Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Primary usage is to track project information, including the labor book to projects. The performance has been really good.

You can't manage what you can't measure. It helps us measure things like time compliance, as people are putting all their time into project costs. 

It is very intuitive. Even if you do not have training documents or anything, you can start feeling your way around pretty easily. I like that piece of it.

I would like to be able to do time submission and time approvals on mobile rather than have to go in the system. It would just make things much easier for everybody, being on the go, and a lot of us have an app for our email on our personal phone. Therefore, to be able to do everything there would be much more convenient, and I am sure we would get better buy in from managers, too.

Stability is very good. We have very little downtime.

We have been with a pretty consistent number of users, so we have not had to move. So, I do not know. For the little increase we have had, it has gone very smoothly.

We meet with technical support periodically. I would give them a nine out of 10. They are good.

The old one we had just did not meet our needs. We had to do too many configurations, and we wanted something that we could keep a little more vanilla. As it was and not have to worry about tweaking it for our needs. We have tweaked it, but with what we had previously, we had to do major changes.

All the complications came from our side with our users as opposed to CA.

The support and the transition from our old system to this, they made it go very smoothly. We had people onsite helping us. They were very good at letting us do a concept and run through it first, and test everything we needed to test. Those were some of the things I liked about it.

Changepoint. It pretty much came down to Changepoint and CA.

From the other ones that we looked at, this was the obvious choice for us after doing a PoC.

Contact CA. They are very good at sending up a PoC.

I do like the new UX very much. We have only turned onto a few users so far. We just upgraded to 15.3 a few months ago. The ones that have been using it do like it very much. We just have not rolled it out to everyone yet. We want to have some feedback first. So far, it has been very positive.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: 

• Support is a big one.
• Ease of use of the product.
• It interfaces well, and we are able to get the data out that we need.

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.