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.
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.
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
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
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.
It helps with our marketing efforts, projects, timing, budgeting, and resourcing. It also gives us a one-page overview.
We're able to run our business more efficiently because the solution is cloud-based.
We use JIRA, so I'd definitely want PPM integrated with that. Also, it needs to connect better with other software so that we can simply drag items into PPM. Additionally, it would be nice if it worked with Microsoft Office.
We've had no issues with deployment.
We've had no issues with stability, and if you have sufficient storage, you shouldn't have any problems.
It is scalable, and it adapts well from the end-user point-of-view.
I don't have personal experience with CA technical support, but my point of view is that they are professional, and the sales and technical guys are also professional. We are very happy with the people at CA.
Because we're smart, we knew we had to switch, and when we saw what CA had to offer, we chose this, although we had pressure to put this in place internally.
We didn't look at any other solution.
We got too much marketing and not enough of the actual product itself during the sales process. Pay attention to the product and not the marketing.
Demand, Resource, Project Portfolio Management, for my business consulting services, PMO services to other clients.
Capacity and demand of the resources, optimize the response times of my requirements, detect the control points of the process of attention to our clients, a collaborative environment, notes, remember agreements, efficiency in the times.
Look and feel of the user experience.
Two and a half years.
No, its normal.
None.
Eight out of 10.
We started with the default use of the solution with some parameters, then we were increasing automations, control points, and other more technical issues.
For all the functionalities of the solution, the price is in the market range, since it is a product which offers governance issues and supports the digital transformation, which is where we will go in the next year.
Yes. Planview, Daptiv, MS Project, Changepoint.
My advice is to start using the solution almost as it comes, something basic, simple, that it already provides. Then we develop small consultancies, configurations by functionalities, demand, projects, portfolios, resources, inventory of applications, services, products, etc., until arriving at a model of strategic government.
Besides offering software development services, PMO, attention to demand of requirements, we are a CA Technologies Partner, for consulting services, consulting and strategy of governance, methodology, processes, as it is what we do with our clients.
Great review!
FYI: Per your comment in "Room for Improvement" CA PPM just released v15.3 which allows a better user experience on the project details page. Projects can have different details pages based on the project template used to create it. So, the details page for a smaller project doesn't need to be as robust as one for a larger project. There is also more flexibility in the layout of the attributes on the details page as well as the modules (tabs) for the project.