Serving the Government with Clarity

When you’re tasked with providing technology services to every department in a federal government you need to be effective, efficient and adaptable. And you need a software solution that helps you do that quickly and intuitively. We recently sat down with IT government department to learn how they used Clarity.

What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?

When our department was created not even email was centralized across government departments. We had to provide a common set of technology management services across very disparate sets of needs. With project investments that diversity was greater than almost any other aspect of technology because projects were so varied in terms of size, scope and approach. And a lot of that work was being delivered and managed using Excel spreadsheets.

How did you go about addressing those problems?

We knew we needed a PPM solution and we knew we needed it quickly. We also knew that any solution we chose would have to integrate with all of our other system and infrastructure elements or it wouldn’t provide our client departments the functionality they needed. We recognized that there wouldn’t be any single solution that gave us everything we needed out of the box, so we also looked for a platform that would allow us the flexibility to customize and tailor features and functions to the unique needs of each of our client groups.

What did you do, and how did it help?

We selected Broadcom’s Clarity solution and implemented it just a year after our shared technology services function was established. It’s being used for everything from major federal government projects to smaller departmental initiatives, and it’s being used for an incredibly diverse range of work.

Our client departments come to us with the type of initiative they are looking to deliver and we are able to create custom objects within Clarity to support them – we’ve most recently stood up functionality to help with the disposal of assets. That is a completely custom object that has nothing to do with projects directly, but where we were able to leverage Clarity’s functionality to deliver an innovative solution that met our client’s needs. We were able to deliver the solution in just 5 months from requirements to pilot launch – and that was during the pandemic.

We’ve also been able to integrate with multiple systems to leverage financial information, resource details, etc. And we continue to create custom APIs and loaders to make it easier for our clients to leverage the functionality they have available to them.

The benefits for our clients have been considerable. As a federal government it’s critically important that all the work done is effective, efficient and transparent. With Clarity it is, before, when work was being managed in isolated Excel spreadsheets, it was anything but.

How is this driving your success?

Our clients have greater control over their work and can make better decisions in less time. That’s good for them, and for the country. They have transparency and visibility to their work which helps them with governance and audit requirements ,and builds trust in the work they are delivering. And we are able to tailor the tool to their exact needs, allowing them to work in a way they want.

Going forward we have plans to support additional federal government departments, to support new types of work and to make integrations even more seamless – always delivering the needs of our client groups.