Q&A: Stockbrokers Get the Full Picture with Clarity

Investment firms tend to have a lot of people working on a large number of high-value projects, all in one of the world’s most highly-regulated industries, where every hour and every dollar have to be tracked. We spoke to a panel of representatives from the financial services industry to understand their environment.

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

For us, the operating model requires us to charge all work back to the relevant business areas, and those chargebacks have to fund our portfolio of investments. It’s therefore essential that we have accurate time, financial tracking, and clear transparency for every piece of work we undertake. Additionally, we capitalize as much of our in-house development effort as possible, so we need to be able to accurately track that work. As a publicly traded financial institution, we have to report financial information to auditors, regulators, and investors, so we have to get it right.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

We know that we need a project portfolio management (PPM) solution to manage our $400 million of investments, but we also know that not any PPM product will do the job. We need it to support 6200 people working in the system and allow us to adapt it to handle all our financial tracking needs. Finally, we need it to handle everything from maintenance activities to strategic investments.

What do you do, and how does it help?

For us, Broadcom’s Clarity solution is the answer. We’ve been using it for more than a decade now and simply couldn’t operate without it. We have the ability to manage everything from an acquisition to a maintenance release, can track and account for chargebacks down to the hour and dollar, and can accurately report all capitalization-eligible activity.

Clarity allows us to work the way we want without having to adjust or compromise because of the limitations of the tool. It also gives us the insight we need without taking our thousands of users away from the work they need to deliver – ensuring efficiency as well as effectiveness.

How is this driving your success?

We simply couldn’t operate without Broadcom’s Clarity solution. We’re looking to expand into more use cases, and are currently planning to adopt the powerful roadmapping functionality. From program managers ensuring the performance of their investments, to users entering time, to the people we’ll be adding with roadmaps, Clarity is our trusted partner in success.