Are there users with BIG projects?

[Legacy User]

Our Clarity program has a potential new user community in our company who has been advised by an outside consultant that managing projects with greater than 100 tasks is "tedious" compared to MSP. We've been asked to demonstrate that Clarity is equally usable if not easier than MSP for large projects.   However,  our current users' projects run 60-80 tasks, so we can't provide real world examples of larger projects. Is anyone out there successfully managing very large projects?

[Deactivated User]

I agree it is tedious to create the plan and definitely not easier and it goes better with a scheduler. If you have less than 100 tasks then people are starting to as about the benefit versus the required effort to do that compared to just using the effort task.

Typically OWB users have one hundred or more tasks say a couple of hundred. I*ve seen max 1000 - 2000 tasks and people in the communities have referent to thousands of tasks.

Such project plans are smoother to create in the scheduler and the same goes for any major revisions. Once you have done that then it is much easier to get the project level information in Clarity and for quick things to use the interactive Gantt.

 

Just consider creating the WBS no grid copy like from Excel to scheduler.

When you have done that once you can create a template project which you can copy completely or parts of it to a new project which reduces your need to use the scheduler.

 

Both Clarity and schedulers have there specific areas where they are better. You need both.

[Legacy User]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.   I think your points regarding creation of a project or template in Clarity are important.  There's no doubt it would be great to be able to copy/paste a WBS to Clarity from an Excel spreadsheet. We've worked around that by xogging from Excel. 

[Deactivated User]

See  TEC1266014

http://www.ca.com/us/support/ca-support-online/product-content/knowledgebase-articles/tec1266014.aspx

for a sample project size (does not say if that is small or big)

[Anon Anon]

Is there a reason you can't use MSP integration via Schedule Connect? That way, your PMs get to keep the user experience they're used to for scheduling*, while you get all the benefits associated with having that information available in CA PPM.

 

* Subject of course to all of the well-documented caveats around using MS Project with CA PPM!

[Legacy User]

Thanks for your response, KiwiAli.  There are several reasons why we want to move away from MSP.

1. The PMs you refer to will be the primary users of Clarity.  We don't want them having to work in two different tools.

2. Our experiments with Clarity-MSP integration, including 14.2, show it to be anything but seamless.  Especially when you are dealing with CA's network user authentication tool (we know as S3, or "single, secure sign-on").

3. We would like to get rid of the MSP licensing cost. Once we move a critical mass to Clarity, we can seek CA Clarity enterprise license.

[Robert_Ensinger]

We use the In App Gantt for small projects (>40 tasks & milestones). These projects are primarily "non professional PM" lead, these come to the PMs with templates & staff roughed in - the PMs are primarily doing what is called "Gantt Sliding". For larger schedules or any PM that wants greater control we use Open Workbench. Here's a thread a couple years old on speed tests. OWB is seamless, we get no noise from the tool usage other than the install.

[Anon Anon]

In that case, I suspect you have an acceptance curve to navigate. The in-app Gantt is orders of magnitude better than it used to be, but it is still a long way from the functionality offered by MS Project (not to mention the "known" user interface, etc.).

 

You're right, the integration is a long way from "seamless", but I'd still advocate it for larger projects.  Personally, I prefer Open Workbench to MS Project (that's possibly my subversive nature!) but again, there's a learning curve for your PMs to go through if you're going to go down that road.

 

I'm not sure I agree about the 100-line comment, especially if you're going to use templates as a starting-point. I've used the in-app Gantt for projects of ~250 lines, and although it's a pain to establish it, it's fine for on-going maintenance and re-planning.  I wouldn't, however, want to use it for anything large (~1000 lines or more).