Clarity PPM: making portfolio governance hold in the tool

What Clarity has to carry

In a Strategy-to-Execution chain, Clarity is often where strategy becomes investment decisions: strategic themes, the lifecycle of demands and Epics, funding, capacity, trade-offs. Our work starts from the governance model to be represented, then translates it into the product. Clarity is a means. We recommend it when it serves the model, and we say so when another tool would serve it better. Tools & Data explains how it fits with the rest of the landscape.

What we do

Implementation and redesign. Scoping the data model, configuring objects and attributes, building portlets and dashboards, defining processes, managing permissions and groups, setting up financial and capacity management. We always start from what the organisation actually does: a tool that formalises a fictional process is soon abandoned.

GEL and XOG development. Writing and repairing GEL scripts, NSQL and SQL queries, and XOG flows for bulk imports and exports. This is the part of Clarity where mistakes cost most: a script that works on a test data set fails in production as soon as the volume changes or an edge case appears. We build and we repair, including code written by others. Typical issues: Oracle errors on large aggregations, outer joins that must survive in derived tables, scope filtering by time horizon kept separate from the selection of cost lines by fiscal year, XOG imports that silently corrupt data.

Moving to SaaS. Gap analysis between your configuration and the constraints of the hosted version, an inventory of incompatible custom development, a remediation plan, data migration, testing, cutover. The hard part of a Clarity migration is rarely the data. It is the customisations accumulated over the years, whose original purpose nobody remembers.

Integration with the wider landscape. Connecting Clarity to Jira and Jira Align, to HR reference systems and to finance tools. The issue is always the same: decide where the truth sits for each data item, and never write it from both sides.

Data migration. Extraction, mapping, cleansing, loading, reconciliation, business validation. The most underestimated part of a Clarity project, and the one that decides whether users will trust the tool.

Running and evolving a critical platform

A portfolio governance tool is only as good as the way it is kept up. We have run and evolved Clarity platforms for large organisations:

• technical and functional audits of existing environments before any change;
• migrations and upgrades, up to the move to SaaS, carried out in phases so governance is never interrupted;
• a full implementation with operating procedures, followed by the handover of administration to internal teams;
• deployment of advanced modules: budgeting, project consolidation, operational tracking and strategic tracking;
• functional specifications written before each change, to limit rework.

This work serves the same goal as the rest of our engagements: governance that holds in the tool. We document the configuration we deliver and hand over administration as soon as your teams want to take it back.

What Clarity has made possible

Financial institution. Lean Portfolio Management represented in Clarity and connected to Jira, from the Epic lifecycle to capacity funding. Read the case study

International financial services group. A Lean-Agile operating model made operational in Clarity and Jira, from governance to teams. Read the case study

Making GEL scripts reliable. GEL scripts in production were producing Oracle errors, and two queries meant to cover the same scope returned different figures. We separated scope filtering by time horizon from the annual selection of cost lines, while preserving the semantics of the outer joins. An error replicated in many places in the code was corrected, and the two queries now return the same figures.