Requirements & Requirements Management

When Good is no Longer Good Enough

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In business, times change because needs change. Changes driven by the rise in software-driven products, the business imperatives of on-time delivery, and extended supply-chain systems threaten to disrupt traditional manufacturing and engineering processes. Your teams are pressured to accelerate product development and manage growing complexity in distributed organization and supply chains, within products, and across a network of interrelated and interdependent products.

Requirements are essential to delivering on this goal.

For many years, IBM’s Rational RequisitePro has been a widely adopted Requirements Management (RM) tool that helps project teams to manage their requirements, to write use cases, to enable collaboration, to reduce rework and to increase quality.   If you are a ReqPro user, you know the value of a good requirements management software solution.  That value is about to come to an end – literally.

The Obstacle

ReqPro is approaching its end of life and therefore end of support. That means no new updates or enhancements, much less any new features.  No bug fixes or help when problems arise – potentially stopping you in your tracks.  You’re in a sprint leading up to launch and you can’t afford to waste time on tools that bog down your critical processes. This has left many IT leaders concerned about the associated risks to their IT projects. And rightfully so.

The Opening

What product made today isn’t a system?  As products get “smarter” and combine hardware and software, building them right becomes a matter of managing complexity. Products have more requirements, and companies have globally distributed teams and more products in their portfolios. When a single product has thousands of requirements and interdependencies, the process of defining, engineering and managing them grows exponentially more complicated.

To accelerate system design and delivery, you need more than just a good requirements management tool.   You need alignment across the engineering, business and product-management life cycles. You need to improve on-time delivery, demonstrate compliance to process standards, link development artifacts, establish full impact analysis and create full traceability.   You need to align teams around what they are building and why.  You need a product development platform.

Jama deconstructs documents into actionable items. You can easily see, grab and reuse items, and be confident that they’re current and include all related comments and status. Forget about wordy “reading assignments.” You can share specific work components with your team for review and approval, without the risk of compromising security or access permissions that document shuffling causes. And when it’s time to pull it all together again to submit or archive a controlled document version, Jama can do that, too.

Maintaining product integrity is tough. Ensuring that what your company envisioned when funding a new product requires careful coordination, attention to detail and—most important—context applied to every decision and action.

Read our other blog post about how Jama can be your RequisitePro Replacement.

 

 

 

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