Tag Archive for: Complex Product Development Page 2
Tag Archive for: Complex Product Development
I am writing this post about reducing the risk of negative outcomes in theproduct development processin the hopes of saving at least some of you from the fate that has befallen many companies before they reach out to us. Unfortunately, many of our new clients come to us AFTER they‘ve had a negative product outcome at their current company, or even more common, at their new one.
According to an Engineering.com survey (full disclosure: we sponsored it) 83% of those companies surveyed experienced at least one negative product outcome including: significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and lengthy rework.In many cases these negative outcomes were quite significant and led to changes in management and staff.
Root Causes of Risk in the Product Development Process
All of these companies conducted root cause analyses to determine what led to these negative product outcomes. The root causes identified are quite similaracross the organizations:
Limited customer and cross-functional involvement in the review and approval of requirements
Static requirement documentsrarely viewed by key stakeholders, maintained in Microsoft Word/Excel or a standalone tool, and used only be a few as a repository
Missing decomposed requirements
No ability to track the life of a requirement through development, test and release
Release cycle misalignment across engineering disciplines
Misinterpretation of requirements across engineering disciplines
No process exception tracking to determine requirements that have been omitted or modified
No identification of process risk patterns –delays in development, multiple test failures, rework cycles, etc.
Product Development Processis Not Under Control
With all of these informational and process gaps, the end-to-end product development process is “not under control”, to extend the concept of Six Sigmastatistical process control to a complex process. A process that is not under control cannot be relied upon to deliver predictable results. The outcomes can vary widely and with no ability to truly monitor risk probabilities as the process moves along, the negative outcome occurs as a surprise at the end of the process where the cost is highest.
Many companies operate under the illusion of risk mitigation. The process is “not under control”, so management relies on managing people and takes each team lead’s assessment of progress and risk as comfort that the risk of a negative outcome is low. Unfortunately, the team leads are only assessing their teams and what they see. This misses the most likely points of failure that connect teams and extend over time. Without Living Requirements™ it’s hard for anyone to see across all teams (and time) to identify the exceptions, omissions, defects, rework, delays and dependencies.
“Poor traceability and missing subsystem requirementswhen a system requirement is decomposed through an error budget or other complex logic.”
“Missing requirements due to a decision to only trace to subsystems directly responsible for given system requirements.”
ROI from Risk Reduction in the Product Development Process
Investments to improve the product development process are typically justified through gains in engineering productivity. What is often missed is the even greater benefit to the organization of bringing the product development process under control and reducing the probabilities of negative outcomes.A basic approach is to quantify the magnitude of the various negative outcomes — and the likelihood of their occurrence — to determine the current risks in financial terms that could be faced by the organization. The next step is to estimate the reduction in occurrence probability given the improvements in the process and then calculate the overall reduction in the magnitude of the expected negative outcomes. A more advanced model is described in the paper by Machac, Steiner and Tupa.
A Common Mistake to Avoid
Let’s wrap up with acommon mistake many make when measuring risk in the product development process. There is an obvious difference between the likelihood of a negative outcome and the financial impact if the negative outcome occurs as the graphicbelow shows.
However, many confuse a constant likelihood of a negative occurrence (scenario A – unmanaged risk in the graphic) with aconstant level of financialimpact when, in fact, it is growing dramatically throughout the product development process as investment and costs to remediate omissions, defects, and reputation grow over time. The only way to maintain a constant and low level of risk is to actively manage down the likelihood of a negative outcome continuously through the development process as shown as scenario B in the graphic. For a deeper dive into this concept please check out a fine piece by Preston Smith in Research- Technology Management, Managing Risk as Product Development Schedules Shrink, and the source of the graphic above.
Watch this webinar to learn more about moving away from documents-based design control and risk management.
Founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Siemens AG, German semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener. Ranking among the top 10% most sustainable companies in the world, Infineon is a leading player in automotive, digital security systems, power and sensor systems, and industrial power control.
In the 2020 fiscal year, the company, based in Neubiberg, Germany, reported sales of around €10 billion with about 47,400 total employees worldwide.
Infineon is dedicated to delivering zero defects regarding committed functionality, reliability, time, volume and cost, and has pledged to achieve CO2 neutrality by 2030. Semiconductor and system solutions from Infineon make our world easier, safer and greener – with technology that achieves more, consumes less, and is accessible to everyone.
In this customer story, we examine how Jama Software helps Infineon manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance and increase efficiency. This blog post is an abbreviated version of the customer story. Read the full story to find out how Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution resulted in better management of complex product development, systemic handling of requirements, improved collaboration, and more efficient functional safety standard compliance.
Top Challenges Infineon Experienced with Complex Product Development
Infineon’s product portfolio scales from single-transistor products to the most complex system-on-chips involving several globally dispersed teams who author, read, and interact with thousands of requirement items across several hierarchies.
The top challenges the organization faced included:
Keeping the overview on ever-increasing product complexities and avoid requirements misunderstandings
Providing compliance without compromising time-to-market goals
Manual document versioning makes review cycles and alignment difficult
Improving the review & sign-off process, making it an integral part of the requirement management system
Need for enhanced reuse capabilities
Exchanging requirements information with customers and suppliers
Overcoming the scaling limits of a document-centric approach
Seeking a Modern Solution to Enable Efficient Requirement Management
Infineon was looking to transition from a document-centric approach to a modern, database-centric requirements management solution.
By deploying Jama Connect, Infineon product development teams have adopted a more efficient working style to manage complexity, increase collaboration across teams, and improve transparency.
Jama Connect helped Infineon shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution enabling newfound product development efficiencies around complexities, communication, reviews, and compliance.
The complex products that Infineon teams build require large amounts of data to be used from a central source, by teams distributed over different locations. With Jama Connect, Infineon is also able to collaborate with teams outside their organization and exchange requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met throughout the product development lifecycle.
“By using Jama to manage our requirements-related information over the product development cycle, our R&D engineers increase their daily efficiency and simultaneously contribute to the current digital transformation. Jama’s good usability won over our development teams.” Pierre Nury Technical Lead Requirements Management Methodologies
To learn more about Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution, download the full customer story now!
Bridging the Gaps in Safety-Critical Product Development
In increasingly complex, competitive, rapidly evolving, and highly regulated industries (including aerospace, automotive, and defense), market forces are creating new challenges for development teams building safety-critical products. To address this challenge, Ansys is hosting a webinar to discuss how combining a product development platform like Jama Connect with a model-based embedded software tool can help you bridge safety-critical product development gaps.
Date: September 15, 2020
Time: 11 AM EDT / 3 PM GMT /8:00 a.m. PT / 17:00 p.m. CEST
Designing complex cyber-physical systems not only requires a significant number of specialized stakeholders, but also efficient collaboration during development and verification activities. With some teams working remotely around the globe, there may be gaps in communications, locations, or tools that must be overcome to deliver the expected product in time and on budget, while being compliant with functional safety regulations.
In this webinar, Ansys and Jama Software show how to bridge the gaps by integrating a modern product development platform, such as Jama Connect, and a model-based embedded software tool, such as Ansys SCADE. From high-level requirements to V&V activities to implementation, you’ll be able to share a single source of truth that provides value to all stakeholders and facilitates alignment across teams.
Register and learn how to:
Design a product from stakeholder requirements to implementation according to safety standards like DO178-C or ISO 26262
Move from natural language requirements to formalized implementation with a high level of automation and using appropriate guidelines
Manage end-to-end traceability from requirements to tests and code that provides transparency to practitioners and management
Do you know the most common product development challenges engineers face? In this post, we have identified them and provided solutions that enable a more modern and efficient product development process.
An ideal product development process requires close collaboration between teams, up-to-date knowledge of applicable regulations, and efficient requirements management platforms for defining, verifying, and validating requirements. However, not every manager is convinced that his or her team needs to do a better job on requirements development and management, or that such an investment will pay off—despite numerous industry studies which indicate that requirements issues are a pervasive cause of project distress.
With the growing complexity of products and software, the more complicated the process required to build it becomes—and the accompanying increased risk of flaws which can lead to expensive, and potentially reputation-harming recalls.
These new complexities have raised the stakes—and made the case—for the need to optimize the product development process from end to end. Engineering and design teams need solutions to the most common product development challenges that provide purposeful, structured collaboration; connect globally distributed team members; and accurately capture and facilitate feedback, decision making, and context for requirements under review.
Doing so requires first overcoming some significant obstacles. To help navigate the journey toward better product development, let’s examine ten of the most prominent product development challenges engineers face and their corresponding solutions.
1. Move on from outdated legacy or document-based solutions
The Product Development Challenge: The traditional approach to managing risks and requirements is highly manual. Teams that operate with a documents-based approach, exchange numerous spreadsheets, and versioned documents via email. This method has real drawbacks:
No single source of truth: A spreadsheet with a project’s traceability matrices could have many cells, but no guarantee its data was authoritative or even up to date. Different versions might be floating around, requiring any changes to be painstakingly manually coordinated to achieve team-wide alignment.
Limited collaboration: Sending complex requirements documents over email leads to important updates getting lost in people’s inboxes and projects being delayed. As remote teams become more common, such issues are even trickier to manage.
Excessive rework: Without effective change management—which is very hard for teams who rely on static, emailed requirements documents—teams often end up developing (or testing) off of older versions of requirements which inevitably leads to misalignment and costly rework.
The Solution: Jama Connect™ provides the single source of truth absent from document-based solutions. Teams from anywhere can collaborate in real-time on a unified platform and capture accurate feedback, review progress, and conduct approvals. That leads to earlier identification and control of risks, which helps reduce rework and keep projects on schedule and under budget.
2. Simplify compliance and meet regulations or standards
The Product Development Challenge: Product development has become much more complicated over time. As a result, so has product risk—and the accompanying regulatory compliance required.
A Jama Software-sponsored survey on Engineering.com found that 62% of respondents reported being reprimanded by regulatory agencies for product development issues. More broadly, recalls have been increasing in certain industries, with medical device recalls more than doubling year-over-year in Q1 2018, due primarily to software-related defects.
The Solution: To address these product development challenges, Jama Connect is engineered to ensure quality with frameworks aligned to key industry standards that streamline design, development, and risk management while maintaining compliance.
Jama Connect helps customers in industries like medical device, aerospace, and automotive solve this product development challenge by streamlining their quality and risk management processes with defined processes for development and production and detailed traceability—from the high-level user needs and systems requirements through to validation and verification. Teams can streamline their product development with templates aligned with industry standards, compliant reviews and approvals, and end-to-end traceability making audit preparation and record-keeping a straightforward process.
3. Establish and implement effective review cycles
The Product Development Challenge: Without the right platform and processes in place, review cycles can be time-consuming and fragmented. For example, under the manual approach to requirements management described earlier, a review cycle can be repeatedly delayed due to versioning issues with documents and lack of visibility throughout the review process. Teams can also spend hours per week in review meetings, just to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Streamlined review cycles require:
One source of truth for requirements and tests
A straightforward way to send items like requirements, user stories, or test cases for review
Best practices for each of the major roles involved (i.e., reviewer, approver, moderator)
Real-time collaboration within a shared, dynamic requirements management platform
A formal approval process to capture and record sign-off
The Solution: Jama Connect Review Center can solve this product development challenge by serving as the single place for reviewers, approvers, and moderators to collect and manage all requirements and feedback for a project in real-time.
Inviting internal and external collaborators into a review cycle is easy, plus roles can be assigned and all agreed-upon requirements approved much more quickly than with manual processes. Pharmaceutical manufacturer Grifols reduced its planning time by 80% by using Jama Connect to accelerate review cycles.
4. Enable secure, cross-functional collaboration across teams, customers, and complex supply chains
The Product Development Challenge: People working together is at the very core of all product development work. The ability to effectively collaborate is critical for innovation. In this era of rapidly accelerating change, structured and strategic team collaboration is the key to improving the product development process for all team members. And in this era, the “team” includes everyone across the supply chain.
Today’s market demands require companies to build partnerships and seek solutions with more specialized materials. These partnerships mean greater sharing of data across distributed teams, partner organizations, and business units, sending a ripple effect through the supply chain as subsystem suppliers must anticipate features on the finished products and get ahead of release schedules and component costs.
But for engineers who are used to working on internal, siloed teams, these new partnerships present previously unforeseen challenges. What worked before doesn’t work today.
Aligned requirements management is necessary for developing products that meet all customer and market requirements while adhering to industry regulations and standards. More specifically, optimized gathering and authoring of requirements are needed to ensure product quality and meet specific requirements, minimize risks, accurately scope projects, enable collaboration, and align teams.
The Solution: Requirements gathering should follow a systematic process, focused on what eventual end users will do and the requirements that must be met to support those behaviors. This approach ensures that both high- and low-level requirements and their dependencies are covered and that corresponding tests can be set up and run.
As teams seek input and feedback on product and systems requirements, tools like Jama Connect are critical in capturing these insights in real-time. With everyone having access to the most up-to-date information, stakeholders can stay informed and aligned, reviews can be streamlined, and teams have better visibility into the progress of their work. This helps reduce the complexities of communication and saves time by having a single source of information regardless of geographic or institutional location, which enables collaboration across a variety of relationships. Having a single platform where these teams can come together to review and connect will keep programs on track, keep teams collaborating, not let insights slip through cracks, and allow for innovation.
Engineers typically collaborate with outside companies by exchanging requirements. Data Exchange for Jama Connect enables the transfer of requirements and associated metadata between customers and suppliers. The solution allows for the import, export, and update of requirements data to create an ongoing exchange throughout the product development lifecycle, allowing for collaboration to extend to remote engineering teams and companies.
RBC Medical (now known as Vantage Medtech)saved an average of $150,000 per project by upgrading to Jama Connect eliminating the back-and-forth email tag that characterized its previously manual processes.
5. Ensure product quality and improve change management with complete traceability
The Product Development Challenge: Maintaining cross-team visibility and staying on top of disparate documentation and processes along the way is a central challenge of working with manual, document-based workflows. It becomes difficult to accurately assess the impact of a proposed change (i.e., perform impact analysis) and to ultimately ensure requirements are properly tracked across the entire product development lifecycle.
The Solution: To make impact analysis more scalable, teams need end-to-end traceability. In Jama Connect, links that are downstream from modified items get automatically flagged as “suspect,” and relevant contributors can be notified right away to take corrective action. Modern traceability software maps out the relationships and interdependencies in product development, allowing for assiduous tracking of risks and requirements in their full historical context.
Important data, such as the percent of downstream test cases that have passed and where coverage may be missing, is also easy to view, while the system’s requirements can be updated in a centralized place as the project progresses.
The right requirements management technology can provide clear traceability that allows teams to maintain a rigorous formal change management process; reveals interdependencies with the process; and enables alignment, making it easier to bring in the right decision-makers at the right time. This level of traceability, with visibility into who made each change and for what reasons, has become especially important as products and systems become more complex and software-driven.
The result is improved confidence that teams are working with the right requirements, have the information they need to conduct useful impact analysis and are generally able to trace forward from, and back to, requirements as needed.
6. Manage development complexities across hardware and software teams
The Product Development Challenge: Software is an ingrained part of modern product development and one that can greatly increase risk if not properly managed. Moreover, complex software requirements have to be managed in tandem with those for hardware. The growing connectivity embedded into today’s ever more complex and often safety-critical products, puts pressure on both software and hardware teams to manage their development processes with more efficiency and effectivity. In fact, in a recent study from Engineering.com, over the last five years, 76% of respondents reported dealing with three or more increased measures of complexity and 25% saw their products become more complex in five or more ways.
The Solution: In a platform like Jama Connect, risks and requirements related to software and hardware can be managed proactively, not reactively. Teams can quickly see the full historical context around a requirement when they receive invitations to contribute to a project. Out-of-the-box frameworks that include industry-specific, software development methodology and risk management also minimize setup time, so that important risks in software and hardware can be identified, assessed, and acted upon as early as possible.
Configurable workflows accommodate various process styles, development methods, and tools to ensure adoption, with flexibility to support your Agile, Scaled Agile or Hybrid development process. Requirements data can be integrated with other tools across the development process to ensure everyone stays aligned.
One of the most common scenarios is integration of requirements to Atlassian Jira. With the Jama Connect for Jira integration, product teams can maintain critical information about their product requirements and test cases and directly connect them to development activities in Atlassian Jira, including sprint planning, task management, estimations, and defect and issue tracking.
7. Increase quality and efficiency by testing earlier in the lifecycle
The Product Development Challenge: It’s well understood that identifying potential defects earlier in the lifecycle prevents costly rework. But how can organizations proactively involve QA at the front end of the process?
The Solution: Early testing prevents defects from surviving until the late stages of the lifecycle, when they become especially costly to fix. In addition, early and frequent testing allows for innovation.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has estimated that the relative cost of fixing a software bug is 30 times higher in production than in the requirements and architecture stage of development.
Conducting some form of testing, at every stage of the product development lifecycle, is highly recommended. Getting the right feedback at the right time ensures that you can deliver a high-quality product on time.
In the early stages of development, performing customer exploratory testing is the most cost-effective way to make sure your product strategy is on the mark. And, at the end of the development lifecycle, conduct system integration tests to ensure components are working harmoniously.
Jama Connects helps engineering and quality assurance teams define, organize, and execute requirements-based test plans and test cases to ensure quality and compliance. Teams can streamline reviews and approvals, perform manual testing, and integrate with trusted test execution and automation solutions.
8. Implement effective requirements versioning, baselining, and change management
The Product Development Challenge: Legacy requirements management systems frequently complicate version control, due to the prevalence of conflicting requirements documents that are manually managed, often owned by varied teams and then distributed cross-functionally. Likewise, they don’t provide the right infrastructure for effective change management, because of the difficulty involved in identifying the latest versions and applying any needed changes amid all of the different documentation in question. Changes might ultimately be made only at a late stage, and at great cost.
The Solution: A requirements management platform like Jama Connect can solve this product development challenge by allowing teams to align their releases to ensure they deliver a cohesive solution/product to their customers. With versioning, baselining, and change management of the requirements in place, teams are able to manage and reuse requirements throughout the development lifecycle. This allows development teams to improve reuse, reduce design inconsistencies, and reduce the discrepancies found during testing, verification, and validation.
Jama Connect offers full control over the requirements you are choosing to reuse. You can not only choose the set of requirements you want to reuse but also the version of those requirements as well. This allows you to take the best and most applicable version of your requirements forward to your next project.
Studies reveal that 60 to 80 percent of requirements, code, and tests are shared between projects. With Jama Connect, you can reuse your data for effective sequential or parallel product development which saves your development teams time and improves time-to-market.
9. Make it easier to coordinate remote engineering teams
The Product Development Challenge: Remote work is on the rise. Although it has many benefits in team flexibility and cost savings for the organization as a whole, it can complicate collaboration and result in additional operational silos as each remote engineer settles into their own workflow and preferred set of tools.
The Solution: Modern platforms that enable real-time, structured collaboration simulate the efficiency of engineering teams working together in a shared physical workspace. For example, engineers can be easily invited into Jama Connect conversations and reviews, notify each other with custom messages and supporting context, and be assured that they’re always working with the latest information.
Such a setup solves this product development challenge by reducing silos and keeping everyone aligned. Buffer’s State of Remote Work survey for 2020 found that communication and collaboration were among the most cited challenges with telecommuting. Teams that still operate in silos with legacy systems will not be equipped to meet the demands of the market going forward. In this era of rapidly accelerating change, structured and strategic team collaboration is one of the best ways to address the product development challenges and obstacles of the modern product development landscape.
10. Build a more effective and efficient product development process
The Product Development Challenge: Product development is complex and, in most cases, will span multiple teams, solutions, and methodologies. Outdated legacy tools and a documents-based approach aren’t enough for this reality, as they aren’t purpose-built for complicated requirements management.
The often-quoted CHAOS Reports from The Standish Group indicate that three of the biggest contributors to projects that fail or are “challenged” are:
Lack of user input
Incomplete requirements and specifications
Changing requirements and specifications
The Solution: An evolutionary leap forward comes from modernizing requirements definitions as well as engineering and management processes—including minimizing the time your team members spend eliciting, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements for their products.
Do you have product development challenges you need to solve?
Jama Connect is a solution for managing complex product requirements from idea through development, launch, and iteration. It brings people and data together in one place, providing visibility and actionable insights into the product development lifecycle. Our platform equips teams to track decisions and ensure the quality of the product they set out to build.
We’d love to speak with you and share how Jama Connect can help your teams find solutions to your unique product development challenges and overcome these 10 common ones. Connect with us today and get started with a better approach to managing requirements in product development.
To learn more about optimizing engineer team collaboration to streamline product development, download our eBook now!
In an environment where modern systems are getting “smarter” and more complex every day, the product development process required to build them is also growing increasingly complicated.
For early-phase documentation and for coordinating small, simple projects, Word and Excel remain effective tools. But as product development grows more complex, teams need solutions that provide purposeful, structured team collaboration; connect globally-distributed team members; and accurately capture and facilitate feedback, decision making, and context for requirements under review.
Increasingly, teams are augmented with many different types of players through contract manufactures or acquisitions or even strategic alliances. The benefits of team collaboration are rarely lost on industry leaders. Bringing together innovators to create a new way of doing things can revolutionize a sector, but without the correct support and infrastructure, collaborations often fail.
Support Structured Collaboration with Modern Requirements Management
Research conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Jama Software identified five obstacles to optimized product development:
Unclear or changing requirements coupled with lack of timely feedback for solutions
Lack of focus caused by conflicting stakeholder priorities, assumptions, and unclear objectives
Difficulty collaborating across globally distributed teams
Unnecessary handoffs and delayed decisions
Increased collaboration across diverse roles, including executives, operations, marketing, and quality assurance
Companies with teams spread across the world, increasingly complex products, and expanding product lines require a centralized system to manage requirements. These teams must be able to trace requirements from concept through design and implementation. Plus, given the disparate locations for teams, ease of use around a shared solution is a critical factor.
When it needed a collaborative software solution for managing requirements within its Border Management portfolio, SITA (Société Internationale de TélécommunicationsAéronautiques), a multinational company providing IT and telecom services to the air transport industry, selected Jama Connect™ because their expanding portfolio of products brought added complexity.
SITA makes a suite of products, and while individual releases can work on their own, they also must effortlessly integrate together. This, in turn, makes SITA’s products more complicated, and they grow even more so as customers request new customizations to fit their individual needs. “Keeping track of what customizations every customer uses on an already expanding portfolio was proving extremely complex,” says Alistair McBain, Sr. Business Consultant, SITA.
[Jama Connect] has allowed us to get more people from our other offices involved in the collaboration process because we’re not all having to sit on a conference call at awkward times. People can come into the system at a time that suits them and review things. And we know their comments will be seen by everybody else.” Alistair McBain, Sr. Business Consultant, SITA
Jama Connect provides SITA’s Border Management portfolio team with a centralized, accessible repository for all its requirements. As the team’s single source of truth, Jama Connect ensures everyone from business analysts to developers and testers — no matter where they are located in the world — are all working off the same set of current requirements.
In anenvironment that introduces so much complexity into the product development process, a more strategic approach to team collaboration offers one of the best ways to address the challenges and obstacles of the modern product development landscape.
Download the full eBook to learn how optimize team collaboration to streamline product development processes.
Product development is rapidly changing. In this era of constant market disruption, development teams are under unyielding pressure to improve quality and get products to market faster. To meet these quality demands and improve speed to market, development teams are focusing on improving one of the most vital steps in their process: requirements management.
But even with greater emphasis on requirements management, siloed teams that are using their own specialized tools can create confusion across the development cycle — and lead to waste and delays.
Several key factors are leading the shift toward greater attention to requirements management:
Intelligent devices such as autonomous vehicles continue to disrupt the marketplace and create both software challenges and risks.
Devices connected to people are fueling the ongoing digital transformation, which leads development teams away from a document-based approach and toward more modern solutions. This move, if not properly thought through and executed, can result in disjointed and misaligned teams across the development lifecycle.
The trend toward more product development governance produces greater regulatory pressure.
But all of this change and modernization results in increased complexity. Complicated development cycles need automation and more modern tools. Work must be coordinated across hardware and Agile software teams using different tools and methodologies. Connected products introduce security risks, mandating increased due diligence across requirements, design, and testing. Faster iterations and evolving solutions make regulatory compliance more difficult and time consuming.
A recent study from Project Management Institute revealed that the second most common reason for product failure is poor requirements management. In addition, 51% of program funds are wasted due to poor requirements management.
Software development teams that want to remain competitive need to transform work processes and adopt new solutions. Jira, Confluence®, and other single-stack tools, while valuable, are often not enough to ensure compliance, quality, cost control, and speed to market in complex product development. Plus, teams also need robust requirements management solutions and integrations across the toolchain.
Learn how enterprise companies can remain competitive in a start-up market by scaling Agile practices across the organization in this blog post.
Integrating Best-of-Breed Solutions Across the Toolchain
For many years, having a single stack solution seemed like the best way forward for product development teams. Large corporations invested heavily in these single stacks, believing that with everything in one place, teams would have fewer silos and easier reporting. However, these single-stack solutions were never intended to serve all functions for all teams.
It’s important for teams to have access to the tools that best support their specific needs. Best-of-breed tools support distinctive and varied needs for specialization. Focusing on depth rather than breadth can help optimize key stages of software development and delivery, as well as unburden the single-stack tools. Investing heavily in one specialized tool means optimizing a key piece of the process of development.
However, problems arise when development teams can’t communicate across the toolchain. Teams end up duplicating work, wasting time, or focusing efforts in the wrong place.
A fragmented toolchain doesn’t need to cause waste, communication breakdowns, or confusion. Integrating the toolchain is key.
Connecting Jama Software to the Product Development Toolchain
The first step in improving the product development process is to take control of requirements management. Jama Connect makes it easy for teams to define, align, and execute on what they need to build, reducing lengthy time cycles, wasteful rework, and effort spent on proving compliance. Jama Software’s unique combination of core capabilities solves some of the most challenging issues modern product development teams face.
Jama Connect offers:
Live traceability
Ease of use
Change management across engineering teams
Robust collaboration and decision tracking
Streamlined compliance reporting
Test management
Jama Software provides a purpose-built, integrated solution designed to scale as your business grows. It’s a best-in-breed requirements management solution that allows teams to use the solutions and processes best suited for their jobs across the ALM ecosystem.
TaskTop Integration with Jama Connect
The second step in getting control of complex product development is integrating the toolchain. Through the extended solution with our integration partner TaskTop, product and engineering teams can connect product development through execution to ensure everyone is working off the most current requirements and stakeholders are aligned and engaged.
TaskTop allows all teams and silos to use the specialized tools that are necessary for their particular piece of product development. By integrating solutions across the toolchain, TaskTop automates communication and brings the work to the team in its own specialized tool.
A new era requires new tools and new processes. While Jira, Confluence, and other tools are highly effective in the right environment and for the right purpose, they aren’t always sufficient across the entire development cycle. Through robust requirements management with Jama Connect and toolchain integration with TaskTop, development teams can meet the demands of users, stakeholders, and the marketplace.
As more companies pull design functions in-house, knowing how to properly execute a good product design critique is becoming a core competency for development teams. That’s according to Jon Kolko, the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design. In an article for Fast Company, Kolko outlines a structure for improving the critique process, demonstrates how a good design process can foster team collaboration, and argues why critiques matter in the first place.
The Problem with Product Design Critiques
Kolko points out that for years, companies outsourced their design functions. Outsourcing allowed businesses with some amount of distance from the product design process and made the design firm a “garbage dump,” he writes. “If a company didn’t like the design firm’s ideas or the ideas didn’t gain traction, the company could simply fault the designers — and the in-house team could feel vindicated, as if the problem were not their responsibility.”
But as companies bring design functions in-house, people who are not traditionally associated with creative functions have to learn a whole new skillset — one that doesn’t come naturally for most people.
Product design itself is one thing. Product and business experts have the knowledge and expertise to provoke innovation in the design phase of product development. But often, these “experience owners” have not developed the skills necessary to critique design — or to receive the critique themselves. In an environment where there is no robust culture or language of critique, product design teams have no proper means to course correct when ideas languish or suffer from poor delivery.
Key Ingredients: Trust and Team Collaboration
In an environment where the experts responsible for the design phase of product development — product managers, marketers, engineers, developers, etc. — have little or no previous experience giving or receiving design critique, working to create a culture of healthy critique isn’t just a nice thing to have, Kolko considers it an imperative. “Critique is one of the pillars of a successful design team,” he writes. “It walks hand in hand with execution and craft. And it’s evidence of a high-performing team, because it externalizes one of the most important parts of creative execution: trust.”
Kolko quotes Rachel Hinman, product design manager at StitchFix: “If you don’t have that trust in the team, it’s really difficult to have a productive critique. It’s either people don’t say the hard things because they don’t want to deal with the confrontation because they aren’t sure how somebody will react, or they do say those things and it becomes a passive-aggressive competition almost.”
He also quotes Ben Fullerton, vice president of design at OpenTable, who says that part of maturing as a designer is detaching from the work and becoming willing to receive feedback from others with the understanding that the intent is to move the work forward and make it better.
In order to build the kind of trust and team collaboration that result in good product design and execution, design teams need to actively foster a culture of healthy critique — one that opens the door to real market disruption and innovation.
In his courses at Austin Center for Design, Kolko conducts critiques as frequently as possible and rarely waits until a project is “done” before asking the student to offer it up for critique. “Design is iterative and is never done, and if a student starts to treat his work as ‘finished,’ he will be reluctant to change it even when confronted with a better solution,” he writes.
The same is true in the design phase of product development. If those responsible for design hold their ideas too closely to vest or resist critique until the design is “finished,” there is little to no opportunity for team collaboration or for others to improve the product — and, as it turns out, little opportunity to build trust.
Trust is only built when it’s given the opportunity to grow, and the only way for trust to grow is to intentionally stimulate it through exercises such as the design critique.
Kolko defines a critique as a process that “emphasizes the negative in order to help designers improve their work. During critique, designers present their work to a group. The group identifies places where the work can improve. They discuss alternative solutions, sketch those solutions, and work collaboratively to explore which changes will benefit the work the most.”
For product design teams to develop a good critique process, there are several elements that Kolko recommends based on his classroom experience:
“Pin up” the work. Displaying the work on a wall or in some physical manner gives the entire team the opportunity to see the work the same way in the same format. It gives a baseline that allows the group to see a full narrative context. And it gives the designer the opportunity to learn how to best present the work to an audience.
Ask the designer to set boundaries for the critique, then step back. Kolko tells designers to only offer parameters for critique, but not to offer explanations. For instance, a designer might ask for specific feedback on certain elements of design or tell the audience to avoid giving feedback on a particular element. This process establishes boundaries, but then requires the designer to detach from the design as feedback is offered.
Note feedback directly on the design. As team members offer feedback, Kolko recommends that they also annotate their recommendations directly on the designer’s work. This forces a degree of specificity in the critique and reduces unhelpful feedback.
Critique the critique if things get personal. Part of establishing trust is learning to avoid personal attacks — real or perceived. If the critique starts to get personal, Kolko stops and conducts a critique of the critique, often brainstorming ways to avoid similar personal reactions in the future.
Summarize comments with the designer. After the critique, Kolko makes sure the designer has everything necessary to make changes for future iterations.
When properly conducted, product design critiques have tremendous potential to not only produce better products, but also to unleash a creative spirit. When trust and team collaboration are established and fostered, teams have a safe environment to push forward truly innovative solutions.
Complexity is nothing new. For decades, systems engineers have participated in new product development processes on internal teams, driving complicated projects to market under old rules, methods, and technologies.
But today’s highly-competitive markets offer new complexities that no longer work within the old rules of product development. According to McKinsey Global Institute, “the number of connected machine-to-machine devices has increased 300% since 2008.” Similarly, Machina Research — now part of Gartner — estimates that the number of connected machine-to-machine devices will increase from 5 billion in 2014 to 27 billion by 2024.
An Increasingly Complex Product Development Process
In an environment where modern systems are getting “smarter” and more complex every day, the product development process required to build them is also growing increasingly complicated.
Today’s systems engineers face new challenges such as:
Tight operational margins
Accelerating rate of innovation
Increasingly complicated end-user demands
Heightened focus on getting to market faster
Increased and changing regulations
Download this recent report by Engineering.com to learn more about the gap between the increasing complexity of products and requirements management.
Research conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Jama Software identified five obstacles to optimized product development:
Unclear or changing requirements coupled with lack of timely feedback for solutions
Lack of focus caused by conflicting stakeholder priorities, assumptions, and unclear objectives
Difficulty collaborating across globally-distributed teams
Unnecessary handoffs and delayed decisions
Increased collaboration across diverse roles, including executives, operations, marketing, and quality assurance
In an environment that introduces so much complexity into the product development process, strategic team collaboration offers one of the best ways to address the challenges and obstacles of the modern product development landscape.
Strategic Team Collaboration: The Key Enabler of Innovation for Systems Engineers
Teams that still operate in silos with outmoded systems will not be equipped to meet the demands of the market going forward. In this era of rapidly accelerating change, strategic team collaboration is the key to improving the product development process for all team members. And in this era, the “team” includes everyone across the supply chain.
Today’s market demands require companies to build partnerships and seek solutions with more specialized materials. These partnerships mean greater sharing of data across distributed teams, partner organizations, and business units, sending a ripple effect through the supply chain as subsystem suppliers must anticipate features on the finished products and get ahead of release schedules and component costs.
But for systems engineers used to working on internal, siloed teams, these new partnerships present previously unforeseen challenges. What worked before doesn’t work today. Systems engineers need new strategies.
Developing complex products with partners requires a common vision. Learn how better requirements management helps facilitate the collaboration process by watching our webinar.
Strategies for Modern Requirements Management
In the new product development landscape, meetings, emails, and hallway chats are no longer sufficient for making decisions that impact the entire team. Modern systems engineering must include means for live data to be shared and accessed by teams anywhere in the world at any time.
Today’s product teams must be able to coordinate across departments, roles, companies, and geographic boundaries. The old way of sharing documents via email attachments and having meetings to discuss decisions doesn’t work when you need to work faster than ever before.
To meet the demands of the modern marketplace, systems engineers should implement practices such as the following:
Establish a common definition of success. Teams need alignment on what they are building so they don’t waste time. Clarify expectations up front. What do the terms “define,” “build,” and “test” mean, for instance? What does success look like based on feedback loops such as customer interviews and design reviews? Define the “why” at the very beginning of the project.
Empower better decision making. When the whole team is clear on the “why” defined at the beginning of a project, everyone is equipped to make better decisions. Good decisions need situational awareness, comprehension of impact, and a way to gather input from others. When responsibilities are clearly defined, those involved are empowered to initiate and resolve follow-up questions and issues.
Tighten up your traceability. Certain industries need to demonstrate compliance with regulations. Traceability analysis proves your system holds up under regulatory demands and meets contractual terms. In order to tighten this process, coverage analysis can help a team find gaps and understand positive and negative progress. Extend traceability beyond engineering processes to link development and test activities back to the business rationale.
Collaborate with purpose. Connect everyone on the team to relevant data that’s tied to the work. Don’t make decisions outside the process, such as in documents or emails.
Reuse your IP. Repurpose entire IP blocks – design artifacts, specifications, test cases, content for data sheets, and process information.
Today’s product and system development environment may be complex, but systems engineers have an opportunity to optimize project management for success. To learn more, download our white paper, “Product Development Strategies for Systems Engineers.”
The last decade of product development has seen change and innovation accelerate to a breathtaking pace. The next generation of products and innovative technologies that were once the purview of science fiction are becoming commonplace, and disruptive technologies that used to remain in isolated industries are now crossing boundaries.
It can be tough to narrow down the “biggest” or “greatest” or “best” when talking about product development innovations. After all, some things that we thought might have a huge impact when they first arrived on scene are barely a technological blip now (Betamax, anyone?). Other things that arrived with a whisper and took decades to develop made enormous changes once they finally reached maturity.
That said, here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the most amazing product development innovations of the last decade. You’ll notice a couple of significant absences — social media sites that kicked off this decade of rapid social media growth actually started last decade, and tablets haven’t made quite the impact on the world as, say, wearable technology. You might also notice some things that might not have already changed your life, but are well-poised to do so in the coming decade — malaria resistant mosquitos, for instance. And a few of these innovations are based on innovative technology that’s been around for a while, but has found new application in this era of rapid change.
So here, in no particular order, are ten of the biggest innovations of the last decade.
The Top 10 Biggest Product Innovations of the 2010s
The sharing economy: For many people who travel frequently or work remotely, the sharing economy has changed the landscape of the workday. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and WeWork offer entrepreneurs and travelers new flexibility and creative ways to work and explore.
3D printing: In fairness, the idea and rough prototypes for 3D printing have been around since the 1980s. But only in the last decade has the technology come of age and shown us its nearly unlimited potential. 3D printers are now being used to manufacture everything from specialized prototypes to human organs to prosthetic limbs, earning itself a solid place on our list of disruptive technologies.
See how Spaceflight Industries leverages Jama Connect to provide greater visibility and collaboration among its team and customers. Read the customer story now.
Gene therapy/genetic engineering: Gene therapy is nothing new in theory or in research labs, but the last ten years have at last seen many of these therapies come out of the lab. In 2017, a teenager with sickle cell disease was reported cured with his own genetically altered stem cells. Scientists have also genetically engineered mosquitos for malaria immunity. The potential of transferring that immunity to humans could save hundreds of thousands of lives, especially in Africa, as 200 million people worldwide are affected by the disease.
The Internet of Things (IoT): Though the term was coined in 1999, this disruptive technology really started to gain traction in 2010 with the news that Google had successfully taken 360-degree pictures and stored data on individual WiFi networks. Today, there are literally billions of connected devices around the world. And the innovative technology goes far beyond smart thermostats and home security — IoT devices span almost all industries and sectors. It’s estimated that the global worth of IoT technology could be as much as $6.2 trillion by 2025, according to McKinsey.
Wearable Technology: In some sense, we’ve had wearable technology since the first time someone put clear lenses over their eyes to sharpen focus. However, the last ten years of product development go far beyond primitive eyeglasses. From the first Fitbit tracker that recorded steps and sleep to today’s modern Apple Watch — considered a Class II medical device by the FDA — and others that integrate with our smartphones and run third party apps, the wearable technology market is on target to “become the world’s best-selling consumer electronics product after smartphones,” according to CNBC. From ECG and blood pressure monitors to biosensors, the wearable tech market promises to revolutionize how people manage chronic illness, consume entertainment, shop, and work.
Learn about some of the biggest obstacles in modern medical device development and how to Jama Connect can help you overcome them in our eBook, “Conquering Connectivity, Competition & Compliance.”
Autonomous vehicle technology: Science fiction has been promising driverless — and even flying — cars for decades, but until 2010, such promises were merely good storytelling. When Google released its first driverless car in 2010, research and development of autonomous vehicles took a huge leap forward. While the cars of science fiction still aren’t quite available for mass market use, the innovative technology is closer now than it’s ever been as GM, Ford, Tesla, Uber, and other carmakers and software firms continue to focus on research and development.
Renewable energy/clean energy innovations: With recent renewed focus on environmental issues and climate change, the advancements in renewable and clean energy are welcome news. However, narrowing down the “best” of this field is tough since so few recent inventions have entered the marketplace. Still, the fact that innovations such as 3D-printed solar trees, carbon nanotube electricity, and even nuclear fusion are on the horizon should give us hope of avoiding disastrous climate consequences.
Crowdfunding: For decades, the only hope for an entrepreneur to make the leap from garage to storefront or office building was the backing of an investor with deep pockets. While the idea of crowdfunding isn’t particularly new, the most popular modern platform, Kickstarter, launched in 2009. Since then, platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, GoFundMe, and others have offered entrepreneurs and artists greater access to their potential audiences without requiring huge private investments or the backing of a traditional publisher, record label, or agent. While it may not be the most obvious choice for this list of disruptive technologies, Crowdfunding has made innovation in product development more widely accessible.
While the 2010s has been a decade filled with trial and error, product development innovation continues to surprise, delight, and inspire us. Here’s to the next decade of innovation!
Read our white paper about how one Fortune 100 semiconductor company is meeting the challenges of autonomous vehicle software safety with a compliance-ready solution that streamlines the development of products that adhere to relevant functional safety standards. Download: “Driving Compliance with Functional Safety Standards.”
This is a guest post from Mark Clark, Account Manage at the product development firm, Bresslergroup. It originally appeared on their blog.
Version one of a new product is what gets people excited, but versions two and three are what will really establish you as a successful innovator.
Taking an existing product to its next generation often has a greater impact on a company’s long-term success than the initial innovation. But only if you respect next gen design as its own unique challenge.
Why Go Next Gen?
For many companies trying to push the edges of what a product can do, simply getting something to market is an enormous effort. The Minimum Viable Product strategy (MVP) has a lot going for it, but it’s rare that an MVP on its own is going to hold market share for very long.
Competition is the most obvious reason to update. If sales numbers on your initial product are slumping, but competitors’ are doing well, that’s a good argument for a refresh, whether through improved tech, new functions (that users actually want), or a more refined aesthetic — especially if your MVP looks like it was released in a hurry.
Here are some compelling reasons to go next gen:
1. Technology Advancements
Technology is always improving, offering a steady stream of possibilities for your product: reducing size, extending battery life, cutting costs, or adding features. All of these expand a product’s appeal, moving it beyond the domain of early adopters and into the mainstream.
When Bresslergroup redesigned Temptu’s cosmetic airbrush system, for example, we were able to take a unique product with niche appeal and make it more portable, intuitive, and easy to use, opening it up to a much wider range of customers. Pump and battery technology advancements made this possible.
2. First Gen Failed to Resonate
In some cases, a truly innovative product may look or work so differently from what’s on the market that it fails to resonate with customers. Early versions of the Honda Insight, for example — the world’s first production hybrid car — were so high-tech looking that people felt self-conscious driving them. It took another couple of years for the Toyota Prius to come along, with its just-different-enough aesthetic, and truly break the market open.
As an innovator, you have the unique advantage of getting to watch firsthand how people react to and use your initial product. With a little well-directed user research, you can learn an awful lot about how to improve the experience it delivers, what features users might want in a second version, and what can be pared down or removed. Implementing these changes is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way of providing a UX that earns real love.
3. To Scoop “Fast Followers”
“Fast follower” products can be a headache: plenty of companies have done well for themselves by waiting for others to innovate, then swooping in with a cheaper, slightly more mature product a few months later. Developing your own next gen product can help stave this off.
4. To Improve User Experience
The best reason for a next gen design might be an improved user experience (UX). Rachio, a smart sprinkler system manufactured by a startup that Bresslergroup has worked with for several years, offers a good example.
Rachio’s first generation was a classic MVP, offering some unique functions (a smart, Web-connected sprinkler system that could adapt to changing weather) in a no-frills package. The initial product was a hit with early adopters, willing to accept certain functional limitations and a nearly non-existent interface in exchange for a truly game-changing product.
Looking closely at what those early adopters were doing with their Rachio units, and what they wished they could do, gave some clear ideas on how to improve the UX in the next round. Rachio’s version two allowed direct control of the unit (not just via app), an easier installation process, and greater WiFi reach — and sold dramatically better than version one.
The approach was so successful, in fact, that Rachio now has a dedicated User Research team on staff — an unusual investment for a small startup, but one that’s yielded huge returns, especially now that version three is on the market.
How To Approach Next-Gen Product Design
Evolving a product to make it more competitive can take many different forms, but in our experience, most next-gen redesigns fall into a few common categories, each with its own advantages.
1. Give It A New Look
A new form factor is an obvious place to start. The technology inside makes the product work, but the external form is what people touch and see. Updating that form is the most direct way to show them your product is grown up and here to stay.
An aesthetic redesign can also help bring a new product into line with a coherent visual brand language, something Bresslergroup has done numerous times for clients including BD and PetSafe. A coherent visual brand can create a network effect, adding legitimacy to each product in the line, and inviting one product’s customers to embrace another as their needs grow.
2. Refresh the Electronics
Refreshing the electronics can serve as both a cost-saving measure and a way of adding function, especially given the speed with which off-the-shelf components are improving.
Trice Medical’s mi-eye+ arthroscopic probe, for example, got an update from Bresslergroup that switched out its custom display for a modified Surface tablet. This not only cut manufacturing costs significantly, it also opened up software options that let us improve the UI and expand the device’s capabilities.
As products age, companies are often forced to switch out individual electronic or physical components in manufacturing, to replace obsolete ones or take advantage of price reductions. At a certain point, this can actually become more expensive than redesigning the entire product with new components in mind. Knowing when that tipping point is reached is crucial to long-term product success, and in our experience, companies are more likely to wait too long than redesign too early.
3. Redesign the App
Since so many products these days also have a digital component, redesigning the app can be a relatively quick, low-cost way of refreshing a product. Customers have gotten accustomed to apps that update every month or two, so last year’s digital experience (on a smartphone or the device itself) can make a product feel dated.
A redesigned app offers another advantage as well: it’s a way of field-testing new features, UI elements, or visual designs. The rapidly changing landscape that makes users expect frequent updates also makes them fairly comfortable with digital change, so you can use an app as a kind of design sandbox, then take cues from it later on when you’re ready to commit to a physical redesign. For many products, two to three rounds of app update per physical redesign is a ratio that works well.
Innovation Is Ongoing
Innovation is an ongoing process, and the truly successful innovators are those who view a new product not as the end of a design process, but as the beginning of a refinement process.
We’ll always love reading about what’s new and novel in products, but when it comes time to open our wallets, we’re more likely to go for the product that’s benefitted from time and careful improvement.
However, many confuse a constant likelihood of a negative occurrence (scenario A – unmanaged risk in the graphic) with a constant level of financial impact when, in fact, it is growing dramatically throughout the product development process as investment and costs to remediate omissions, defects, and reputation grow over time. The only way to maintain a constant and low level of risk is to actively manage down the likelihood of a negative outcome continuously through the development process as shown as scenario B in the graphic. For a deeper dive into this concept please check out a fine piece by Preston Smith in Research- Technology Management, Managing Risk as Product Development Schedules Shrink, and the source of the graphic above. 
