In last week’s blog on Enterprise Collaborative Engineering we illustrated the concept of ECE using The Beatles’ Paul McCartney and John Lennon song writing team in connected collaboration. We highlighted the exponential value of including the enterprise in George’s contribution to the song writing process and the speed and quality which dramatically improved the construction process (Eleanor Rigby was a masterpiece of brilliant lyrics yet with simple music).
For review, we define Enterprise Collaborative Engineering as the following:
- ECE connects cross-functional roles across your Enterprise
It’s recognizing the behavioral power of expanded collaboration. Enterprise in ECE means expanding the list of roles (Business stakeholders, product owners, SCRUM masters, software developers, hardware and electrical engineers, build manager, and operations). - ECE breaks down barriers, adds agility, and virtualizes reviews
It means providing product development tools which enable expanded, connected collaboration. - ECE positively affects your Business
It enables faster decision loops all through the product lifecycle. ECE has proven business results (50% faster decision time, 43% defect reduction, and > 20% reduction in design cycle time).
In this post, we will look at applying ECE to the product lifecycle. How does ECE speed innovation with high quality?
There are two building-blocks to ECE. Core ALM and Enterprise (connected) Collaboration. Core ALM alone brings business benefits. But as we will see below, adding Enterprise Collaboration exponentially increases business benefits.
Core Application Lifecycle Management:
The first building-block of ECE is Core ALM (see Figure #1). ALM is the “engineering” component of ECE. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) supports your Business Analysts, Developers, and Testers). ALM generates the engineering outputs. Core ALM is implemented by Waterfall, Iterative, Agile or some hybrid work flow. The BA’s or Product Owners write requirements, Epics, or User Stories. The developers write software, and the testers validate and verify products and features. ALM alone solves some business problems. It makes the hard questions which affect delivery easy:
“What is the impact of this requirements change? “If we remove this feature, what is the impact on testing?” “What risks have we introduced by changing this feature?” “Will we deliver on time?”
Enterprise (connected) Collaboration:
The second building block of ECE is Enterprise Collaboration. It’s applying the power of connected collaboration to dramatically improve Core ALM. The business benefits are significant and exponential over just Core ALM (metrics represent individual Jama customer results).
ECE goes way beyond Core ALM’s roles to include your customers, business stakeholders, hardware and electrical engineers, DBAs, and Operations. This inclusivity gathers critical points of view and enables connected collaboration from all of these roles. This improves quality and delivery (e.g. 33% reduction in requirements related defects).
ECE gathers connected role inputs across the lifecycle, from concept to launch. Core ALM alone considers limited front and middle lifecycle activity. ECE adds in the Customer, Operations, DBA, others throughout the entire lifecycle. Collecting inputs from across the lifecycle positively affects decisions and improves product quality and delivery. Companies are achieving 20% reduction in design time.
There are also exponential business benefits of adding enterprise collaboration. Connecting the expanded role set causes significantly faster decisions (e.g. requirements get written faster). But connecting all of those roles directly to the engineering artifacts also causes dramatically improved quality. Organizations are achieving 33% reduction stakeholder response time. Others are gaining 50% faster decision loops. The proven results are speed and quality.
In summary, we see that Core ALM is essential and drives business value. But adding Enterprise (connected) Collaboration significantly improves engineering speed and quality exponentially over just Core ALM. The business benefits of ECE are measurable and proven.
Origins of Enterprise Collaborative Engineering (ECE):
Jama pioneered ECE. We enhanced our ALM capabilities (requirements/test traceability and ReUse) with new and innovative collaboration features for the Enterprise. The Jama Review Center for example, dramatically speeds requirements review with significant business benefits for our customers.
To learn more about how Jama’s ECE is helping large enterprises like Spaceflight achieve high efficiency, read our case study.