thing that it's like that? No, it's just that's where they could go next.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, first, that they meet the requirements that we set ahead of time. Second, that they are willing to answer those questionnaires. If they're not, then it's my opinion that they are not ready for prime time and we wouldn't even talk to them. And suitability, that's above everything else; that's above costs, that's above relationships, or how well known they are.

I would advise a colleague to look at the nature of the work they are trying to do, and what is the end goal they are trying to achieve. If your end goal is to ultimately get to the point where you can report up, then it might be a very good product to look into. If your end goal is either greater communication with your team, downward, or being able to have a clear idea across the organization of what needs to be done in a project, maybe look at another tool.

Our primary use case has been for supply and demand management and resource management. So far, it has been okay. We do two levels of resource management. 

Our first level is at the project overallocation, then we also have to do resource checking at the key date and event management. 

On the event management side, we had to do some custom steps. Our research managers and our booking managers have to go through multiple steps to go through that process. It is still efficient, but it is not as efficient as it could be if we had to do some custom stuff.

There are some tool limitations. We had to create some of our own summary competencies to create more of an agile tool concept, or an agile team concept, that they did not really have.

We are hoping for:

• Better resource management
• Reducing the time it takes to get resources identified. 
• Demand
• Putting all of our projects together in one project. 

We used to have where one department would have their own plan, another department would have their own plan, and these were all different plans for the same client. Now, we are smashing them together so there is a little bit of a learning curve of working together, which is more of us; organizational change management. 

In general, we hope to reduce our time to finding resources to backfill resources and also reduce admin time to get a project setup and running. 

• Having information altogether in one single source.
• Being able to look at the data across team members, resources, projects and coming up with the algorithms and resources. 

Moving more to an agile state. It is very difficult. There is not a good way to have a team member manage tasks. So, a project manager can update assignments and can say, "I'm going to move this work to this person," but when you are going to a more collaborative based approach, PPM does not support that. 

It is hard for them to say, "I have a person on my team who is going to be available, I am going to move that task to them." That requires a project management license, it doesn't require a team member license, so the licensing model does not sometimes support the way the business world is going. I think they need to reexamine having some of the capabilities of a project manager be available to team members. 

It still lacks some key features and we had to do some custom stuff. It has some deficiencies, but we also have not optimized everything. 

Stability has been okay. We have had some performance problems. I do not think it is necessarily related to CA. I think it is the way we deployed it. We need to optimize it. 

I do not think that stability has been a problem. I think we just need to do some indexing. 

We have not, CTS has, which is our IT partner. We also have worked primarily with Rigo Consulting to do our implementation services. Since we are just now getting live those are the ones. 

Microsoft Project focused more on resource management, schedule management, not necessarily on demand management, integrations, agile, etc. We switched due to scalability.  

We had a lot of problems with Microsoft Project. We had to abandon using Microsoft Project because it was not working. We kind of had egg on our face. That is one thing that CA can do better. Give us a better scheduling tool. 

It was about a four year journey for Cerner. We know that our resources were not being deployed. We were spending a lot of time trying to find the right resources. IP uses it. CTS is going to be using it. It was an enterprise decision to invest in a new solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We worked primarily with Rego Consulting to do our implementation services, since we are just now getting live. We just rolled out about four weeks ago.

Talk to other clients.

The depths of tools and technologies that you have available for all clients has surprised me. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Willingness to do partnerships
• Willingness to be transparent
• Credentials and references from other people. 

Portfolio management, to capture market ideas, gather criteria around those ideas, and make business choices on which ones to move forward.

We're in the early stages of implementation, but it seems better than the tool we had before, which was a spreadsheet.

It makes it easier to compare different opportunities, and to track the metrics though the process. It helps us make better choices of which opportunities to go after and not go after. Then, we can balance that with what we have for staffing, to know what we can actually staff.

It makes it easier to function.

More team-based management, and less people-based management; as far as the resource management goes, to do it per team and not per person.

I personally believe that for software development, management at the person level is not the right level to manage. Managing at the team level is a better level.

To my knowledge, the stability is fine.

Scalability seems fine.

I have not used technical support. Others have. I think we get the support we need.

Our previous solution, a spreedsheet, was complex, and it was difficult for multiple people to use. To make it easier to use, we needed a different tool.

We felt CA was a better fit for our needs.

Getting agreement on how to use the process is complex, because there are a lot of people involved. The tool is highly flexible, so it does take some effort to choose how to use it as well.

CA, Oracle, and one or two others that I don't recall.

Regarding the new UX, I don't have an opinion. I've only used it a little bit so I don't think I'm the best person to ask about the UX itself. I think it's easy to use.

When selecting a vendor functionality is the first criteria, does it do what it needs to do. Certainly trust in the vendor is in that list as well. But the first need is that the tool has to do what we need it to do.

Be clear about how you want to use the tool, what processes you intend to use as you're making your selections.

The primary use case is about demand management and understanding where our resources are allocated and who is over or underallocated. Often we find that our shared services organization is caught blindsided when demand comes their way all of a sudden, and they have no previous inclination of that. 

Something like CA PPM would really mitigate some of that as we forecast our demand for the next six months, or whatever. Shared services would know ahead of time as to be able to balance, not only the work, but even make some hiring decisions ahead of time, as to be not caught by surprise.

IT just rolled out the tool. Therefore, we are in the process of rolling out the tool. That said, I have worked with CA PPM in other companies. It definitely has met the use case of performing well. Although in other companies, the bigger use case was really around portfolio, scenario planning, and long-range business planning in large companies, like Boeing.

It is about bringing about that transparency. Once you bring about that transparency, what happens is, you can use data to encourage people to pivot in a certain direction. If I just go with a gut-feel, I do not get anywhere. If I have data and I have our investments captured, and I have my resources captured, I can let the data speak for itself.

The data should be able to make decisions. Use the data as the catalyst, if you will, and I am just the messenger.

Transparency and just having the ability to procure information that is pertinent. Not just the execution of programs in a more systemic way, but also from a strategic perspective; to understand the big rocks in the organization and how much money are we putting where our mouths are.

1. I would really like a modern UI. I do not want to get on a user interface and feel like I am in the 1990's. Today, at least prior to 15.3, that's the case. Even 15.3 does not really do it for me. When you look at the new UI, where they are looking at light project management and resource allocation, those are very compelling and modern interfaces.  
2. It would be just seamless to integrate with some of the industry standard tools that are out there. I know they are making some headway with Power BI, Tableau, ServiceNow. JIRA, and others, but it just seems like they are just getting started. I would have thought that being 30 plus years in the industry, that they would have figured this out long ago.

We are going with the SaaS solution now.

I am hoping that it is going to be stable, because again, we have not hit production just yet at F5. However, in a previous life, we had on-premise CA PPM deployments, and they have all been pretty stable.

We are targeting a February launch.

It has worked for organizations the size of Boeing, which is 160,000 people. F5 is 4,000, so I do not see a scalability issue.

I have not used technical support yet.

We did not have anything before. We did not have a PPM software at all, let alone a process behind it. F5 is a pretty young company.

We have been in business for about 20 years and grown leaps and bounds. The focus has primarily been customer-driven features, products, and services. Now, I think we are pivoting more towards, "Hey, we better get our act together to be able to compete in the marketplace." 

I think the attention is shifting more towards internal process maturity.

Nothing is straightforward, especially when it is company-wide. There is a lot of organizational change management that goes with it. There is a lot of, "Who moved my cheese-type of discussions?" that you have to have, but I think none of that is unexpected.

I would say there were not any unknowns that really came our way. I think the organizational change management takes the cake in that.

There were two others. They fell short in a few things that were absolute must-haves. Although, they were working on getting those features available, they were not there, and we just could not move forward with them.

Look at the needs of your organization first. If you can meet that need with a scalpel, do not go with the sledgehammer. CA's outlook has a pretty broad spectrum in terms of being able to meet the needs of varying organization sizes. However, focus on the need that you have at that point in time and do not cast such a broad and wide net, because chances are your organizational change management is going to limit you anyway. 

Take a look at what your needs are. Choose a product that is modern and cloud-based. Do it in phases. Do not try to bite more than you can chew.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is the ability of the vendor to really understand where we are coming from in terms of our pain points and our requirements. Not using the book and opening to chapter 17, paragraph three. I do not want that. I want vendors to really feel the pain, relate, and be part of the team. 

There should be a seamless integration between full-time or contract people. Be honest, open, and transparent to the biggest extent possible without giving up any proprietary information. That is not what I am after. 

Just be upfront and honest about dealings and capabilities. Winning the trust of clients probably takes care of 80% of the headwinds that contractors and vendors face.

It's project and portfolio management. We just rolled out phase one, but the primary use case for us right now is to make sure that all our project managers are able to put their resource plans and cost plans into a centralized system, so that our finance team can roll those numbers up and do forecasting.

In terms of evaluating it performance, we just started about two months ago, so it's hard to say right now. Numbers are rolling up but folks are still getting used to the process and are slowly working towards that.

We just put all the data in one place and hopefully, after we have accurate data, we can make more decisions based on real data rather than gut feeling.

Right now it is the resource planning, because I know not all of the project managers really did resource planning before. This has set up an expectation for them to do that necessary step, going forward.

We use a product called TFS and we would definitely like to see integration with that. It's not there right now. Agile Central is the one that is integrated with, however, I don't think we are leaving TFS. 

I think stability is good so far, except the test environment is not as good. We're using the SaaS solution, so we do see errors quite a bit in the QA environment, but the production environment seems to be more stable.

We don't know yet, we don't have a lot of people in there yet.

I feel that the Professional Services team is reacting better than the support team, in terms of how quickly we get the feedback; also in terms of how careful they are with our environment. The support team actually broke our QA environment without telling us. We were wondering what's going on for something like a day.

So far it's straightforward, but we haven't really done a lot of customization. We just try to use what is out of the box. 

Regarding the new UX, we haven't used it yet.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, although I wasn't involved in the selection, what I heard my boss say was that there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies using it, and if all of them trust it, that's probably a good indication that it's a good product.

Just focus on what there truly is, because there is a lot of functionality in the tool, and probably nobody is going to use all of it. So just focus on what you think are the most important things for you right now and just look at those particular features.

Portfolio and project management.

We just started, but it's a simple and powerful tool. I really love it compared to the previous one.

Previously it was complicated. We had to do the costing, everything manually, after doing the integration of a couple applications. Now, because of CA, it's going to be one application as a whole.

It will be one application for the whole PPM department: portfolio, project, and reporting in one tool.

It will improve things because it's already integrated into one. Before, there were something like three applications, and you had to integrate, and sometimes there were a lot of errors coming out. Sometimes the old system would crash.

• Timesheet Approver
• Resource management

You know where the hours of each resource manager or each worker are.

Blueprints. I'd also like to see the user interface simplified, and to have a lot of templates available on each blueprint.

I think it is stable. It's been on the market for so long, and it's CA.

Scalability is good.

I'm not sure about why the switch was made, because the one who made the decision is our director, and the architects. But I think it was because it simplified things for the users; that matters.

We evaluated Primavera Unifier and some other portfolio management systems. We went with CA because it's so easy. Everything is easy to do.

Regarding the new UX, I actually haven't heard about it.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are that

• their product has to be easy to maintain
• the users can easily adopt it, with whatever interface
• it's easy to upgrade.

I would tell colleagues who are looking for a similar solution this will work. Give it a try. I know there are a lot of products out there, and companies that are really well known. But just give them a chance to demo it and you will like it.

It is mainly for handling the project and financial management across the organization. Mostly it is the IT department of the company which uses this tool. We may have a user base, in all, of about 20,000 users. It is also used by all the vendors of American Express. We on-board them onto the tool, and then they are able to track their the time against all the projects which they are working on with American Express.

There are a lot of other use cases.

It helps all the portfolio managers and the program managers to take stock of the financial situation at the program and portfolio level, because it rolls up all the financials at the product level.

We also have integration with CA Agile Central. So we get all the project-related data and the user stories-related data into Clarity and we report on to that: How much funding is there, and how much are the actuals between these two tools?

The resource management, the program management, financial management. It combines a lot of things, all of them are of benefit to our end users.

I don't work as an administrator of the tool, so I can talk from the standpoint of the end users who actually use it. I think financial management would be one of the most important features of all of them, to keep track of the finances. Everyone runs against a budget. They have a particular funding, which they have to manage. So I think the Cost Plans, Financial Planning, those are among the most important features for most users.

I think a lot of things that you'd want to see were touched upon in the roadmap yesterday, which we attended here at the CA World conference, yesterday. With the new UI, the Sub-Object part which they plan to bring into the new UI, I think a lot of customers would be happy to implement the new UI for their companies.

Maybe they could improve the mobile app. I think right now it only offers time sheet. If they can integrate a lot of other components into it - and not only CA PPM, a lot of other companies are now focusing on the mobile apps - I think that would be helpful for the users.

I think after the last upgrade, I think it was 14.2 or 14.3, the performance of the tool has improved a lot. I can see a drastic change in a lot of the stock jobs of the tool. And it has become quite stable.

When we started off - it's been almost eight, nine years now with CA PPM - at that time our user base was a lot more. But now with CA Agile Central coming into the picture, I think a lot of companies are making a shift of moving a lot of their user base from CA PPM to CA Agile Central. So it is cutting across various tools. It does not concentrate on a single tool.

They are very helpful. In fact, we have a bi-weekly call with one of the representatives from CA. And when they are in town, we have a meeting with them and they are very helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup, I think I joined a couple of months after the initial set up. But I've been there all throughout since then, including upgrades. The upgrades used to be complex. But now, I think it depends on upgrade planning. How often do you upgrade? If you upgrade once in three years, then it can be complex. But if you keep on upgrading as and when CA releases their upgraded version, I think it would be smooth.

Regarding the new UX, we have not actually onboarded that yet. But, we plan to in the near future. From the administration team, we have seen it, we have implemented it in our sandbox environment, but it's not rolled out at the organization level yet. There is still a lot of planning to go into that.

Regarding the most important criterion when selecting a vendor to go with, I think it would be a long-term partnership that the company has with them. If we had already engaged with them in some other products and we see a value, then I think that would be the most important criterion.

I would say that you should first see the problem you are trying to solve in your company. I think if project, resource, and financial management are the things you are trying to solve, then it would be very useful.

I am a project manager/program manager, too. So I look at it from the high level also, which is a lot more difficult I think for the program. For it to go back to the initiative, figure out exactly what you are spending, how much you are spending on it, and which projects are included in it. 

From a project standpoint, I think it actually works really well, because it is much more simplistic, and it is at that lower level. So, you can track your risks, issue some changes, and it is a lot easier than when you go up and roll up to that program level.

This is a hard one, because some people just see it as overhead. Everybody is used to just doing it within their Excel spreadsheets within their teams. Some of it is just kind of a roll up of data, such as, what is our milestone for when we are going to get the BSD done? What is our milestone for code drops? 

So, there is definitely a mixed view, even from myself. I can see the benefits of it, and I can get the data out to be able to report on it. However, I also feel like it is a lot of overhead.

Probably the data itself. We do a lot of extracts from Clarity. There is not a lot of reporting within the tool itself. So, we actually export it, run reports, and roll out that data.

It was very interesting, because we did get to see the newest version. There are a lot features that I really can't wait to actually get my hands on. 

When we upgrade into the cloud, we are still going to be a version behind. So it is hard to say what I would want in it, because I have seen a lot of the things that I would want in it. They are going to be in it once we actually do the upgrade.

From a stability perspective, it is very stable. We do not have a lot of changes to it. However, we also do not upgrade as often as the tool is upgraded.

We leave that in the hands of our upper management on when we actually upgrade. So, we have done multiple upgrades, and we have configured it a lot. Going forward in December when we do the CA PPM, we are going out-of-the-box. Therefore, we do not have do a lot of the customizations. We can still configure, but we do not have to customize it.

We have not used technical support. Our PMO usually deals with any problems, questions, and they work through the technical solutions.

We see it as overhead. Let us collect all the data in one place. Which, it is always nice to have everything in one place, but it does cause that overhead. So a lot of the teams are not comfortable with it. They are going to track it separately. We are just a data gatherer to say, "Okay, what is the last date we are going to code drop? When are we going to be SD?" So, a lot of overhead.