Broadcom's Clarity solution is a powerful investment portfolio management tool that helps organizations optimize their business and work management processes. Clarity provides a wide range of capabilities that enable organizations to manage their work efficiently, including strategic portfolio management, investment tracking, resource management, and financial management. In this blog post, we will outline the top three ways that we see customers using the Clarity solution.
Strategic Portfolio Management
Clarity's Strategic Portfolio Management functionality helps organizations to manage their investment portfolios effectively. It enables users to select the right investments that align with their strategic objectives, evaluate the risks associated with each body of work, and allocate individuals and teams based on their availability and skills. Additionally, Clarity gives users the flexibility to track the work that’s important to their organization—no matter which nomenclature, ideas, projects, epics, or features they use.
Clarity’s Portfolio Management module includes several features that help users make informed decisions, including roadmap visualization, work prioritization, what-if scenario analysis, and portfolio optimization. Strategic Portfolio Management provides reporting capabilities for stakeholders to visualize the progress of work, track performance, and monitor the evolution of each of these different investments. With these capabilities, users can assess their investment’s overall impact on the organization's goals and objectives and ultimately make data-driven decisions.
Figure 1: Strategic Roadmap, Events, and Dependencies
Resource and Team Management
Effective resource management is critical for the success of investments, regardless of whether agile or waterfall methodologies are being implemented. Clarity's Resource and Team Management capabilities help organizations effectively manage their resources, individuals, roles, and teams. With these capabilities, users can identify staffing gaps and allocate resources based on availability and skills. Resource Management also helps organizations forecast demand and staffing needs, optimize individual and team utilization, and ultimately manage conflicts.
Here are of the key ways customers use Clarity’s Resource and Team Management capabilities:
Optimization of resource tracking and utilization
In both waterfall and agile methodologies, managing resources effectively is critical. By understanding each resource's skills, availability, and workload, executives can assign the right team members to the right work, ensuring that individuals are not overburdened or underutilized.
Resource and Team Management features out-of-the-box dashboards that provide real-time visibility into availability, utilization, and performance. These views offer drag-and-drop customization capabilities, delivering user-friendly options for forecasting demand and easily analyzing, correcting, and optimizing organizational utilization.
Figure 2: Resource and Team Management Dashboard - Allocation Timeline
Workforce modeling
Workforce Modeling enables organizations to forecast future workforce needs, which can be helpful in strategic or annual planning. By analyzing historical workforce and skill data, organizations can identify patterns in employee turnover or demand to predict their future workforce needs. This can help organizations avert staffing mistakes, saving time and money. With these capabilities, executives can ensure teams are made up of the individuals needed to advance and meet business goals.
Workforce Modeling enables individuals to make informed, data-driven decisions about their workforce, so they can optimally align human resources with strategic goals.
Figure 3: Workforce Modeling Plan Example
Increased collaboration
In both waterfall and agile methodologies, managing resources effectively promotes collaboration between team members. By ensuring that resources are allocated to the right tasks, team members can work together more efficiently, minimizing conflicts and improving communication.
Clarity offers Collaborative Work Management to promote team collaboration. The solution provides to-do’s, checklists, and conversations, which can be combined with dashboards, boards, and calendar views to streamline work for individuals and team members.
Figure 4: My Team’s To-Do’s Calendar View
To ensure that investments are delivered on time and within budget, teams need to be able to track individual progress and make adjustments as necessary. Clarity’s Resource and Team Management ultimately provides organizations with the ability to plan and run investments with the feedback of real-time data to make informed decisions.
Financial Management
Clarity offers Financial Management functionality that helps teams manage the entire investment lifecycle. The solution offers capabilities for managing long-term forecasts, short-term cost plans and budget plans, and revenue projections. Plus, the solution can be integrated with legacy ERP systems and other financial tools.
Whether your organization is funding projects, products, value streams, or some combination thereof, Clarity meets teams where they are. The solution can assist with efforts ranging from simple, planned cost and budget tracking to detailed cost-benefit analysis of expenses, including capital, operating, hardware, software, travel, and more.
The solution couples out-of-the-box Financial Reports with Strategic Portfolio capabilities of Roadmaps and Hierarchies. These capabilities empower teams to view data roll ups, compare planned to actuals, and analyze real-time data to make true data-driven decisions. This functionality enables teams to monitor the performance of investments and assess their overall impact on the organization's financial objectives.
Figure 5: Program Hierarchy - Budget and Cost Roll Up
Conclusion
Clarity provides a powerful set of tools that enable teams to effectively manage their work, resources, and finances. The application’s Strategic Portfolio Management, Resource and Team Management, and Financial Management capabilities enable organizations to optimize their investment management processes, make informed decisions, and achieve their strategic objectives. In a nutshell, Clarity is a powerful, overarching tool for managing strategic investment portfolios.