January 7, 2021

Health-Device Maker Finds Remedy in Clarity

Operating a business in the medical technology and life sciences industries is not easy. The stakes of every project are extremely high, not just to ensure that the company delivers value for itself, but to deliver value to customers that might mean the difference between life and death. In this business you simply have to get it right. We recently spoke to a health-tech company facing just this situation. Here's an excerpt:

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

We have over 3,000 systems and applications contributing to just a small number of products that deliver customer value. This complex environment had resulted in the development of a number of custom spreadsheet solutions to understand how much money we were spending on each product, where effort was being expended and whether products were profitable.

Unsurprisingly this was an unsatisfactory solution for us – no one had a clear insight into what work was being done, why it was being done and how much it was costing. Our parent company was looking to spin us off as a separate business and we absolutely had to have accurate information – it was critical to our success.

How did you go about addressing those problems?

We focused on investment and cost management. Those were the areas where we had the least insight and where we were spending the most time trying to understand what was going on. We needed to get to an accurate picture of the total cost of ownership of every product whether that was customer support, agile development or any other category of expenditure. We also knew that we wanted a system that had a light footprint for users – we weren’t going to get accurate information if it took excessive amounts of time to capture timesheet data or to allocate costs to the right areas.

What did you do, and how did it help?

We implemented Clarity in conjunction with Rally, and we added some custom integrations to allow for cost allocations that worked with our complex business models. Rally handles all of the work management so that our engineering teams can manage and deliver all the work in the pipeline while capturing all of the time spent on different initiatives and products.

We fund our product teams through Clarity and we have a clear picture of the budget for every Release Train as well as actual and forecast costs. In Clarity we have a single source to understand all of our funding, forecasts and features, and we have that without anyone being taken away from where we need them to be focused.

How is this driving your success?

The shift from a massive amount of cumbersome, unreliable spreadsheets to push-of-a-button information is revolutionizing our business. It’s redefining what’s possible and allowing us to pursue initiatives that would never have been considered before. That in turn delivers greater customer and business value.

We can pivot our investments quickly and with the confidence that we are making the right decisions at the right time. And we can see the implications of those decisions to validate performance.

Tag(s): ValueOps , Rally , Clarity , Q & A

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