What's new in Clarity 16.5

Clarity 16.5.0 became generally available on November 9, 2026, for both on-premise and SaaS customers. The short version: AI tools can now connect to Clarity more securely and work faster, everyday editing gets undo and redo, and investment managers get new ways to fund and track work. It's also the release where Jaspersoft reporting is gone for every customer, so any reports still built on it need a new home.

If you're planning an upgrade, the second half of this post covers what to plan for.

Clarity releases at a glance

If you're still on 16.2, support ends November 30, 2026, so now is the time to plan your upgrade.

What's new in Clarity 16.5

AI and the MCP server

AI comes up in a lot of our Clarity conversations right now, so this is the part of 16.5 we expect most teams to ask about first.

Clarity's MCP server is what lets AI applications such as Claude and Cursor read and update your Clarity data. In 16.5, those applications can connect with OAuth. Users sign in the way they normally do and approve the connection, so nobody has to create, paste, or guard an API key. The AI application works within that user's existing access rights and never sees their password.

Source: Clarity 16.5 release notes

The MCP server also responds faster, and administrators can now control exactly what AI applications are allowed to create, update, or delete.

Undo, redo, and change history

Until now, every edit in a grid, board, or timeline saved immediately, with no way back. In 16.5 you can undo and redo your recent changes, and a paste or bulk edit counts as one step. If you update the status of 30 projects and realize the filter caught the wrong ones, one click puts them back.

Source: Clarity 16.5 release notes

Administrators also get a Change History page (beta) that shows updates to a record and can roll it back to an earlier revision. It's available for custom master objects that an administrator turns it on for.

Funding, hierarchies, and staffing costs

• Drawdown funding (beta): an investment can request money from a funding source investment. The request is approved in full, approved for a different amount, or rejected, and Clarity keeps a record of who decided what
• Sankey layout for hierarchies: a diagram where each branch is sized by the metric you choose, such as planned cost, so you can see at a glance which projects make up most of a program's total
• Costs in staffing: project managers see allocation, actual, and forecast costs for each person on the Staff pages, without creating a cost plan first

Source: Clarity 16.5 release notes

Tasks, processes, and business rules

Project managers can now assign several resources, roles, or teams to one task or many tasks in a single action, which was one of the last reasons some teams still went back to the Classic interface. Tasks and assignments can be viewed and edited together in one tree, and task types can be set automatically by WBS level.

Business rules can now run when a record is created, including from a template or when an idea is converted to a project, so access and default values are right from the start.

Processes are easier to start, too. A project manager who needs to start a mitigation process on a dozen risks after a review can select them in the project's Risks grid and start it for all of them in one step, instead of a dozen separate starts. Administrators choose which processes for sub-objects like risks and issues are available.

Reporting

The Reporting workspace keeps growing. Highlights in 16.5 include opening a report from a project's Actions menu already filtered to that project, drill-down reports from table rows, distinct counts, symbols in conditional formatting, and scheduled delivery to SFTP servers for on-premise customers.

For administrators

• Move configuration between environments: export blueprints, views, and navigation menus from a test instance and import them into production, instead of rebuilding them by hand
• Faster Rally synchronization: large Rally imports now finish in a fraction of the time, so daily full and incremental runs fit inside your maintenance window

Jaspersoft is gone: what to do with your reports

Jaspersoft (Clarity Advanced Reporting) reached end of support on September 30, 2026. SaaS customers lost it in September, and with 16.5 it's no longer available to on-premise customers either. That means Jaspersoft reports no longer run from Reports and Jobs or the Advanced Reporting console, and Classic object actions and Modern UX channels that point to Jaspersoft reports stop working.

Broadcom's support for Jaspersoft is now limited to basic help on an "as is" basis, and issues without a workaround can be deemed unresolvable. If your reports still depend on it, the risk grows with every server or browser update.

If your team still relies on Jaspersoft reports, here's where to start:

1. List what's still in use. When we scope conversions with customers, we start with the five to ten reports people actually rely on, not the whole library.
2. Check the built-in reports first. Clarity's Reporting workspace includes rebuilt versions of the most popular Jaspersoft reports, ready to copy and adjust.
3. Rebuild the rest in Report Designer. Report Designer now supports drill-downs, subreports, report bursting, Excel exports, and scheduling.
4. Fix the links. Find object actions and channels that pointed to Jaspersoft reports and point them to the new ones.
5. Use the Data Warehouse or OData for outside tools. If your analysts work in a separate BI tool, the Data Warehouse and the OData service are the supported ways to get Clarity data there.

Source: Clarity 16.4 release notes

Not sure where your reporting stands? A Solution Health Check is a good place to start.

Highlights from the 16.4 releases

16.5 builds on the four 16.4 releases that came before it. These were the biggest changes:

• Vaia, Clarity's AI assistant: AI agents that summarize and analyze your Clarity data, running on your organization's own AI provider
• The Reporting workspace: Report Designer, scheduling, and built-in versions of the most popular Jaspersoft reports in one place
• Non-labor costs: a dedicated module with units of measure and transaction adjustments
• Planning and staffing: a resource calendar, shared roadmap views, and channels in the Staffing workspace

Source: Clarity 16.4 release notes

Planning your upgrade

SaaS customers are upgraded automatically after each release, while on-premise upgrades take more planning, especially if you're more than one release behind. We've worked with organizations that went years between upgrades, and the bigger the gap, the more an upgrade starts to look like a new implementation.

However you upgrade, have your administrator review Broadcom's 16.5 Change Impact and Upgrade page before go-live. 16.5 changes how single sign-on assigns security groups, along with a few other settings that need attention after the upgrade.

How Virelli helps

Our team's Clarity experience dates back to 2004, through every major release. We plan and run upgrades, rebuild reports in Report Designer, set up AI agents and the MCP server with the right access controls, and support Clarity day to day through managed services. If you're evaluating Clarity, see how it works in Clarity 101 or learn more on our Clarity page.

Frequently asked questions