Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We are the support team that administers the PPM tool, currently addressing over 3,000 customers in 28 different business units.

PPM is awesome. We do have an on-premise system and we use our developers that we partner with, both CA and one of the consulting agencies for them, to make sure that we're implementing things correctly and taking on things as they come.

Right now, it's the PPM piece of it, the scheduling, the Gantt, the task view. It gives that full visibility to the team. But we're wanting to take that further and start building upon the financial piece of it, doing extracts from contractors to employees, to determining resource planning and future planning, and doing "what-if" scenarios.

I think the biggest benefit right now is the reporting. It gives that quick visibility and it's consistent data; versus everybody just trying to go out there and look at their own individual pieces, looking at it as a whole.

We're looking at adding the Agile piece to it. I want to make sure that that integration is very smooth. And I'm here this week, at CA World, to see how that's going to play out for us. So, it's understanding, when we have multiple customers using both Waterfall and Agile, how that can come together, because we are still supporting HR, finance, and business planning for their outputs. Regardless of your methodology, we're going to be giving them streamline information.

Stability is awesome. Not to criticize any other tool, but we actually have some customers right now that are migrating from another tool because that tool has been down so often. Part of our success, we believe, is that our team administers the tool, we don't give out administrative rights to our customers. It's fully owned by our team, but we have a 99% "up" rate so we're very excited about that.

It's nice that we have the options. We try to tell our customers not to "drink from the fire hose." It's important that they start off and have some discipline before they take on more. They come to CA World, they see all the exciting things and features, and they come back and say, "I want it all." So it's kind of my being the "pacemaker" for them. I have to say, "Let's start here and build off that," while building their disciplines. They're getting their PMs engaged because everybody adopts change a little bit differently. So we want to make sure we're doing it smoothly.

Tech support is very good. We've had our challenges in the past with MSP interface connector, especially because we're on-premise and we've got configuration settings that are required. Sometimes it's an issue with the PMs themselves just not following instructions. But other times, you realize that there is a known issue or defect. Support is really quick to identify that, let us know, and either there will be a workaround, or we need to upgrade to the newest version.

Not in my current company. In my past life, we had been using a different PPM. And I was instrumental in doing the proof of concept. We interviewed several customers and put them through the gamut before choosing Clarity.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but as a support team, my team will do a lot of the testing in the different phases of upgrades. We test it from an administrative standpoint, but also as a user, as a PM, different rights permissions. We'll swap those out to make sure that everything is fluid.

The updates are straightforward. We have a development team that helps to make sure that we're migrating properly.

We're excited about the new UX. We're actually going to do the 15.3 upgrade in 2018.

When looking for a new vendor, our criteria include combining all the "asks" from our customers, but also with what we can manage. What's ready out of the box versus what we're going to have to customize. I'm a very big fan of CA's configurability. It's not necessarily something that is custom-built, but people can rearrange their filters, they can set up their criteria based on their needs. 

I give it a nine out of 10 right now. I'm not giving it a 10 because I have to see how the Agile piece works. Past life, we were using Rally and CA PPM and their integrations were just really wonky, and we ended up backing out of it. That was kind of cumbersome. So we're looking forward, now that CA has obtained what was formerly known as Rally, the Agile Central. I'm very curious to see how's that going to overlay. If it makes me happy, it will definitely be a 10.

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would say know the data that you have and what you want your output to be later. I think it's important to think about the future, because if you start off - for clarity purposes - using that idea, there's not a step before that. So you really want to have to make sure that your idea is your goal-point from the beginning. 

Also knowing what you want to extract from it later. Permissions and securities are going to have to dictate, "Are you going to access that?" or "Are you going to want your customers to be able to pull their own information?" Do you want to utilize partitions? Because everything has that downstream impact. If you know what you want or you think you know what you want, take that step back and look at your long-term goals and how they fit into it. From everything, from work streams to tasks.

Project and portfolio management.

It's performing okay, I would say. There are no issues with the performance, but I think we are not using it at capacity. 

I would say the Project and Portfolio Management, its potential. If you talk about any other tool for PPM, I think CA PPM has the most potential.

It gives us all the projects in one view where we can drill down into our portfolio and see the potential benefits at the end of the day.

I am not sure what features they could add but, personally, what I have seen is that last year when I came to CA World, PPM was on version 15.2 and this year, after 365 days I am here at CA World again and CA is still on 15.3. Within a year only a point release. It looks like CA itself is driving it slowly and they should do something. It says something, that after the whole company worked hard they are still only coming up with a point release. It is something doubtful.

I think CA is already doing the work, probably, by going to the new UI. I think they are on the path. But they need to take a risk and go. Their initiative started, I think, two years back about going to a new UI. It's showing progress but not at a pace that I would like to see.

Since we moved to version 14, we haven't seen stability issues.

We haven't had issue with the scalability yet.

At times it is good but it is not always the best.

Response time is a bit slow in some cases. In some cases it is frustrating that we have to escalate, we would prefer not having to. But at the time, if there is an urgent issue and you get frustrated, you have to escalate it. It doesn't give you a good feeling about getting support that way. After you escalate, you get support. You get everything you want but, at the end of the day, you still feel that it would have been great if CA would have helped us during our first attempt.

I was involved with PPM setup from scratch. It's not straightforward but it's not complex either, if you know the product.

We are using version 14.3 but we would love to go to 15.3. We have seen the new UX and it's looking good so we think it is a positive change.

I would say go with PPM with SaaS. I would suggest that any customers or new customers use Clarity PPM at its default values, not customize it terribly. It has a lot potential using the product out of the box rather than making your own product.

CA has been working every year to provide a product upgrade, and if you can't use the latest features immediately, or in the near future, you are missing out on a lot. Use the regular settings, or at least most of the product out of the box, and leverage or grow from there, rather than making your own changes.

We use it for project-tracking, budgeting, and resource-tracking.

The budgeting. With budgeting would be the resource-tracking, because we budget our resources. Overall budgeting is probably the best use of Clarity for us, because we can see how much we are allowed to spend, how much we have spent, and then how much is left over.

It has all of the features that currently we need.

Project managers have insight into everything regarding their projects. They can do anything they want, such as update and edit their projects within Clarity. They use it every single day, in every way that they can, to keep it updated and to track their project features. It has made project-tracking much simpler and easier.

What I do is just keep things running as much as I can on our end, so I think that would be something that our project managers would better answer, because they are the ones that use it. I just keep it running. 

We have had issues, but that goes with anything. Nothing is perfect, so we work through those and we do what we can when those issues come up to get them fixed quickly. Nothing big; nothing that has obviously stopped us from using it.

We use CA technical support whenever we need to. We try to fix as much as we can on our end, but obviously there are things we can't do that CA has to do for us. However, they are always very helpful. They are always very willing to work with us to figure out what is going on, and to help us out in fixing any issues.

I was not around during the initial setup.

I was not a part of the decision-making process.

I like the new UX. I think it is cool. We pretty much only use it for the time-tracking, which probably more companies do than not. The UX is super-simple, very user-friendly, colorful, and fun. So, I think it is really awesome, and we have received a lot of positive feedback from our time-trackers.

It is something our company continues to use and likes to use. Otherwise, we would not be using it. It gets the job done, and it helps us get our jobs done. 

We use CA PPM to handle our project and portfolio management, as well as time sheets for our resources. 

The new UX, though we are not on it. Some of the new features look really nice. We are just looking for them to be a little more fully fleshed out before we move to them. 

It helps a lot with the automation and manual processes to go faster.  

One major thing that is super relevant to me, and my role in handling it, would be having more published API access, so we could integrate with all of our other tools that we are using.  

I cannot speak to stability, as we have only done a few light tests.

We have had varying degrees of success. Sometimes things are handled super quickly. Other times it takes a little while. 

Know what your full use case will be before launching into something as big as CA PPM. It does a lot of things and it is great at doing a lot of things, but if you only need a small subset, maybe it is not right for you

It does everything we need it to do. It could definitely be improved as far as speed and interoperability with other tools that we have in place. 

Managing the work of a federal agency.

It's performed very well. We've expanded it quite a bit. There have, though, been a couple of issues. 

• The configurability
• The resource management

They're valuable because that's what the customer uses the most.

I've also seen a little of the preview of the new UX and I'm impressed.

The organization that we contract for, they have centralized visibility into a lot of the different things that they were doing manually before, or on spreadsheets. There are a lot of reports that we've written based on that, that are sent out to executives and to management. It's a lot more efficient. It's all centralized, and the reporting is a lot easier, since it is all centralized. The data entry is a lot easier as well as the reporting.

I would like to see much more advanced financial management capabilities. Particularly, both financial and contract management capabilities. Even though there are some of those built in now, our federal customers manage their finances and their contracts differently from most folks on the commercial side of the world, so we've had to configure a lot of things, specific to them. It would be nice if some of that was built in to the product.

Additionally, there are some things that come with the product that are problematic. And the biggest one and, the company certainly knows this, is the integration with Microsoft Project. That's been a real pain in the butt for us. We've actually had contract issues because of it with our customer; it's not as robust or as full-featured as it could be.

There's no downtime or lagging.

In terms of scalability, so far so good. We haven't had any issues. We're using the cloud, CA cloud.

It's good. Sometimes they don't get back to me as quickly as I would like, but they're definitely always within a day.

The factors that are important to us when selecting a vendor are

• capability
• integration points.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because there are some pieces that are just not there that we would like to see. It's not like core type features that you'd expect in a product like this, the ones I talked about earlier, the financial stuff.

I would say, take a very strong look at CA PPM, depending on if you have a couple of specific things that they were looking for. 

We do project management and resource management in PPM and we use mainly that piece from it, right now.

It's been performing well. There are some drawbacks, some features we can't really utilize considering our GAAP business process. So we face issues sometimes with that, that we can't fully utilize CA PPM resource management.

Provides an overall picture, it gives you the ability to store your capex, capital and expense budgets, on projects. You can really drill down with their new utilities, you can use Clarity. You have Allocation Editor and Assignment Editor that give you more flexibility in entering the data.

You get rid of Excels, that's the main point. We are so used to, in the old days, capturing data in Excel; people are really use to doing that. In general we were working in Excel workbooks. We were doing things like ETC assignment, how much they will be, how many hours you're assigning, what the cost will be at the end of the day. With CA PPM we have really gotten rid of those Excels and are utilizing the resource managem

ent and Project Management pieces.

I'm interested in something that would give you flexibility in loading the data to PPM. We have some other utilities, which CA is providing, but sometimes it takes time for users to enter the data into Clarity, the resource management piece. 

They need something so that if we, say, send some sheets to users, or for the scenario where not everybody has access to Clarity, but are part of planning; those people should be able to upload data directly to Clarity. 

We are using another tool to do reporting, or load data inside Clarity. If CA provided that, that would be great. 

The reporting piece is really slow right now, with Jaspersoft. CA is doing a lot on that. They have opened a port that we can connect from an outside tool to the Clarity data warehouse, database. But it would be great if they could do something on Jaspersoft because sometimes it takes 20 minutes to for a report to show up; not all, but some do.

Stability is going well. I'm really hoping for the new UI. I heard it's going to be something like Excel, so we can really do a copy-paste, drag and drop things. I think we will be utilizing it more and longer.

In terms of scalability, I can't say much. We're trying to use different features in it, because we had so many customizations. Actually, we revamped Clarity in the last couple of months, where we're trying to use more out-of-the-box functionalities, so I'm hoping that will be pleasant.

It's okay, right now. It used to be very good. The responses are not really quick. You don't get a response immediately, you have to do a lot of follow-up. We already brought this up, and we might have a support person specifically for us with whom we can work. 

In the past it was very good, but now I see it is weak, we have to follow up a lot.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we're actually trying to not have more vendors, because CA is now providing the different utilities. We have another system - there are a lot systems that are integrated with our Clarity environment right now. I have heard about a lot of things which we did in past, buying products from another vendor, CA already has those utilities so we are looking at that.

I haven't used any other products so I can't really compare with anything else, but I gave it a seven out of 10 because it's not customized per client. Sometimes we want to do something but we are stuck because Clarity doesn't allow you to do it. There are a lot of restrictions in some areas and, considering we are on SAS, we run into a lot of restrictions. It's a generic product, so sometimes it doesn't follow our business rules. And there are some scenarios in which is Clarity is not behaving the way it should. We asked about it, but I didn't get any use-case for it. So there are some areas which need some improvement.

We don't use the Portfolio Management piece, but I'm really happy with Project Management and resource management. So if you're looking for something with granularity, Clarity can do it.

The primary use case is to format the PPM, provide the forecasting and utilization of research utilization, and determine future trends.

The benefit is using the Capacity Demand Model. We can use it to forecast and see the future trends for resource allocations and demands. 

We are on-premise. I would like to see more features around the data warehouse analytics reporting. At the same time, I would like to see some more functionality on the UI side. They have the new user interface, but that new interface is only a portion of it. I would like to see that extended to other parts of the tool.

It is stable.

On a scale from one to 10, I would say PPM scales at a nine.

I have used the technical support. I have mixed opinion on them. I did receive very good support, sometimes. I did receive bad support, too. Most of the times, I would say it is a good support. Maybe there are a few people new to the tech support, and they may be still learning it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was not difficult for me. The documentation is good. I followed it and was able to set it up myself. It was pretty straightforward; no drawbacks.

It is a very good project portfolio tool.

For me it's the Project and Portfolio Management tools within PPM, the portfolios. The functionality within there, and now we're starting to use resource management to tie into that as well.

It has improved things very much so. They're just starting to full-fledged adopt it right now. Gives them better visibility across the organization.

I don't know if it's missing or not, but I'm anxious to learn more about Agile and using the tool with Agile. We're starting to use that methodology more and more within our organization. So how do we use the tool more effectively for that?

Also I'm looking for some more enhanced portfolio management capabilities.

Stability is good. Haven't had any problems.

We have scaled it. Scalability is very, very good.

I haven't used it.

At another company I used HPE PPM. I like Clarity CA PPM a lot better. It's more user friendly, easier to figure out if you don't have the significant training that you need. Pretty intuitive.

At my current company they previously used a home-grown solution but I'm not sure how they decided on CA.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I came to the company after it had already been set up.

I think the important criteria when choosing a vendor are 

• reliability
• innovation
• the ability to listen to their customers. 

I think those are the key.

Don't customize it right out of the gate. Understand its capabilities out-of-the-box.

Detailed schedule makes estimation of resources, and resource forecasting, easy and meaningful.

This product is good for resource management and project management. I have managed detailed schedules with great success.

Reporting is not good as they keep on changing reporting environment.

Not anything significant.

Yes, scalability may be issue in a SaaS environment but can be resolved by proper configuration.

Okay, but not that great. Over the years the support level keeps on dropping.

No, though worked with Daptiv and HPE PPM. Daptiv is not ready for a big corporation.

Initial setup is not complex. It sometimes gets ugly and complex after customization.

This project management software is a little bit costly compared to others, but it is mature. Customers should understand this product is geared towards project management, not financial management.

We evaluated CA PPM vs Micro Focus PPM.

This product needs technical expertise. Purchasing the software is not sufficient and support is very important.

Project Management features that are excellent in managing the Project Management Life-cycle, along with other related details like Financials, Resources and flexibility to customize, as per requirement.

For an insurance company, all the project management activities, approvals and processes were offline.

CA PPM gave them the ability to automate approval processes, managing project life-cycle in a central tool, filling time-sheets against the projects and providing the reports to executives.

It helped them reduce their effort in the terms of cost and time involved.

The forms (e.g., project properties page) need to be more attractive, colorful, and field more flexibility for validations.

For more than seven years.

Stability issues have occurred in on-premise implementations but have significantly reduced during on-demand implementations.

On-demand implementations are more scalable as compared to on-premise implementations. As with number of users added, licenses can be increased and infrastructure requirements are taken care of by CA itself.

Good (seven out of 10).

Organizations that have migrated from other solutions to CA PPM may have found this more suitable to their business requirements.

Initial setup varies on the organizations requirement.

If less customization is required, it can be setup within few weeks and is simple. However to meet the requirement, larger customizations are not provided by the tool or require integrations and data flows with other vendors, and this could take months to do. Hence, many organizations prefer to go in phases.

Once an initial setup is made and the tool is ready to use, other major functionalities are added with time.

It's important to understand your organization's requirement clearly, then understanding how the vendor is categorizing its licensing (e.g., different license types and their respective pricing).

Better understanding of requirements and how it will be implemented (with number of licenses for a given budget) would help.

As per the focused areas like Project management, Financial Management, etc., the organizations should weigh all suitable products in market w.r.t. time and cost involved (e.g., HP PPM, Planview, etc.).

The objective should be a benefit in medium to long term, as some solutions may save money in short term but can turn out to be expensive later. I would suggest to go through the comparison reports, blogs, and demonstrations of the products before making the final call.

Focus on correct licensing and integration with other applications like JIRA, Remedy, ServiceNow, SAP etc during the implementation. Also, this application has good automation features to automate your offline/over the mail approvals and processes. This can also be kept in mind during the designing part.