Welcome aboard:

Wells Fargo - Named a top 10 innovator in online finance

Jeppesen / Boeing - Industry leader in aviation and navigation information systems

Virgin Media - Digital media, broadband and mobile phones

ING Clarion- Real Estate investment and management

Merck - Global pharmaceutical leader

Gematik - Creating digital health care solutions for the 80m citizens of Germany

Utiba - Software for mobile devices

Fluid - Brilliant online retail software

Brunel - Research University based in the UK

Eniro - Leader in search in the Nordic market

VNet Software - Managed outsourced software development

Telepacific - Local exchange carrier with 25,000 miles of fiber optic cable

Port of Antwerp - Managing over 16,000 ships and 65,000 barges annually

Multnomah County - Managing services delivered to the 750,000 people living in the County

InScope - Software consulting firm delivering Federal and commercial solutions

IntraPace - Surgical devices to control obesity

GrapeCity - Global provider of software, services and business solutions

ProLogic - Software design, engineering and testing services

Jama Software’s mission is to eliminate that failure by enabling companies to take a more collaborative, customer-driven approach to product planning and development.

The latest release of Contour, Jama Software’s powerful Web-based application, is now available.  You can see it in action through the videos and try it out for yourself.

The focus of Contour and this release specifically centers around three key benefits:

1. Speed - Cut your product planning and requirements management cycles in half
2. Alignment - Keep your entire team in sync and connected to the needs of your customers throughout the development process
3. Quality - Reduce costly errors and ensure high quality product releases on time and within scope

Our product roadmap is driven by the feedback of our customers, and we appreciate all the insights that led to the enhancements we made to Contour v2.4.  Check out what’s new and let us know what you think.

You can join the discussion and share your thoughts in our online customer forum:  Jama Backstage

The potential benefits to a company can be huge:

• Greater alignment with customers
• Faster product development cycles
• Reduced R&D costs

Dell’s Ideastorm and Starbuck’s “My Starbucks Idea” are two well-publicized examples of online customer communities designed to foster collaboration around new product ideas. Both of these brands have successfully grown web sites with hundreds of thousands of participants and ideas. So, when given the platform to speak up, people are more than willing to participate.

Sounds like a windfall, right? Build a community site and poof you’re the next great innovative company…not so fast…

Social networking alone isn’t innovation management. Ideation is an important step, but it is just the front-end of the innovation funnel. This growing trend of online idea sharing is exciting but it’s raising some questions into how to best apply the valuable (but unstructured) input from customer communities and social networks into the complex product development process:

• Are the most popular ideas the most lucrative ones for the company to pursue?
• If misapplied, can the wisdom of crowds actually lead an organization to the wrong decision?
• Does the input from the community site replace traditional R&D?
• How can internal product teams effectively connect the ideas and feedback from the community to the other downstream steps of the product planning and development process?

Here’s a recent article that highlights some of the challenges:
http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/EnterpriseDetails.asp?a=332

Our opinion: Whereas the focus recently has been on the creation of customer communities, we believe the focus now will naturally shift to solving the bigger challenge of how to best manage this new channel of customer input and apply it to the internal process of developing new products. The companies that get this right will be the ones that realize the greatest financial benefits.

What’s your opinion? Post a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Finalists and award winners will be recognized during the event at the Oregon Convention Center on September 18, 2008. This year’s event theme “Rogues and Renegades” honors the independent spirit of Oregon’s entrepreneurs.

Even though our customers are worldwide, we take pride in our Portland roots and membership within OEN. We are honored to be participating in this year’s award ceremony and look forward to seeing everyone there.

For more information: Read the OEN Awards blog post

As a vendor, we feel it’s important to do our part to support universities and educational institutions that are preparing students to be successful at the next level.

We recently experienced first-hand that in the case of requirements management, the students at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, are ahead of the class.

Graduate students at St. Joseph’s were paired up and assigned an interesting project for their Masters program. They had to understand the latest requirements management tools well enough to deliver a sales presentation and product demo to the rest of the class, and make a compelling case for why the solution they represented was superior. It required them to dig in beyond features and understand customer needs, product positioning, competitive differentiators, pricing and sales strategy.

Brian Brown and Mareme Gueye chose Contour, our Web-based requirements management tool.

They shared with us the materials they put together and we were very impressed with the high-quality work they did. Of course, it didn’t hurt that they wore the Jama “People against Project Failure” rockstar t-shirts for their final presentation.

“Brian & Mareme did a wonderful job on the final assignment I gave the class. I was impressed that Jama showed so much interest in their work. You are the only company that took a personal interest,” said Shelley Weismer, the professor who taught the class.

The future looks bright for the graduating class of 2008. Good luck!

One interesting presentation I found was “Assuming doesn’t feed the Bulldog“. There are some good stats within the slides that validated some of our research and assumptions.

One stat I found interesting was a slide that shows where resources are wasted on failed products by stage. The #1 stage was during product development. To me that illustrates how critical it is to understand your customer needs as you start spending money on development- but also how important execution is. If you’ve nailed the solution to a major customer pain, but the product team isn’t aligned and misses the mark, it’s costly.

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.

They discuss the benefits and challenges of ALM, the need for lightweight tools and how MS office is often the default requirements management tool.

The full article is posted at http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/08/11/barry_gilbert_xeau/.

Contour was designed to be flexible because every project is different in some way. Whether your project is Agile based or a combination of many methodologies it can be very difficult to find a tool that fits nicely into your environment. Through Contour’s customization capabilities you can track Requirements, Use Cases, Test Cases or create your own artifacts. You are in complete control of what data you need to capture and track for a project.

Filters

What is important to you can change each day. Getting access to information that helps you focus on what is important has always been a goal of Contour. Through relationships, folders, groups, tags or even by release your data can be viewed and tracked in multiple ways. Now with filters you can do custom queries to see only what’s important to you based on a set of criteria. Each filter can be saved on an individual bases or shared with the rest of the team.

Reports

Contour has always had reports, but with the new report engine the possibilities for richer reports has greatly expanded. We provide many out-of-the-box reports such as a release Plan, Task List with Estimates and System Specification to name a few. As we create more we’ll be making them freely available on our documentation site. If you’d like to create your own custom reports there is a separate downloadable designer.

All and all 1.6 is a very exciting release. Many of the features we provide are a direct result of the excitement and energy provided by our customers. Our goal has always been usability and flexibility so that our customers don’t have to adapt to us but rather we can adapt to them.

Thanks to the whole Jama team and to our customers who have been incredibly helpful in guiding our success.

On to 1.7

Are there features you’d like to see? Feel free to contact us.

]]> http://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2007/05/24/contour-version-16-out-the-door/feed/