Broadcom Clarity Reviews

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.

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.