Five Signs Your Clarity Is Over Customised
Written by Martin Hulbert, Chief Technology Officer, Ignite Technology
If you’ve been running Broadcom Clarity for several years, chances are your environment doesn’t look much like the one you originally implemented. Processes evolve, teams change, structures shift, reporting needs expand, and before long, the environment starts carrying the weight of years of “just one more field” and “add this for now.”
As a platform, Clarity remains incredibly strong, but when the environment around it becomes too heavily customised, the cracks start to show, not because the tool is lacking, but because the configuration has drifted away from how the business now operates.
Over the past few years of assessments, recovery projects, and optimisation work, these are the five clearest signs I see when a PMO’s Clarity environment is overdue for a reset.
“As a platform, Clarity remains incredibly strong.”
The Five Signs your Clarity is Over-Optimised
1. Reporting Takes Too Long and No One Trusts the Numbers
If leadership regularly challenges the accuracy of your dashboards or your teams are exporting data into offline spreadsheets “to be safe”, that’s the first red flag. Over‑customised Clarity environments often have:
- Competing versions of the truth
- Fields used differently by different teams
- Dashboards are built on inconsistent data
You don’t just lose visibility, you lose time and money and the impact is real – slow, manual reporting silently erodes confidence and increases operational cost.
2. Every Upgrade Feels Risky or Painful
When an upgrade feels like a project of its own, it’s usually because the environment is carrying custom objects, scripts, attributes, or workflows that no one is quite sure are still needed. Symptoms include:
- Long pre‑upgrade assessments and delays caused by “we need to check this doesn’t break X”
- Custom code that breaks
- Fields that no longer map to the modern UX
The platform itself is modernising at speed, but your configuration may not be keeping up.
3. Your PMO Is Doing More Work Outside Clarity Than Inside It
This is one of the strongest indicators of over‑customisation. When project managers and PMO analysts stop using Clarity for day‑to‑day activities, it’s rarely because the platform can’t support them, it’s because processes, layouts, and governance rules have become too complex or unintuitive. You might notice:
- Actions happening in Teams, Excel or email
- RAID logs kept outside the system
- “We enter it into Clarity at the end of the month” behaviour
When this happens, the system stops being the engine of governance and becomes a reporting afterthought, costing you both efficiency and accuracy.
4. Your Blueprint & Field Structure No Longer Match How You Work
As organisations mature, merge, restructure or expand, their delivery models evolve. But if Clarity’s blueprints, attributes, layouts, and workflows don’t evolve with them, the environment becomes harder, not easier, to use. This shows up as:
- Pages cluttered with unused fields
- Attributes that were added for one project three years ago but now confuse everyone
- Integrations that don’t map correctly
This is exactly where Ignite’s consultants see the biggest hidden costs, a configuration that no longer reflects reality. It doesn’t just slow teams down, it wastes money every single month in rework, misalignment, manual correction, and lost insight.
5. You’re Asking Your Teams to Deliver More, but the System Can’t Support It
The final sign is subtle but critical. When your organisation grows its portfolio, accelerates transformation, or increases governance expectations, Clarity should be your ally. But if the environment is over‑customised, it becomes a bottleneck. Common signs include:
- Portfolio processes outgrowing the current design
- Executive reporting requirements that Clarity can deliver but your current setup can’t
- New business processes struggling to fit into old structures
This is when PMO Directors start having difficult conversations about “whether it’s time to look elsewhere”. But the truth is simpler: You don’t need a new platform, you just need to fix the environment.
The Good News: You Don’t Have to Start Again
After years of assessments and recovery projects, we’ve seen this pattern over and over: The gap isn’t between Clarity and where you want to be, it’s between your current environment and what Clarity is fully capable of.
And the cost of doing nothing? Slow decisions, manual work, delayed reporting, upgrade pain, and thousands of pounds lost each year in inefficiency.
But you don’t need a rebuild or a migration, you need a reset that realigns your Clarity environment to the business you are today, providing:
- Clean, modern blueprints with simplified fields and workflows
- Disciplined data governance providing reliable, executive‑grade reporting
- A stable, predictable system your teams can rely on
Your Next Steps
If your Clarity environment is showing these signs, our eBook walks through exactly how organisations are fixing them, you can read it here:
eBook: Fix Your Clarity Headaches
Explore the common challenges facing highly customised Clarity environments and how to mitigate them, including insights into solving:
- A Lack of executive‑level trust.
- Cutting total cost and upgrade risks.
- Increasing adoption and speed.
Ready to speak to our team? Let’s start the conversation today, contact our team to explore your options to fix your Clarity headaches in 90 days.
