I was on a sales call last week demonstrating our requirements management solution, Contour, walking through some common scenarios when the client asked if we use our tool internally. We do, and we get this question periodically - do you eat your own dog-food and the like. After I said we did, they asked if we could switch over and look at Contour in action right now. That request hadn’t come up before, but I pulled up our instance of Contour and we walked through a few scenarios with live data.
After the call I thought about the request, with everyone saying they use their own tools that was a great way to figure out if we really did or if we were full of it. I thought it also might be helpful to post a few scenarios on how we use Contour here at Jama so you don’t have to wait for a demo.
One common scenario is capturing customer suggestions from our user community and tracking it through the development lifecycle. We use Jive’s Clearspace product for our community site. It’s a great product for fostering a customer community.
User’s post a suggestion and it’s discussed…
While Clearspace is great for fostering collaboration with our user community, we need to get the new ideas into our product development cycle and track them. For now this is a manual link but from Clearspace to Contour - but we’ve got a plug in coming that will take care of this automatically. Once an idea is identified and discussed, we create a customer request artifact in Contour and link back to the original discussion. This gives the analysis and development team the requirement in context.
Anyone on the project team can access the requirement as well as the original thread in our user community. The development team has also created a related task which shows up in the relationships section.
When we deploy version 2.0 and we generate our Features by Release report, we’ll be able to see the source of the new features which enables us to credit Ryan for the enhancement to the user profile page - or close the loop with anyone who provided input.
Contour enables us to feed ideas from our users right into our product development cycle. In addition, visibility by the entire team and end to end traceability helps us get it right the first time, with minimal overhead as fast as possible.