Clarity 16.0.3 is a powerful new release that mixes both customer-requested enhancements with industry-leading capabilities to give Clarity users, both new and existing, features that will propel their PPM investment. In this document, we have broken down the enhancements by users who could be impacted. As of publication, the release documentation was updated by Broadcom on September 8, 2022.

To see these new features demonstrated, watch Discover What’s New in Clarity 16.0.3.

Team Members and Project Manager Enhancements

Checklists and To-Dos

Changing the entire approach for work management, Clarity now allows users to review and manage their to-do’s in a completely new way: via both a calendar view and a “Kanban style” board view that consolidates all of your work. The Board view is similar to a sticky note board where you can easily move To-Dos from panel to panel using a drag and drop experience. The calendar view, which is new to Clarity, is a welcome addition that has been requested for some time. It supports a “short week” (or workdays only view), a 7-day week, a full month, or custom date range. Currently, the calendar view is only available with the To-Dos, but it is expected to be added to other modules.

Clarity includes a To-Do and Calendar view.

Conversations

A popular feature in other investment objects, conversations have now been added to Ideas, Custom Investment Types, Roadmaps, Hierarchies, and Agreements. They support attachments and named or “@” mentions of users.  These will automatically notify the recipients giving them context-based conversations vs. emails or separate channels of discussion that are disconnected.

Clarity 16.0.3 Leadership and Finance Enhancements

Hierarchies Now Displays Financials

Clarity continues to enhance the Hierarchy capabilities by giving more insights and driving powerful rollups of data. In this release, you can now see an aggregated view of your financials in Hierarchies with drill down capabilities to the working investments. You start by determining the plan type: cost, budget, or benefit. The financials then leverage the consistent user experience to select the columns you want to see, the time periods, and even sort/filter as needed. Even the export to .xls is available should you need to share this data with others.

Resource Management Enhancements

In this latest version, Clarity has enhanced the Resource Managers experience, specifically in the Users module. When you select Users from the Administration dashboard, you can now see a complete list of your users. From here, you can make changes such as adding or removing someone from a group or bulk editing updates. This ability, along with the export to .xls options, are true time savers for resource managers and admins alike.

Utilizing the new User administration tool you can view users and make changes directly from this list.

Staffing

Clarity has made some tactical improvement to the staffing pages: page landing and bulk-edits. Clarity will now “remember” where you were working, whether on the allocations timeline or the staffing grid and return you there. This way, should you click away, you will land back where you were last working.  Additionally, they have granted permission-based rights to enable bulk edits from the staffing grid.

Admin Enhancements

Roadmap Copying

Using this version, you can now apply the Always True condition to sub-objects. The sub-objects supported include Projects, Ideas, and Custom Investments. Sub-object rules can be created in the parent Master Object Blueprint. This new ability provides increased versatility and an improved ability to create unique, relevant experiences for end-users.

Broadcom also introduced toggle for native and custom sub-objects. The two toggles do not change any existing security rights.

Blueprints

Some financial features have been added to the Investment grid. You can now view TSVs (Time Scaled Values) in the Hierarchies Investment Grid and Post Actuals to Investment Job. Another enhancement is the ability to view financial TSVs in the Project, Ideas, and Custom Investments grids.

Using Clarity, you can now add Always True conditions to sub-objects.

Customer Requested Enhancements

The developers at Broadcom make a point to always listen to clients and what they need. The following enhancements have come straight from the clients.

  1. Word Wrapping in Grid: An often-requested capability, you can now go to your View Options box and now select “Wrap Text” in columns. For example, you can employ work wrapping to Project Names or description text, allowing you to see all the content from the grid views. Currently, it does not apply to headers.
  2. Auto Assigned Access Rights Calculated as Read-Only: Users named in manager fields are no longer required to utilize a full license to “view” items unless they have additional rights granted above being named in the manager field.
  3. Increased the size of Properties Module Tab: The properties tab now displays twice the number of characters in all Blueprints. This makes it able to display longer custom tab names.
  4. Individual Users Can Select Language and Locale: Previously, admins set the language and locale for users in the last release. Now individual users can set their preferences.
  5. Navigation Improvements in Hierarchies: Now, you can more easily navigate from a hierarchy to the hierarchy’s grid. You can use the Dynamic back button (breadcrumbs) to move from an investment to the hierarchy.
  6. Resource Date of Hire and Date of Termination: The API-enabled attributes make available date of hire and date of termination dates to be displayed in the Staffing grid.
  7. Translate Configuration in Blueprints: These new features allow Blueprint labels to support multiple target languages.
  8. Filtering by Column: Like Excel, you can configure columns to be sorted by chosen criteria in Grid.
  9. Apply Maxs and Mins to Widgets: You can configure the Number Tile and Bar Chart widgets to display information based on set maximum and minimum values.

Clarity Mobile App 3.1.1

The latest mobile version is available for iOS and Android platforms. This version provides extended timesheet options. For example, you can view timesheets for more periods for your own timesheets and for those that review and approve timesheets. You can filter timesheets by resource manager and perform bulk actions using the mobile app.

We hope you have the opportunity to take advantage of the new features in Clarity 16.0.3. If you need further guidance, Rego offers free configuration and adoption assessments, webinars, and half-day training classes for Clarity and Rally Software®.

For a full list of Clarity PPM services, see Clarity Portfolio Management. If you’d like to learn more about Clarity’s mobile features, Broadcom created a video presentation with screenshots.

When you are ready to upgrade, we are here for you

Rego also offers free configuration and adoption assessmentswebinars, and half-day training classes for Clarity and Rally Software® on Roadmaps, Portfolio Management, Power BI, Scaled Agile, Jaspersoft.

For a full list of Clarity PPM services, visit regoconsulting.com.

About the Author: Rego Consulting

As the leading Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Technology Business Management (TBM), Agile and expert services provider, Rego Consulting has helped hundreds of organizations achieve a higher return on their software investment, including 60% of Fortune 100 and 70% of Fortune 20 companies.