I’ve noticed several enterprise organizations working with Clarity and Open Workbench lately.  Enterprises are looking outside the traditional MS Project Tool set for their project management software.

Clarity is an enterprise back-end solution that is well-suited to run portfolios of projects. It seems to hold every slice of enterprise project data you could ever imagine. The reporting is robust; however, there is a learning curve to access the data. It takes some time to master the movements and to understand how each piece of data relates to the other in the Clarity UI. You will have several “Aha” moments along the learning path as you understand how it is all interconnected.

Clarity works with a scheduling tool called Open Workbench (OWB) that is an alternative to MS Project. When you create information in the OWB schedule it syncs its data with Clarity, aligning such things as resource time sheets to match open work items in the schedule. Clarity will also hold information from the schedule, such as the EAC, so you know if you are on target budget-wise. It is an interesting combination of both tools.

If you are a project manager experienced in using Microsoft Project, you will probably struggle initially when you try OWB and long for the finished product that you have learned on. Organisations planning on adopting Clarity and OWB should know that it is likely to take longer than you might think to ramp everyone up.

OWB historically was an open source project adopted by CA to enhance it. It takes some getting used to and the UI has a decidedly ‘90s look to it. Not all of the functionality seems intuitive, and some even seems unfinished, but if you stick with it OWB will start to make sense.

Some of the main differences include Auto Scheduling, Resourcing, Views (oh yes – Views), and Filters. I’ll talk about the Resourcing and Auto Scheduling here and leave Views and Filters for another post.

The interesting part of Clarity, if you use it end to end, is to first deal with resourcing at an organizational level. (Bear with me, as I understand there is a chicken and egg scenario around planning a project and asking for the resources.)

Picture assigning all company project resources an hourly or % allocation to each particular project for which they have been requested. Add up all the project assignments and you should get a full time resource (not more, or you are asking for OT). You have a schedule with tasks you need to complete in the project. Your task ETCs and resource assignments per resource need to balance. You also have project EAC that should balance to the overall budget. OWB has more color codes than you can shake a stick at, with the background turning yellow if there are resource leveling issues for the task, turning pink in other cases, etcetera. There is a very detailed grid of font and background color combinations attempting to help the user spot any deficiency. It takes some practice to get used to it, but you can resolve the majority of conflicts.

OWB has an Auto Scheduler that also takes some time to get accustomed to. Step one is to grant team members access to the project (making your team) and to request time as you plan to use them. When running the Auto Scheduler, there are options you can turn on and off so you can take into account someone’s availability or abide by must-start-on dates, as examples. Now click the Auto Scheduler and see what happens. Sometimes it moves the tasks unrealistically into the future, and then you look to determine why. Perhaps there is no available time for that resource when you thought the work should take place, so you need to either fix the resource allocations or move tasks around, or perhaps even modify dependencies.

The main difference is that understanding how OWB Auto Scheduler works will take time, whereas you will probably find MS Project to be a lot more intuitive. But given this, you can learn to work efficiently using OWB – it will just take more initial time to get there.

Use the comment section below to share your thoughts on Clarity and OWB, and on any other tools either that your organization has adopted or that you wish you could work with.

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Ron is a Project Manager and occasional blogger with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

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