May 9, 2022

To:         Clarity Customers

From:     Broadcom’s Clarity Product Team

Subject:  General Availability Announcement for Clarity Release 16.0.2

On behalf of Broadcom, we appreciate your business and the opportunity to provide you with high-quality, innovative software and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to customer success, we regularly release updated versions of our products. Today, we are pleased to announce that Clarity Release 16.0.2 is now available for On Premise and SaaS customers.

New features for Clarity Release 16.0.2 include:                                            

• The introduction of Checklists to: Organize, create and copy To Dos. In addition, the ability to define ‘Smartlists’ of To Do’s; associate Checklists with Investments; share Checklists with existing Clarity users; define To Do’s in Risks, Issues & Changes; and copy Checklists when creating investments from Templates.
• Configurable Visual Widget updates provide the ability to: create Widgets on custom sub-objects across Projects, Ideas, Custom Investments, and Custom Master Objects; create Widgets on Cost, Budget, and Benefit Plans, and Actual Transactions; use the enhanced relative date filtering; and use the enhanced current user filtering for business rules.
• Continued focus improving Visual Resource Staffing with added capability to: perform inline edits within the Timeline (grid) & Details flyout (e.g., Start, Finish, Allocation, etc.); and indicate default allocation & start / finish dates when either adding or replacing a role or resource via drag-n-drop or reallocating a role or resource.
• Robust Resource Management capabilities including the ability to: view and edit Resources and Roles (in addition to Teams) in the Resources workspace; aggregate labor allocation and usage per-period metrics within Project, Idea, and Custom Investment list views.
• Top-down planning (Hierarchies & Roadmaps) improvements including the ability to: edit Investment details from within the Hierarchy Grid view without having to drill into the details; configure sub-objects across all investment types as 'modules' list within a Hierarchy Blueprint; leverage TSV attributes (stock & custom) across Projects, Ideas, and Custom Investments when defining Hierarchy Metrics (both Aggregation & Calculation); view allocation and usage per-period metrics in the tree view; share saved views across different Hierarchy instances; configure Roadmap Timeline output formatting options for screen size and orientation while in PDF preview mode; synchronize additional attributes between Roadmap Items & linked investments (e.g., Budget (Capital & Operating) Costs, Forecast (Capital & Operating) Costs, Department, and Location attributes; and sync attributes of type Multi-Valued Lookup – String.
• Continued focus on improving the Financial Management user experience including the ability to: drill down to per-period actuals from cost and budget plans; optionally hide the Actual Transaction page; filter using per-period metrics (TSVs) in the Timeline, Board, Grid, and Widgets; work with Benefit information in Projects, Ideas, and Custom Investments; and manage Currency Exchange Rates with the API.
• Pages have been updated with the ability to: Configure an end user's default home (or landing) page after login; define a ‘Canvas’ as a module; configure the Canvas using drag-n-drop to position Tasks, Risks, Issues, and Changes as ‘Table’ widgets; each table widget can be added multiple times to the same canvas; and introducing Action Items as a widget for users to manage process-based action items in Modern UX.
• Continued focus on improving Clarity Connections, the Clarity-Rally no-code integration with the following tools:
  • A new Investment Hierarchy module providing visibility of metrics associated with multiple (child) investments. The (Clarity) business user has immediate visibility of delivery or execution status for the investments they are responsible for without having to navigate to Rally to retrieve the information.
  • Capability to sync Clarity resource (e.g., Manager) field values with Rally’s Owner field values.
  • End-users have on-screen information indicating when the last sync (from Rally) occurred and if the sync was successful (or not).
  • Added capability to map (and sync) Clarity’s (SVL) lookup values to Rally’s ‘custom’ lookup values using ‘Clarity to Rally’, ‘Rally to Clarity’, or ‘Both’ sync directions.
  • Sync job updates to automatically associate Integration Mappings values, configured on Rally parent Portfolio Items (e.g., Epic) with all child Portfolio Items (e.g., Initiative); a ‘Full’ sync job option processes all records for data comparison regardless of the last update.
  • Synchronize Rally (MVL) lookups between Clarity Roadmap Items & their linked investments.
  • Users can map and sync Rally’s Formatted ID to a Clarity field.
• Key improvements delivered through our Customer Innovation Panel process:
  • Powerful Roadmap capabilities including the ability to use ‘Dynamic Lookups’ to define swimlanes (e.g., Department or Location); and users can also hide or show available swimlanes.
  • A Timeline view (e.g., GANTT) is available for Project, Ideas, and Custom Investments (in addition to Board and Grid views).
  • Subprojects can be included in a (master) Project Tasks list using a new ’action’ menu option.
  • Business rules can be enabled on Sub-Objects associated with Projects, Ideas, Custom Investments, and Custom Master Objects.
  • Clarity’s Board columns configuration can use custom defined and system restricted (dynamic) lookups, similar to static lookups.
  • To improve Project scheduling, the Task Duration field is editable within the Task Timeline, Grid, and flyout views.
  • The ‘document’ attribute has been enabled for Risk, Issues, and Changes in Modern UX.
  • Removed the dependency on an active ‘reports and jobs’ notification setting to alert users the CSV export (for documents with >500 records) has completed.
  • Doubled the maximum width for a customer logo (supporting up to 480px) and the image tooltip character support has been increased (up to 80 characters).
  • To match global unique identifier industry standards, the Task objects ID (prexternalid) size has been increased to 36 characters.
  • A ‘View Options” setting enables users to see decimals for Number, Money, and per-period metrics (TSVs) based on the attribute’s Studio configuration.
  • To improve the performance of the “Investment Allocation” job, the job has been updated to accept parameters (Investment (name), Investment Manager, OBS Unit, & OBS Unit Filter Mode) to filter the data, the job is also renamed to “Update Investment Allocations & Usage’ to reflect its actual function; the job has also been enhanced to process the new Investment level curve fields.
  • Improved process for auto-assigned Custom Sub-Object access rights to be treated as “Restricted” licensed users.
  • Expanded the list of parameters that can be used for Channel and Links include: the logged in user’s internal user ID and the internal resource ID.
  • Access configured Channels (e.g., Rally) directly from Clarity when configured as a Clarity Channel in SSO authentication environments.
• Various other quality-of-life UX improvements including:
  • Configure tooltips, at the attribute level, providing additional context for end users.
  • Manage Blueprints leveraging the configurable grid with support for group by and export to CSV; robust configurable filtering & search; saved views; as well as a configurable Details fly-out for selected Blueprints.
  • Leverage enhanced governance controls with field-level security support for the Resource and Status Report objects.
  • Improved attribute grouping within Column selector and Filters.
  • Improved user experience for discovering the Details flyout with the addition of a right-click action from within Timeline, Board, and Grid views.
  • Improved the user experience to replace the ‘Name’ of a Saved View or (Hierarchy) Metric. Essentially, the dialog no longer closes unexpectedly.
  • View Options page content has been reordered to be consistent across Timeline, Board, & Grid views.
  • Enhancements related to the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard with the inclusion of numerous foundational accessibility improvements encompassing Visual design (e.g., color, contrast, visible focus), Responsive Design (e.g., pop-up windows, text areas, and browser zoom), Keyboard (e.g., key input, tab order, & focus), and Screen readers (e.g., semantics, hierarchy, & pages structures) in view of WCAG 2.1 AA requirements.
  • Enhanced end-user help page experience, for administrators only, with the new In-product customer experience that provides a central place for product documentation, communities, knowledge article, and product support.

If you are an On-Premise customer, you can download your copy of Clarity Release 16.0.2 online at Broadcom Support where you can also utilize Broadcom’s case management system. To install your product, follow the installation procedures for your product at Tech Docs. If you are a SaaS customer, your environment will be automatically upgraded to the new release at a scheduled time following the 16.0.2 GA release date. Customers can expect a follow-up communication with additional details related to automatic upgrades. If you have any questions or require assistance, please contact Broadcom Support.

Should you need any assistance in understanding these new features, or implementing this latest release, our implementation services partners can help.  Please contact your CA account representative for more information on how they can help. To connect, learn, and share with other customers, join and participate in our Clarity Broadcom Community page.

For a list of free Education courses, please visit Broadcom Academy. We update courses based on functional impact as well as high demand; therefore, courses created from previous releases may apply to the current release.

NOTE ABOUT THE “STAFFING PLAN” WORKSPACE: With the release of Clarity 16.0.2, Broadcom is announcing our plan to deprecate the Staffing Plan workspace. The Staffing Plan workspace will no longer be enhanced and we plan to remove the Staffing Plan workspace from the product in the 16.1.2 release scheduled for May 2023. This advance notice is being provided to allow your organization to plan a smooth transition to the new Staffing workspace.

END OF SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: In keeping with evolving software industry practice, Clarity Product Management now communicates the End date for each release at the time of release. This change allows customers greater flexibility in your upgrade planning process. In accordance with the Broadcom Service/End of Life Policy within the “Working with CA Support” guide available at Broadcom Support Online, please consider this email your written notification that support for Clarity Release 16.0.2, all patch levels, and all languages, will be discontinued as of November 30, 2024.