November 30, 2022

Q&A: Financial Firms Boost Employee Engagement with Clarity

The financial industry is highly competitive. It’s essential that companies are able to have the right people working on the right things at all times, and that resources are as fully utilized as possible. At the typical scale financial companies need, that can be a challenge. We spoke to a number of companies to understand how they go about managing such large, complex operations.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

Our firm, for example, has about 12,000 employees and contractors working on our IT initiatives. That’s a lot of people with different roles, reporting lines, and commitments. It’s also a tremendous number of projects to support. We need to be able to see all resources across all functions and allocations in order to understand where our current and upcoming bottlenecks are, where we have opportunities, and where we have over- or under-allocation issues.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

It can’t be through a standard approach. We need to be able to deliver work using traditional, Agile, and increasingly hybrid ways of working; a single standard process and resource pool, therefore, doesn’t work. Instead, we need a tool that supports different ways of working while still providing us with a complete picture of resourcing. We also require the ability to report, analyze, and model resource availability and utilization to optimize performance.

We need to be able to connect work with strategy so that we understand the business impact of our resourcing decisions and challenges. We also need to be able to quickly understand how variances between planned and actual resource needs impact performance. All stakeholders need to see information in a context that makes sense for them – resource owners seeing what their people were doing, project managers understanding where their challenges and bottlenecks were, and so on.

What do you do, and how does it help?

We use Broadcom’s Clarity platform, which gives us exactly what we need. We can assign resources using individuals or roles, monitor actual vs. planned utilizations, and report on all areas where we have challenges and opportunities. We can also model different project schedules and mixes to understand resource impacts. Clarity’s insights give us a level of understanding of our resources that we just haven’t had before.

We do the same thing using Broadcom’s Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that combines the Clarity platform with Rally. As an increasing amount of our work moves to Agile, our teams can operate in Rally while we can consolidate resource information from all work management tools in Clarity, helping us understand what’s happening across all work delivery approaches. It makes resource decisions faster and easier, and improves those decisions’ effectiveness and efficiency.

How is this driving your success?

Companies always say that people are their most important asset, and it’s true. When we are able to better understand what’s happening with our resource utilization and allocation, not only are we more effective and efficient, but we are also able to improve employee engagement and motivation. Every individual feels that the organization better understands the situation that they are in, and feels that their workload is better balanced.

Additionally, the fact that Broadcom’s solution connects work directly with strategies allows all our people to understand how they are contributing to the success of the business. That’s powerful, and drives even greater performance.

Tag(s): Value Stream Management , ValueOps , Clarity

Alf Abuhajleh

Alf Abuhajleh markets Clarity by Broadcom. From early-days cloud computing, mobile apps and cognizant enterprise apps, Alf spent the past 25 years developing and launching emerging technologies in Silicon Valley.

Other resources you might be interested in

Blog October 8, 2025

Nobody Cares About Your MTTR

This post outlines why IT metrics like MTTR are irrelevant to business leaders, and it emphasizes that IT teams need network observability to bridge this gap.

Read Blog

Blog October 8, 2025

Tag(ging)—You’re It: How to Leverage AppNeta Monitoring Data for Maximum Insights

Find out about tagging capabilities in AppNeta. Get strategies for making the most of tagging and see how it can be a game-changer for your operations teams.

Read Blog

Office Hours October 6, 2025

Rally Office Hours: October 2, 2025

The Rally Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server acts as a standardized interface for AI models and developer tools. Learn about this exciting new feature then follow the weekly Q&A session with Rally...

View Recording

Blog October 1, 2025

Why 1% Packet Loss Is the New 100% Outage

In an era of real-time apps and multiple clouds, the old rules about 'acceptable' network errors no longer apply. See why you need end-to-end observability.

Read Blog

Office Hours September 30, 2025

Rally Office Hours: September 25, 2025

Rally Office Hours delivers an essential product tip: Learn to transition from Legacy Custom Pages to powerful Custom Views. Plus, Q&A insights.

View Recording

Blog September 26, 2025

Defining the Network Engineer of Tomorrow

Read this post and see why the most important investment isn't in new hardware, but in transforming your team from device managers to service delivery experts.

Read Blog

Blog September 26, 2025

Harnessing AppNeta’s Browser- and HTTP-based Workflows to Track User Experience

AppNeta’s browser- and HTTP-based workflows let you see what users actually experience. Preempt issues before they become headaches for your end users.

Read Blog

Blog September 26, 2025

“Rego U” Recap: Why SPM Is Still Hot

Rego Consulting’s Annual Conference underscored why strategic portfolio management (SPM) is still essential. Leverage SPM to bridge strategy and execution.

Read Blog

Blog September 23, 2025

What's New in AutoSys 24.1: Built for the Modern Automation Landscape

See how AutoSys 24.1 is designed to streamline your daily tasks, accelerate troubleshooting, and simplify how you integrate with the latest technologies.

Read Blog