Structured Collaboration in Semiconductor Development
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Structured Collaboration in Semiconductor Development
Any semiconductor product development team has experienced the challenge of managing data from different components of a highly complex system of systems. In today’s hypercompetitive market, requirements management is a high-stakes effort navigating tight operational margins with little room for data integrity errors. Because different components of a semiconductor product may evolve along different timelines, building a coherent product from multiple data streams requires new methodologies and practices to continuously deliver these products to the market quickly and with high quality – no easy feat!
Many of these organizations struggle to keep pace with the rapidly changing product development environment, especially when their teams work in silos using either business applications (Word, Excel) or legacy requirements management systems to house their definitional data. As businesses continue to shift focus to faster time-to-market and customer-driven product development, deeper structured collaboration amongst teams is not only desired but necessary.
What is Structured Collaboration
Structured collaboration is centered around the idea that people can work and interact with one another, moving toward specific and measurable goals. This approach works in two parts, utilizing technology and process frameworks to define new and innovative ideas that drive business outcomes.
By combining asynchronous but interdependent collaboration with elements of content management (content about your product or system), development process management, and task management — all integrated into a workflow process that coordinates multiple activities from several teams — cross-functional teams can produce the results that drive the business forward.
The absence of structured data and practices early in the Product Lifecycle can lead to wasted time, untraceable changes, lost context for decisions that were made, and missed opportunities for innovation.
RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Semiconductors
Innovation Depends on Structured Collaboration
Bringing together innovators across cultures, organizations, and geographic regions to accomplish goals can revolutionize a sector. It also presents unique challenges with each group having their own standards and entrenched way of tackling the task at hand. So, how do these teams tackle complicated divides without their differences becoming impediments?
- Unify Goals: When cross-functional teams have a shared purpose and unified goals for developing a product, innovation, or service, they can better overcome challenges inherent to collaborating in a complex environment.
- Clarify Roles: Clearly communicating expectations for how and when each team member will be asked to participate helps alleviate the uncertainty that comes with collaborating in a new way. Documenting areas of accountability and tracking collaboration each step of the way keeps programs moving forward smoothly.
- Encourage Expression of Unique Points of View: Unlocking the creativity needed for innovation requires harnessing insights and unique perspectives across different stakeholders. Encouraging team members to speak up and share alternative perspectives results in robust and better-considered ideas for implementation. Having representation from across the team will also help better assess the impacts of decisions made and identify issues before they become problems.
- Use the Right Tools: We’re fortunate these days to have a wealth of collaboration tools from Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams to Zoom and Google Meet. As teams seek real-time input and feedback critical to capturing insights, these tools serve a vital purpose. These only scratch the surface in eliciting the type of collaboration necessary for modern systems engineering, though.
Enable Cross-Team Alignment with Live Traceability™
While meetings, emails and instant messaging channels serve a purpose, they are insufficient for making and tracking key decisions that impact an entire silicon program. Modern systems engineering must include means for live data to be shared and accessed by teams anywhere in the world at any point in time.
As members of the product team seek to communicate requirements and project status across departments, roles, and geographic boundaries, the golden age of sharing documents and spreadsheets will no longer serve its purpose. Without a digital thread that connects people and processes — from definition to delivery — development teams face increased risk, challenges meeting compliance, and delays that can impact time-to-market and product and systems stability.
Live Traceability™ in Jama Connect® provides a single-source of truth, cross-team collaboration, and end-to-end visibility which forms the digital thread through siloed complex product, systems, and software development.
RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries
Eliminate Collaboration Silos to Enable Strategic Partnerships
Today’s semiconductor ecosystem requires companies to consider strategic partnerships as they sell into varied dynamic and often integrated markets such as robotic factory automation, autonomous driving, and AI-enhanced medical diagnostic equipment. With these new partnerships and integration comes greater sharing of data across distributed teams, business units, and with partner companies. Teams that operate in silos with legacy systems will not be equipped to meet demands set by the market.
For engineers accustomed to working in internal, siloed groups, these new partnerships present previously unforeseen challenges. Structured and strategic team collaboration and careful data governance and security are critical to improving the product development process for all participants – and this includes everyone across the supply chain.
People working together is at the very core of all product development. For companies to turn the research of today into the products of tomorrow, it is critical that their teams stay connected, synchronized and unified. By aligning business objectives with a system in place that allows for structured reviews and collaboration, teams can elicit feedback, review product features with stakeholders in real-time and track critical decisions across teams and locations. Simply put, it gives companies that ideate, design, develop and deliver highly complex semiconductor products a critical edge in an industry where the speed, precision, and quality of process enable the speed, precision, and quality of products.
Jama Connect provides a robust yet flexible framework to enable accelerated design and development. Contact us to learn more about reducing collaboration friction through shared data across your semiconductor system of systems.
Member of the Industrial Innovation Committee of the IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference at IEEE
Representative invited talks:
* Keynote, ACM SigSoft Industry Summit, Beijing, China. (17 September, 2016)
* "It Depends: Heuristics for Common-Enough Requirements Practice" REFSQ'16, Gothenberg, Sweden (March 2016)
* "Writing Secure Requirements: It's Simple if you Ignore the Complexity" Intel Software Professionals Conference (SWPC), Guadalajara, Mexico. (October 2016)
* "How Common is Common Enough?" REFSQ'15, Esesn, Germany (March 2014)
* Keynote, ACM SigSoft Industry Summit, Beijing, China. (17 September, 2016)
* "It Depends: Heuristics for Common-Enough Requirements Practice" REFSQ'16, Gothenberg, Sweden (March 2016)
* "Writing Secure Requirements: It's Simple if you Ignore the Complexity" Intel Software Professionals Conference (SWPC), Guadalajara, Mexico. (October 2016)
* "How Common is Common Enough?" REFSQ'15, Esesn, Germany (March 2014)
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