Jama Connect® Features in Five: Categories for Milestones
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Jama Connect® Features in Five: Categories for Milestones
Milestone Tracking Made Simple with Jama Connect’s Categories Feature
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.
In this Features in Five session, Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect’s Categories feature streamlines milestone tracking, boosts transparency, reduces risks, and ensures compliance.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Knowles: Hello, I’m Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Consultant for Aerospace and Defense at Jama Software. In this video, I’ll demonstrate how teams can use Jama Connect’s Categories feature to improve visibility of deliverables at key development milestones throughout an airborne system’s product development cycle. This approach helps increase transparency, reduce risk, and ensure timely delivery of critical data.
When developing a complex system of systems such as an aircraft like an eVTOL, teams heavily rely on milestones. Tracking what is due at each milestone and certification stage can be a complex web of documents, schedules, and loose threads. Jama Connect’s Categories feature simplifies this by clearly organizing what’s due and when. This boosts transparency for engineering teams and reduces the risk of missed deadlines, as well as ensuring compliance with standards like ARP-4754 for systems such as an eVTOL.
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Knowles: Solution. An organization administrator can set up milestone-specific Categories in Jama Connect. These Categories are assigned to the information due at each stage of a program, enabling teams to create filters, dashboards, and reviews for clear visibility. Unlike tags or other manual methods, Categories provide a structured error-resistant way to manage milestone data, reducing risks like copy-paste mistakes. Let’s open Jama Connect and learn how to enable this strategy in the tool.
The first step is to ensure Categories is enabled within the project. An organization administrator will enter the admin tab within their Jama Connect instance. From there, they will navigate to the category section of the tab and turn the toggle that enables Categories. After Categories is enabled, the administrator will begin to develop the specific Categories that will enable the team to track each milestone. The administrator will add a system development phase category by selecting add and populating the name. This will serve as the parent category, which the rest of the lifecycle milestones will be grouped underneath. From here, the administrator will add the rest of the milestones as individual Categories and move them under the system development phase parent.
It is a best practice in this case to use the move functionality rather than the copy functionality to keep the Categories trees simple and clean. Additionally, when complying with regulatory standards and requirements, it is best to clearly align your milestone. The milestones used throughout the rest of this example are derived from the ARP-4754B and its systems requirements process. This method can be expanded to any number of other regulatory docu ments as well. With all of the milestones created, the administrator has one last step to complete, assigning the parent system development phase category to the appropriate projects or enabling it to be globally accessible.
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Knowles: After your team’s organization administrator has completed the creation of the milestone Categories, it is time to implement within the project. First, a user will go into a project and begin to categorize components, sets, and folders that belong to each of the Categories. It is easiest to categorize top-down from components, sets, and folders, and then to batch manage Categories of each of the item types within the logical organizers. With the organizers categorized, the user can then manage the Categories of the individual items within each organizer.
Now that the hard work is done, it is time to harvest the fruits of the labor. The simplest way to do this is to open the Categories tab in the project and select any of the milestone Categories. With one click, the user will see all the items associated with that milestone. However, this isn’t the only way to visualize the information. A best practice for viewing Categories is to set up filters. By developing filters that narrow in on the information due at the upcoming milestone, a team can target that work and ensure it is effectively completed. Once a filter is created, the user can even utilize it to narrow down the project’s explorer by right-clicking on the filter and selecting apply filter to explorer. This will automatically sort the explorer to only display the information within the specific filter. Additionally, a team can use this filtering to help expedite exports or reports related to this narrowed down amount of information.
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Knowles: At Jama Software, we strive to ensure our customers are able to successfully implement and develop their products through the use of Jama Connect. Lifecycle milestones are no small feat, and the team here at Jama Software knows that. Creating a user-friendly and maintainable approach to developing and tracking data due at each lifecycle milestone is the driving force behind this Jama Connect features inside. By tracking data deliverables for lifecycle milestones in Jama Connect with Categories, a team will increase transparency, reduce the potential for error, and improve their data delivery process at Lifecycle Milestones. Through simple organization administration setup, a team can quickly align the work they are developing in Jama Connect to lifecycle milestones and improve their current processes. To find out more about tracking developmental milestones with Categories in Jama Connect, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com.
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Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series
Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software
Patrick Knowles is a highly accomplished Systems Engineering and Project Management expert with a deep understanding of the Aerospace & Defense industry. As a Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, he empowers a diverse portfolio of clients to achieve their strategic objectives. Leveraging his extensive industry experience and profound expertise in Jama Connect, Patrick is dedicated to optimizing his clients' Systems Engineering and Requirements Management processes. He is renowned for his ability to translate complex technical challenges into actionable solutions, ensuring seamless implementation and measurable success. He accomplishes this by relying on his experience in developing and fielding missiles, software, and commercial space products over the course of his career. Patrick's insights are invaluable for organizations striving for peak efficiency, compliance, and innovation in the demanding Aerospace & Defense landscape.
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