Jama Connect Best-in-Class API for Creating Interoperability Across Your Development Toolchain for Live Traceability™
Siloed data creates significant roadblocks for businesses. Isolated information across teams and systems obstructs collaboration and slows critical decision-making. Open APIs provide a solution to this problem by enabling interoperability between compliant software.
Jama Connect features a best-in-class REST API for connecting to any other REST-compliant software or system. Our API is the basis of the many prebuilt integrations available from Jama Software & our partners.
What makes Jama Connect API the best- in-class
Accessible: Anyone with a Named Creator license can utilize the REST API – at no additional cost and no charges based on number of API calls.
Performant: Each Jama Connect Cloud instance allows up to 36,000 calls per hour/over 26 million calls per month, significantly more than other large SaaS providers.
Reliable: Industry standard best practices, such as API throttling, maintain system stability for consistent and reliable performance with minimal latency.
Comprehensive: We provide documentation accessible through Swagger UI, code snippet examples, and training from Jama Software’s services team who are experts in using the API.
Streamline Integration Processes: Combine Jama Connect API’s simple, flexible, and easy to use framework with the API cookbook, a step-by-step guide with practical, real-world recipes that address common integration needs, offer clear best practices, and answer frequently asked questions.
Boost Data Handling Efficiency: Manage data seamlessly with advanced features like strict pagination and the ‘include’ parameter. These optimizations
ensure your API calls retrieve only what you need, reducing system strain and enhancing performance during data-intensive operations.
Leverage Strict Security and Authentication: Prioritize security with OAuth authentication for Jama Connect Cloud users or Basic Authentication for self-hosted environments. Jama Connect API ensures the integrity and safety of your data during every integration.
Using the Jama Connect API
There are many ways to benefit from the Jama Connect API. Here are several examples:
Reporting: Automate the retrieval of project data for reporting purposes. By making GET requests to the API’s/projects endpoint, users can fetch detailed information about all projects within their Jama Connect instance. This data can then be integrated into business intelligence tools for real-time tracking of project progress, resource allocation, and key milestones.
Data & Trace Synchronization: Automate the synchronization of requirements and their trace relationships between Jama Connect and other REST-based tools for Live TraceabilityTM. This can be particularly useful for organizations that need to ensure alignment between their requirements management system and their development tracking tools. By leveraging the API, users can create scripts to push updated requirements and their traces from Jama Connect into their development platform or pull issue statuses back into Jama Connect.
Test Results Import: Automate the import of test results into Jama Connect. This ensures precise control, real-time updates, and integration with third-party test tools and related workflows for more efficient and reliable verification of new and changes to requirements.
Whether you’re retrieving actionable insights, integrating data across tools, or optimizing test workflows, Jama Connect API empowers your business with flexibility and performance.
Bridging ALM and MBSE for Modernized Systems Engineering Practices
1: Introduction
In an era marked by rapid advancements in technology, the aerospace and defense industries face increasing complexity in systems engineering. Addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift towards more integrated and collaborative workflows. This whitepaper explores the essential relationship between Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), highlighting how bridging these disciplines can modernize systems engineering practices.
2: The Growing Complexity of Systems Engineering
The complexity of systems engineering has grown exponentially in recent years, driven by advancements in technology, globalization, and the increasing interconnectivity of systems. Modern systems often integrate a wide array of specialized components, from hardware to software, all of which must seamlessly function as a whole. This challenge is further compounded by the need for performance optimization, cybersecurity considerations, and adherence to regulatory and safety standards, which vary across industries and regions.
For example, in the aerospace sector, the development of next-generation aircraft requires the integration of advanced avionics, autonomous systems, and material innovations. These aircraft must not only meet stringent performance criteria but also comply with international safety regulations and environmental standards. Similarly, in the defense industry, modern weapon systems rely heavily on interoperability between software-driven subsystems, such as sensors, communication networks, and artificial intelligence algorithms, all of which must operate flawlessly in highly dynamic environments.
To manage this complexity effectively, systems engineers must adopt integrated methodologies that bridge gaps between disciplines and stakeholders. Traditional linear workflows and siloed engineering practices can no longer keep pace with the demands of today’s systems. The introduction of tools and frameworks like MBSE enables teams to visualize and validate system designs in a digital environment, ensuring all components meet specifications before physical prototypes are developed. Combined with ALM, MBSE enhances traceability and communication, fostering collaboration across various teams and ensuring that every aspect of the system remains aligned with the overall mission objectives.
By leveraging integrated approaches and modern engineering tools, organizations can address the escalating challenges of systems complexity, enabling them to deliver innovative solutions while minimizing risk and maintaining efficiency.
The demand for innovative, safe, and efficient systems in aerospace and defense has led to unprecedented levels of complexity. Systems engineering processes need to manage a significant volume of requirements, design models, stakeholder expectations, and compliance standards. Traditional engineering approaches fall short of addressing these demands effectively, creating the need for solutions that promote end-to-end traceability and model-driven development.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the framework that encompasses the entire lifecycle of a system, from concept and design to implementation, testing, and maintenance. ALM ensures alignment between business needs, development efforts, and operational goals.
3.2 What is MBSE?
Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) represents a paradigm shift by focusing on the use of models as the primary means to design, analyze, and validate system behavior. MBSE emphasizes simulation, system-wide visualization, and clear documentation to foster collaboration and problem-solving.
4. The Value of Integration
Integrating ALM and MBSE enhances engineering by enabling a seamless flow of information and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration. This integration is fundamental to achieving traceability between requirements, design, and verification, ensuring that projects meet critical objectives efficiently.
4.1 Improved Traceability
By linking tools like Jama Connect with system modeling tools, teams can create a direct trace from system requirements, design decisions, test cases, and compliance reports to the system model analyses, parameters, and behaviors. This level of traceability minimizes risks and helps ensure that the final product aligns with initial specifications.
4.2 Enhanced Collaboration
Bridging ALM and MBSE facilitates better communication among stakeholders by providing shared insights and clear documentation of system behaviors. This reduces misunderstandings and promotes alignment across all project phases.
4.3 Accelerated Development Cycles
Integrated workflows reduce redundancies, streamline handoffs, and eliminate rework, allowing engineering teams to accelerate system development while maintaining high quality and compliance standards.
Jama Connect is a powerful tool that brings cohesiveness to Model-Based Systems Engineering by enabling efficient requirements management, traceability, and collaboration throughout the system lifecycle. By integrating with MBSE processes, Jama Connect provides a centralized platform where teams can define, manage, and validate requirements while ensuring alignment with system models. Through its robust traceability features, Jama Connect ensures that every requirement is linked to design elements, testing artifacts, and verification processes, creating a comprehensive digital thread.
One of the key strengths of Jama Connect is its ability to foster collaboration among diverse stakeholders. The platform offers an intuitive interface for real-time communication, enabling engineers, project managers, and business teams to work together seamlessly, ensuring clarity and reducing the risk of misunderstandings. Additionally, Jama Connect’s alignment with compliance standards streamlines audits and regulatory reviews, essential for industries with rigorous certification requirements.
When linking Jama Connect with system modeling tools, such as SysML modeling solutions, Jama Connect facilitates continuous synchronization between system requirements and system architecture models. This reduces errors, eliminates redundancies, and supports iterative development, helping teams adapt to changes quickly. Ultimately, Jama Connect empowers organizations to align engineering objectives with business goals, ensuring that the end product meets customer needs and system specifications efficiently.
LemonTree.Connect™ for Enterprise Architecture
LemonTree.Connect™ acts as a bridge between ALM and MBSE tools, offering advanced capabilities for merging and synchronizing data to maintain consistency across systems models and requirements.
When used together, Jama Connect and LemonTree.Connect™ create a unified environment for modern engineering practices.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Advisor™
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 video, Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect Advisor™, Jama Connect’s natural language processing (NLP) tool, designed to improve requirement quality.
In this video, learn how Jama Connect Advisor enhances your product management by:
Reducing authoring errors
Increasing clarity
Optimizing foundational product needs and requirements managed in Jama Connect Cloud
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Katie Huckett: Hi. I’m Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software. In this video, I’ll introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor, an add-on to Jama Connect Cloud that uses engineering-based natural language processing to optimize requirements authoring. It helps you write effective, well-organized requirements with speed and accuracy.
We’ll explore how Jama Connect Advisor can enhance your product development by reducing errors, increasing clarity, and optimizing the foundational requirements managed within Jama Connect Cloud. Jama Connect Advisor is designed to help teams author complex requirements quickly and accurately using AI and engineering-focused natural language processing. It minimizes disruption to engineering workflows while improving quality. How does it work?
Jama Connect Advisor applies the globally recognized INCOSE requirements rules and EARS syntax patterns. Even experienced engineers find it challenging to follow all forty INCOSE rules and six EARS patterns while writing even a single requirement.
That’s where Jama Connect Advisor steps in to streamline the process and enhance productivity. Now I’d like to show you a demonstration of how Jama Connect Advisor enables teams to intelligently improve requirements quality and usability, minimize requirement ambiguity and contradictions, which are the source of seventy to eighty-five percent of rework, and save time authoring, reviewing, analyzing, and updating requirement statements.
Huckett: There are a few different ways that you can use Jama Connect Advisor within the Jama Connect Cloud application.
Let’s start by adding a new requirement. Once you’ve added your requirement into the description field, you’ll notice the highlighted text to analyze the prompt underneath the description field. Once you’re ready, go ahead and select the text that you’d like to analyze and select analyze selection.
Underneath the description field, you’ll see a quick summary of your INCOSE score as well as any errors found, if any. You can move on at this point and save your item, or you can go ahead and view the details if you’d like to make changes at this point. So I can see on the slide over panel, the text that’s been analyzed, what my INCOSE score is, eighty-seven percent, and then the different identifiers that I’ve flagged it for the INCOSE rules. Underneath, you’ll see the EARS errors, if any were found. You’ll also see some information about the EARS notation pattern that your requirement might align with. I’m gonna go ahead and save this item, and I’ll wait to make my changes in a moment.
Now that I’ve saved that, let’s say I want to analyze a whole group of existing requirements. I’m going to go ahead and analyze all items within my set on the side here. So I’ll select all items and you’ll notice the batch analyze button, appears in the top right-hand corner. Once you select that, you’ll be given a summary view of what will be analyzed. So you can see I’ve got seventeen items selected here. All seventeen of those items happen to have a Jama Connect Advisor-enabled field on it, and then we have thirty-four fields per, these items. So it appears we have two Jama Connect Advisor enabled fields, per each item within this group.
Once you select analyze, the slide of our panel will pop up on the right-hand side. You’ll notice your group of requirements. Each item is listed at the top within this drop-down. You can navigate with the drop-down or the directional arrows. And then underneath, we also have a field drop-down. So as I mentioned, we have two fields per item type on this particular example. So I can swap between those as well either using the drop down or the directional arrows to move through.
So now that I’ve come in here and I see the, recommendations, I’d like to go in and edit my item to make some changes. So here, I want to remove some of the items that were flagged. I’m gonna remove this and just update this to say, you know, users can create a login using we don’t wanna use pronouns, per that flag. So I’m gonna change this to using an Apple ID, email.
Huckett: I’m gonna update this to be an actual logical condition with or social media. And then I’m gonna remove the example of LinkedIn because I don’t necessarily need that, and I’ll just update that to end the sentence there. Once I’ve made my changes, I can select the text again in the edit quick edit mode, analyze the selection, and I can see here my INCOSE rule score is now a hundred percent. I still have to deal with my ears errors, but so far so good on INCOSE.
I can view my details again in the slide-over panel and update here. I can also close that back out, and I can return to my batch analysis results by selecting the latest analysis link at the top, and that will take me right back in where I was before I made those changes. Now I can go ahead and save my item and complete those changes going forward. If I want to work through these requirements across multiple sessions or maybe I just wanna have a benchmark of what my score was before I started making my edits, you can then generate a report within the slide-over panel.
That will open up in your reports history page where you can download the report into Excel.
Once you open the report that was generated, we have a few different tabs you can work through in the worksheet. The first one just gives you some general information. What’s the average score of your requirements, the minimum, and maximum score, your total number of valid requirements, and then if you did have any invalid requirements as well. The file analysis reports, tab will give you a complete breakdown of all the requirements that were analyzed, their score, and then any corresponding INCOSE flags that may have popped up within the analysis.
We also have an explanation of each INCOSE flag as long as with their associated description. And then if your, report did happen to include any invalid requirements for any reason, those will be included in their separate sheet as well. Thank you for watching this demonstration of Jama Connect Advisor. If you would like to learn more about how Jamala Connect can optimize your product development process, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com
If you are already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information about Jama Connect Advisor, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Jama Software Consultant.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Empowering Project Owners in the AEC Industry
Managing construction projects can feel like trying to juggle a dozen tasks at once while standing on a tightrope. For project owners in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, the stakes are even higher. Misalignment among stakeholders, inflated risk costs, and compliance challenges can derail even the best-laid plans, causing delays, inflated costs, and unnecessary headaches.
But what if there were a way to simplify the complexity and take control? That’s where Jama Connect comes in. Designed to tackle the toughest challenges in construction project management, Jama Connect gives project owners the tools they need to streamline processes, align teams, and keep projects on track.
In this Features in Five session, we’re featuring a must-watch video with Michelle Solis, Solutions Architect at Jama Software. She breaks down the persistent challenges facing project owners and demonstrates how Jama Connect empowers teams with clarity, accountability, and confidence. Whether you’re managing public infrastructure, real estate developments, or any large-scale project, this is your opportunity to discover smarter solutions for project success. Read on to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Solis: Hi there. I’m Michelle Solis, a solutions architect at Jama Software. In this Features and Five video, we break down real problems the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry is facing, and how smart teams are solving them. Today, we’re speaking directly to project owners. Whether you’re a public agency, real estate developer, or infrastructure lead, if you’re responsible for project outcomes, this episode is for you.
We’re going to cover three of the most persistent challenges owners face: misalignment across stakeholders, risk-inflated bids, lack of accountability and compliance exposure, and, more importantly, how Jama Connect helps you get ahead of them.
Managing construction projects isn’t easy, and owners face a range of interconnected challenges that can derail success. These challenges include:
Misalignment across stakeholders: When teams interpret requirements differently, it leads to design errors, miscommunication, rework, RFIs, and change orders. Without a unified system to manage and communicate requirements, projects are prone to scope creep and wasted resources.
Risk-inflated bids: During bidding, contractors often pad their numbers due to unclear expectations. This results in risk premiums, vague assumptions and inconsistent comparisons, forcing owners to choose between suboptimal options and inflating costs.
Lack of accountability: Without clarity on who owns specific requirements, you’re left exposed to safety risk, regulatory penalties, and liability due to non-compliance. Invisible accountability creates confusion, finger-pointing, and increased project risk. Together, these problems affect your ability to deliver projects on time, within budget, and with confidence. Addressing them requires a solution that brings clarity, alignment, and accountability to every phase of the project.
Solis: Jama Connect empowers project owners with comprehensive solutions to streamline construction projects, reduce risk, and improve outcomes. Here’s how it addresses key challenges.
Stakeholder alignment: By providing a shared source of truth for all requirements, from design to regulatory to contractual, Jama Connect ensures that everyone is on the same page. Requirements are traceable, version controlled, and validated, allowing teams to see who authored a requirement, what changed and why. This proactive alignment helps catch gaps early and prevent costly mistakes.
Clear scope for competitive bids: Jama Connect eliminates ambiguity during the bidding process by clearly defining scope and acceptance criteria. This clarity gives contractors the confidence to price jobs accurately, reduce inflated risk premiums, and ensure you’re comparing apples to apples. The result; faster bids, competitive pricing, and a smarter use of project budgets.
Built-in accountability: Accountability is made seamless with Jama Connect. Every requirement is assigned to an owner and tracked in real-time, ensuring comprehensive oversight. Requirements are also linked to compliance standards, contracts, or codes, providing audit-ready documentation whenever needed. If issues arise, traceability tools help resolve them quickly and transparently. Together, these capabilities equip you with the visibility, clarity, and confidence you need to deliver successful construction projects.
Solis: Let’s quickly look at Jama Connect in a project owner dashboard. Jama Connect dashboards are a visual tool to help with the three problems we just explored.
Accountability. This bar graph shows us who’s assigned to each of these stakeholder requirements. If multiple PMs are working a project, you can manage them all in one place.
Stakeholder alignment. This list of owner requirements is easily configured to show the data owners might be tracking daily. We have the priority column that shows us how the requirement has been categorized and the percent of downstream completed requirements. Owners are able to see all of this information in one place.
Clear scope. This last widget is a pie chart that separates the project requirements by their status. I can quickly see which are being worked on, have cost implications or schedule delays. These are all interactive, so I can click into the section like the schedule delay and see the specific information for those requirements.
Here’s the takeaway for project owners. Construction is complex, but you don’t have to lose sleep over scope creep, inflated cost, or compliance headaches. Jama Connect gives you the visibility, control, and confidence you need to deliver successful projects from planning to handover. Thank you for watching this demonstration of how Jama Connect empowers project owners in the AEC industry. To learn more about optimizing your projects, visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama customer, your success manager, or Jama software consultant, can provide you additional insights. Together, we can build better outcomes.
How Smart Companies Turn Economic Challenges into Opportunities to Get Ahead
In the past, when economic uncertainty hits, most companies instinctively tighten their belts and cut spending to prepare for the worst. But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the smartest move during tough times is actually to invest more aggressively in technology and innovation? Let’s dig into the data and lessons we can learn.
Recent research from Accenture shows overwhelmingly that companies that scaled (and some even doubling down on) their technology investments during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just survive…they thrived, growing revenue 5X faster than their peers and competitors. And while the pandemic created a unique dynamic of economic, political, and social challenges, there are lessons here that can be learned during any economic uncertainty, including the headwinds we’re seeing right now.
It’s no secret that the pandemic wasn’t just a health crisis; it was a massive stress test for business resilience. However, companies that emerged stronger shared a lot of common characteristics, including investing heavily in cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital transformation while their competitors were thinking more shortsightedly by cutting costs.
In fact, these “LEADER” companies didn’t just weather the storm…they used it as a launching pad for unprecedented growth.
The “Leaders,” “Leapfroggers,” and the “Laggards”
Accenture’s comprehensive study included 4,300 companies across 25 countries and showed three distinct categories of technology adopters during the pandemic.
Leaders represent the top 10% of companies that had already established strong technology foundations before COVID-19. These organizations stepped up their adoption of cloud computing, AI, and IoT technologies when the crisis hit. Their strategic advantage? They were already positioned to scale quickly when opportunity knocked.
Leapfroggers make up 18% of the sample and represent perhaps the most interesting group. These companies accelerated what would typically be multi-year digital transformations into mere months. They moved aggressively (and strategically) from being technology followers to leaders, demonstrating that timing and execution matter more than just being first.
The “Laggards” are the bottom 25% of companies that only recently began investing in new technologies. The decision to invest was made primarily just to maintain basic operations during the pandemic. This “reactive” approach to technology adoption left Laggards struggling to keep pace with market changes. Many still feeling that impact now.
What we’re seeing is that the financial results speak volumes. The Leaders are now growing revenue 5X faster than Laggards — a huge increase from the 2x growth differential that existed pre-pandemic. The widening of this gap demonstrates that technology investments are creating compound advantages over (a short period of) time.
Strategic Technology Investments That Drove Growth
It’s also clear that the companies that succeeded during COVID-19 didn’t just increase their technology spending randomly; they made strategic investments and changes in specific areas that delivered immediate and long-term value.
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud adoption emerged as the foundation for pandemic-era success. And for Jama Software customers, this should come as no surprise.
Among Leapfroggers, 80% had adopted some form of cloud technology by 2017, but this figure jumped to 98% by 2020. More importantly, 72% of Leaders accelerated their cloud security investments, while 68% increased their hybrid cloud spending.
This cloud-first approach provides the flexibility and scalability needed to support remote work, handle fluctuating demand, and rapidly deploy new capabilities – all of which was key to success during the pandemic, and now. Companies with robust cloud infrastructure could pivot quickly as market conditions change.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML)
The study showed that 59% of Leaders accelerated their AI and ML investments during the pandemic. These technologies allowed companies to analyze rapidly changing market conditions, optimize supply chains, and personalize customer experiences at scale. All factors that made the difference between success and failure during the pandemic.
AI-powered analytics helped companies identify new opportunities in real-time, while machine learning algorithms optimized everything from inventory management to customer service. Organizations who invest in these capabilities are able to make data-driven decisions faster than their competitors.
IoT and Process Automation
The research showed that 70% of Leaders increased their Internet of Things (IoT) investments, while 60% accelerated (or invested in) robotic process automation (RPA) adoption. The outcome was that these technologies eliminated manual processes, reduced errors, and freed up human resources for higher-value activities.
The companies who invested in process improvement saw incredible outcomes. IoT sensors provided real-time visibility into operations, enabling predictive maintenance and optimized resource allocation. RPA handled routine tasks, allowing employees to focus on strategic initiatives and customer relationships. The investments paid dividends.
Investments in Collaboration
While collaboration may feel like a “soft skill” investment, it can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
70% of leading companies looked to aggressively increase funding for training to build an agile and collaborative organization. By prioritizing employee development and leveraging digital collaboration tools, these organizations foster better communication, faster decision-making, and more cohesive teamwork.
Examples of these investments included virtual platforms, real-time communication technologies, and programs that encouraged cross-functional alignment. The result? Improved project execution, enhanced innovation, and stronger connections across distributed teams, driving both operational efficiency and global scalability.
Three Strategic Imperatives for Digital Transformation
The research shows that the most successful companies during the pandemic followed three key strategic imperatives. These are the lessons that can guide any organization through economic uncertainty. Let’s call these the 3 Rs.
(R) Replatform to the Cloud
Leaders moved beyond basic cloud adoption to build what Accenture calls “Systems Strength.” This means reducing redundant technologies (maybe this can be our 4th R), eliminating disconnected data silos, and gaining the computing power and flexibility that cloud platforms provide.
But cloud replatforming isn’t just about moving existing systems to the cloud — it’s about rethinking (or reimagining) how technology supports business objectives.
Companies that approach cloud migration strategically can easily scale resources up or down based on demand, experiment with new capabilities quickly, and integrate disparate systems more effectively.
(R) Reframe with Innovation-First Strategy
Successful companies shifted from viewing technology as a cost center to treating it as a growth engine. 67% of Leapfroggers sought to aggressively increase revenue from non-core business lines, using technology to explore new markets and business models.
This innovation-first mindset encourages experimentation and rapid iteration – and it clearly pays off. Companies that embrace this approach can test new products, services, and market strategies without massive upfront investments.
(R) Reach Across All Business Functions
Technology investments delivered the greatest returns when they extended across entire organizations rather than being confined to IT departments. 65% of Leaders prioritized employee happiness through digital-based flexible work arrangements, compared to just 43% of Laggards.
This holistic approach to technology adoption creates seamless interactions between humans and machines, improved collaboration across departments, and built organizational capabilities that support long-term growth. There’s that “soft skill” investment again, paying off handsomely.
Prioritizing Employee Experience and Collaboration
If you’re reading this, we don’t have to tell you that the pandemic fundamentally changed how people work, and successful companies recognized that technology investments must support human needs as well as business objectives. We’re all living proof of that.
Digital-First Work Arrangements
Companies that thrived during COVID-19 didn’t just enable remote work; they reimagined work itself, perhaps for the first time in decades. They invested in collaboration platforms, digital communication tools, and virtual meeting technologies that made distributed teams as effective as co-located ones. While some company leaders feared working from home might decrease productivity, those who embraced the new way of working saw that employees actually adapted quickly and efficiently to the change. Many employees found that without office distractions, they were actually MORE productive and efficient.
And so the data shows that these investments in employee experience paid dividends in terms of productivity, retention, and recruitment. Companies with superior digital work environments began to attract top talent regardless of geographic location.
Human-Machine Collaboration
66% of Leaders focused on creating seamless interactions between humans and machines (the theme of the decade, maybe?). This approach recognized that technology should augment human capabilities rather than replace them. This is a practice we stand behind as an organization, always including “human in the loop” in our AI process workflows.
Successful companies designed workflows that leveraged both human creativity and machine efficiency. The successful balance was AI handling data processing and pattern recognition, while humans focused on strategy, relationship building, and creative problem-solving.
Agile and Collaborative Structures
70% of Leaders invested aggressively in training to build agile and collaborative organization structures. An investment that these companies recognized required corresponding changes in how teams work together.
Agile methodologies enabled rapid response to changing market conditions, while collaborative tools broke down silos between departments.
The outcome is that companies that have mastered both technology and organizational agility adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.
Quantifiable Benefits and ROI of Technology Investment
The financial returns from strategic technology investments during the pandemic were substantial and measurable.
Revenue Growth Acceleration
Like we said above, Leaders achieved 5x faster revenue growth than Laggards, showing a significant acceleration from the 2x advantage that existed before the pandemic. This widening gap clearly shows that technology investments create compound advantages over time.
Leapfroggers achieved 4x faster revenue growth than Laggards, proving that aggressive technology adoption can quickly close competitive gaps. These companies demonstrated that multi-year digital transformations can actually be done in months, achieving rapid ROI on their technology investments.
Operational Efficiency Gains
Companies that invested in automation and AI reported significant efficiency improvements. Process automation reduced manual effort by up to 50%, while AI-powered analytics accelerated decision-making and improved accuracy.
Cloud infrastructure investments provided both cost savings and operational flexibility. Companies could scale resources based on demand, reducing waste ($$$) while ensuring adequate capacity for growth.
Market Expansion Opportunities
Technology investments enabled companies to enter new markets and serve new customer segments. Digital platforms reduced barriers to entry, while data analytics provided insights into customer needs and preferences.
67% of Leapfroggers actively sought to increase revenue from non-core business lines, using technology to explore new opportunities. This diversification strategy was able to reduce dependence on traditional revenue sources and create multiple paths to growth.
Practical Lessons for Companies Facing Economic Downturns
The success stories from the pandemic provide a roadmap for any organization facing economic uncertainty.
Invest Aggressively in Core Technologies
Economic downturns create opportunities to gain competitive advantages while competitors are cutting costs. Companies should prioritize investments in cloud infrastructure, AI, and automation technologies that deliver both immediate efficiency gains and long-term strategic value.
Focus on technologies that eliminate manual processes, improve decision-making, and enable rapid response to market changes. These investments provide measurable ROI while building capabilities for future growth.
Compress Digital Transformation Timelines
Economic pressure creates urgency that can actually accelerate digital transformation. Companies should use downturns as opportunities to make bold changes that might be difficult during normal times.
Leapfroggers compressed multi-year transformations into months by focusing on high-impact initiatives and accepting some risk. This aggressive approach enabled them to emerge from the crisis stronger than before.
Focus on Employee Experience and Collaboration
Technology investments must support human needs as well as business objectives. Companies that prioritize employee experience through digital tools and flexible work arrangements will attract and retain top talent.
Invest in collaboration platforms, communication tools, and training programs that enable effective remote and hybrid work. These investments pay dividends in productivity, retention, and recruitment.
Embrace an Innovation-First Mindset
View technology investments as growth engines rather than cost centers. Look for opportunities to enter new markets, serve new customer segments, and create new revenue streams through digital capabilities.
Encourage experimentation and rapid iteration. Economic downturns provide cover for bold moves that might seem risky during normal times.
Building Resilience Through Strategic Technology Adoption
The pandemic taught us that economic disruptions are inevitable, but they don’t have to be devastating. Companies that invest strategically in technology during downturns can emerge stronger and more competitive.
The key is to view economic uncertainty not as a threat to be weathered, but as an opportunity to build advantages that competitors can’t easily replicate. Technology investments made during difficult times often deliver the highest returns because they’re made with focus and urgency.
Organizations considering technology investments during economic downturns should remember that the gap between leaders and laggards continues to widen. The companies that act decisively now will be positioned to capture disproportionate growth when conditions improve.
For teams managing complex development processes, ensuring regulatory compliance, and coordinating global collaboration, the lessons from pandemic-era success stories are particularly relevant. Strategic technology investments can streamline operations, reduce manual effort, and create scalable systems that support both current needs and future growth.
Explore Jama Connect Today
Ready to transform your organization’s approach to requirements management and compliance? Jama Connect has helped hundreds of the world’s leading companies scale and thrive during uncertainty. Discover how our platform can help you reduce documentation time, ensure regulatory compliance, and build the collaborative workflows that drive sustainable growth — even in challenging economic conditions.
Disclaimer: This blog post was written with the assistance of AI, particularly the portions summarizing Accenture Research. This blog post was edited and reviewed for accuracy by Kenzie Jonsson, Mario Maldari, and Decoteau Wilkerson.
Building an Efficient and Effective Product Development Process
Managing shifting priorities, complex requirements, and compliance across teams is no easy task. But optimizing your workflows could make the difference between staying competitive and falling behind.
Join Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, for this 45 minute webinar to learn how to build more efficient and effective product development processes — and avoid the preventable setbacks caused by outdated workflows.
What you’ll gain:
Understand how ineffective requirements processes lead to costly delays
Discover strategies to accelerate development with structured, fine-grained data
Learn how dynamic workflows replace outdated, linear processes for greater success
Whether you’re tackling recurring challenges or looking to refine your team’s processes, this session will provide practical solutions backed by industry insights and real-world success.
Patrick Knowles: Hello everyone. My name is Patrick Knowles and I come from a background of systems engineering across the aerospace and defense industry in both defense and commercial space. During my time in industry, I was a Systems Engineer, Lead Systems Engineer, and Systems Engineering Manager, where I’ve been privileged to see multiple different product development processes and life cycles.
Today I want to share my experience in industry and marry that with how Jama Connect can help each of your teams be empowered to effectively improve and develop products. During today’s webinar, I will share the key challenges of developing complex products and how Jama Connect can help alleviate these pain points. This will include how collaboration can mitigate issues, teams face, how compliance to standards and regulations can be simplified, and how to accelerate the final portion of product development, V&V.
What we’re hearing from customers is that they need to move faster, that their products are becoming more complex, and integration of the engineered products as well as within teams is becoming increasingly common. In engineering, we like to go fast. We like to run first and fail early, none of which is inherently bad. However, when teams are unprepared for the inevitable mistake or misstep, things can fall off the rails pretty quickly.
Knowles: Teams that are pushing to keep on schedule, sometimes miss standards, regulations, or even properly validating their product. Many times these things that teams lose track of, they lose track of their documentation that will be critical to the field when they go to field that product. Things get lost in emails, Slack channels, teams chats or worse, on someone’s hard drive that gets left out in the rain, of course, that would be the nightmare scenario.
Moving fast is probably the root of many of these issues, but it can be prevented by teams doing some other things that don’t inherently slow them down. As we progress throughout today’s webinar, my hope and what I’m trying to get across here is that it becomes incredibly clear that we want to enable your teams to run at full speed from the get go here at Jama. The pressure of speed is of course not the only challenge teams face though. The products that we develop nowadays are becoming more and more complex, right? If we think about just the evolution of a calculator, or a cell phone, or a computer over the last 20 years. Everything is getting smaller, tighter, better form, better fit, better function, but that also increases the complexity.
So when all the parts are moving, all the data is spread across a plethora of channels and teams are pushed to develop to the next generation of the greatest gadget. These increased complexities lead to preventable failures becoming unfortunately more routine, but we are going to discuss some of the ways to treat that as we go forward here.
Creating a thread of data that can be traced from the top to bottom is one of those ways in which Jama Connect can support a team facing these issues. In fact, starting simple in Jama Connect can help a team develop their complex products more efficiently. But as you will see later in this presentation, start simple does not mean you must maintain that simple starting point. In fact, we actually really want to talk about how you evolve and optimize as you go forward. That’s really the main theme that you’re going to see throughout this presentation.
Knowles: Finally, integration between teams and products is becoming more and more challenging, particularly in the end stages of development. Teams are typically fantastic at creating things and talking together while they’re creating them, but when it comes to properly confirming that they created the right thing in the right way, we see a lot of unforced errors, to use a sports term, that typically is due to a lack of centralized stream of consciousness. Where all the thoughts, all the design energy goes into the same centralized location. This, of course does not to be the case, and in fact, we’ll spend a good portion of today’s session discussing collaboration and efficient centralization of information.
So how do we improve development processes, especially when we’re talking about collaboration? I want to dig into that topic here to help illuminate how to engage with some of the best practices in Jama Connect, as well as why these approaches are suggested.
One of the worst things in the digital age is trying to find something. You want to find that document, you can’t, but I actually believe that the next worst thing, or maybe even worse, is when you find the information and you simply can’t understand its intention, why it was written the way it was, and you’re trying to decipher why the decision was the way that it is, why the requirement exists or generally why something really came to be in the way that it is today. So let’s pretend you’re a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new engineer developing something like a next-generation munition for cutting-edge, new fighter jet.
The team you are on has been tasked with taking a legacy design, 25 years of work, and revamping it for the modern age, using more sophisticated components and integrating whatever else it might be there. You show up day one of this effort and begin to realize all the legacy design was completed 25 plus years ago. There are a few Holy Grail documents that really guided the design, but much of the system was developed before teams that adopted data-centric tools like Jama Connect. So you sift through mountains of paperwork to determine why the system was designed the way it was, and that’s not inherently all that easy to do. It’s time staking, it is difficult to get the right information out.
Now imagine 25 years in the future still you, still same person. You are now leading the charge of another new development, same scenario, new fighter jet, new munition, but now it’s another new fighter jet, another new munition. This time you sit down on day one and you log into Jama Connect filled with itemized requirements, regulations, interfaces, and other information that has comments and commentary like you see here on the right side of the screen from engineers who develop stuff and you see the call and the response between them and their teammates. You can filter on all this information. You can search for key topics. You can start from either one single item or sort through all of the information and commentary in the database.
In this example, I think it’s easy to see the difference first hand of how centralizing communication can support long-term wins.
INBRAIN Chooses Jama Connect ® to Provide Clarity, Stability, and Confidence in Quality Control for Neural Implant Systems Development
INBRAIN Neuroelectronics develops GRAPHENE NEURAL implant systems for central and peripheral neuroelectronic applications including autonomous BCI Therapeutics to restore movement control and other important lost functions in Parkinson’s disease, Epilepsy or Stroke in addition to organ related therapeutics
Customer Story Overview
The company started looking for a requirements management tool to use in developing their first product. They knew that building implants would involve a huge number of requirements to be written, checked, reviewed, and iterated on. Connecting to related software development activity in Jira and test management systems would be critical to ensuring quality and maintaining traceability.
They determined that using Excel for requirements and test traceability would be too cumbersome, time consuming, and risky. Ensuring regulatory compliance and product quality was too important for successful product development and delivery to rely on a manual, document-based process prone to human mistakes.
INBRAIN chose Jama Connect because it greatly increased confidence in quality control by enabling the entire team to work collaboratively and efficiently on requirements, tests, and risk management. This provided the stability for the team to focus on the development effort rather than worry about data integrity or quality control issues.
With Jama Connect, Users Experience:
Greater confidence in quality control thanks to distributed collaboration that enabled the entire team to work in parallel with consistent, shared, up-to-date information
Ability to start working immediately after fast configuration and setup of integrations assisted by Jama Software’s Services team
Centralized platform for integrated requirements, tests, and risk management professionally supported by Jama Software’s Support team
“The massive collaboration in Jama Connect, where everything is controlled and checked and where reuse is supported, makes the whole management of requirements much easier.”
– MARTIJN HAZENBERG – HEAD OF EMBEDDED ENGINEERING, INBRAIN
When developing highly complex medical devices, the use of Excel for manual tracing of large volumes of requirements and tests through multiple iterations and reviews would have been too time-consuming, cumbersome, and risky from a compliance and quality perspective.
“We wanted to avoid spending so much time on manual efforts such as modifying data in Excel sheets and performing manual traceability. By using Jama Connect, all of that wasted time disappears, and we can focus on the things that truly matter, such as our development effort.” – ALBERT MOLINS – SYSTEMS ARCHITECT, INBRAIN
Evaluation
Integrated solution for managing requirements, tests, and risks in connection with Jira and test automation systems.
The evaluation demonstrated that Jama Connect could provide the integrated, efficient, collaborative solution that the company needed for both current and future needs. The team also appreciated how quickly Jama Software’s Solutions Architect and Support staff responded to questions and requests during and after the evaluation.
“Jama Connect has given our team much greater clarity, stability, and confidence in control quality to focus on development.”
– ALBERT MOLINS – SYSTEMS ARCHITECT, INBRAIN
With Jama Connect, the INBRAIN team has experienced the following benefits:
Confidence in the development process based on consistent, shared, up-to-date information
Ability to start working immediately after fast configuration and setup of integrations
Distributed collaboration enabling the entire team to work in parallel managing requirements and tests used to prepare regulatory documents
Centralized, professionally supported platform for integrated requirements, tests, and risk management
Experiencing the distributed collaboration in Jama Connect gave the entire team confidence to focus on the development work that mattered. During verification of requirements, everyone was engaged in running test cases and other activities in parallel to ensure quality. They continue to benefit from continuous support available from their local Jama Software consultant whenever they have questions that could hinder development progress.
Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect for Naval Systems Requirements Management
UK operation chooses Jama Connect for its ease-of-use and administration.
About Ultra Maritime UK
Founded in 1944 and acquired in 2021 by Advent International
Over 2,300 employees across fifteen locations worldwide
Premier provider of undersea warfare systems, products, and solutions to US, UK, Canada, Australia, and allied navies worldwide.
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
This customer story is about Ultra Maritime UK, a division of Ultra Maritime, which develops equipment for surface, subsurface, and unmanned platforms, including acoustic and sonar systems and torpedo defense and radar sensor solutions. Customers include the Royal Navy of the UK, the U.S. Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Indian Navy.
Since the Ultra Group’s acquisition by U.S. private equity firm Advent International in 2021, Ultra Maritime has operated as an integrated company with lines of business headquartered in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, responsible for developing both worldwide and localized solutions.
Ultra Maritime UK’s products and solutions must adhere to the highest quality, security, and safety standard,s including ISO 9001-2015, ISO 14001:2015, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, and ISO 45001:2018. In addition, the products must satisfy customer requirements and regional naval standards, including U.S. DoD/MIL-STD and UK MOD DStan.
Challenges
Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements
Evaluation Criteria
Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence
Outcomes
Consistency across projects
Business mandatory requirements tool for all new projects
Quick user adoption with minimal training
Easy tracking of progress with dashboards and standardization
Reduced risk with pre-built standardized project structures
Easy management of large numbers of objects and changes
Easy initiation and completion of reviews to action items sooner in development
After years of managing project requirements with IBM® DOORS® Classic, these challenges drove Ultra Maritime UK to find a user-friendly collaborative tool that would enable them to increase their requirements management effectiveness and deliver projects faster.
Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Ultra Maritime UK identified several requirements management tools as potential replacements for DOORS Classic, including Jama Connect, which a member of the engineering team suggested. They then established criteria to be used for the evaluation.
Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Integrable with development and test software tools
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence
First, a top priority was for the new solution to have a modern, intuitive user experience for teams to get up and running quickly with their new projects. They needed software that people would want to work in. Otherwise, people might opt out of using the tool and work in disparate documents, which would introduce risk, impede productivity, and hamper efficiency. Second, it would need to have low administrative overhead that did not require team members to become full-time administrators. Third, it would need to be integrable with development and test software tools from different vendors. Fourth, it would need to support the reuse of requirements and test evidence from past development programs when starting new products or projects.
During the evaluation process, Jama Connect stood out from the competition as the solution that would best meet the company’s needs. “Looking at all the features, the user’s ease of use, and the low level of administrative time required, Jama Connect came out on top compared to the other tools reviewed,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.
In its search for a modern solution that would be quickly adopted, Ultra Maritime UK found that Jama Connect’s intuitive user experience made adoption extremely easy for engineers to get started managing requirements and test evidence more efficiently and intelligently. Tracking and finding information quickly and easily was achievable with Jama Connect’s powerful filtering and the ability to add hyperlinks to any architectural elements, requirements, test items or other objects. In addition, the ability to create a Definitions database and Glossary in Jama Connect was particularly useful for getting everyone informed and up-to-speed about projects. “Jama Connect has a highly intuitive user interface and allows for engineers to quickly and easily become accustomed to using it,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.
Having a simple and quick way for systems engineers to initiate reviews and for stakeholders to complete their reviews in a timely manner was a key area where Jama Connect’s Review Center led the way. The fact that reviewers were not required to be licensed as full-time users made Jama Connect more attractive. “Jama Connect certainly makes it much easier to initiate and manage reviews and be aware of progress through them,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
“Jama Connect proved to be extremely useful for making sure that we’ve got complete coverage and traceability of a given set of artifacts to see which ones have or haven’t reached the approved step. This helps ensure we haven’t missed any anomalies such as system requirements missing verification cases to avoid rework,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
Support for multiple IDs for the same object in Jama Connect made it easy to identify opportunities for reuse of older product requirements and test evidence for new products to efficiently manage shared elements of core and variant products. “The ability to identify, distinguish, and reuse global requirements across products and projects to reduce development time and cost is a strength of Jama Connect,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
In addition to product capabilities, team expertise, and training resources provided during the evaluation demonstrated that Jama Software would be a good fit as a partner for Ultra Maritime UK. “We were impressed by Jama Software’s responsiveness to our questions and the online training, forums, and support available to our team,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
Jama Connect® Attains Level 2 TISAX Certification from TÜV SÜD
Jama Software, the industry’s leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, announced that it has achieved Level 2 Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) certification from TÜV SÜD. TISAX is a security standard created by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA).
Jama Connect is now the only requirements management application that is both TISAX and SOC 2 certified
This achievement underscores Jama Software’s unwavering commitment to information security and data protection. TISAX certification is a critical benchmark for meeting the stringent security requirements of German OEMs and their global supply chains, ensuring that sensitive customer and product data is handled with the highest standards of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
For our customers, this certification unequivocally demonstrates that Jama Software’s solutions and processes embody the highest standards of information security. It empowers organizations to meet stringent compliance requirements, simplifies and accelerates procurement processes, and fortifies trust in an era of increasingly complex regulatory demands and cyber threats. With this certification, customers gain not just confidence but a decisive edge in addressing their most critical security challenges.
“Jama Software is committed to enabling the highest levels of security for our customers. In support of our rapid growth in the automotive sector, we have added TISAX certification to complement our market leading SOC 2 certified application,” said Neil Stroud, General Manager Automotive & Semiconductor, Jama Software.
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, software-defined vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect requirements management software to minimize the risk of defects, rework, cost overruns, and recalls. Using Jama Connect, engineering organizations can now intelligently manage the development process by leveraging Live Traceability™ across best-of-breed tools to measurably improve outcomes. Our rapidly growing customer base spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, financial services, and insurance industries.
Simplify Airborne Systems Lifecycle Milestones with Categories
Gain Clarity, Reduce Risks, and Stay Compliant.
Struggling to keep track of deliverables across complex aerospace projects? You’re not alone. Managing deadlines and milestones often feels like navigating a maze of documents, spreadsheets, and shifting priorities.
In this webinar, you’ll discover how Jama Connect®’s Categories feature can bring order to your milestones, improve transparency, and align deliverables with key compliance standards like ARP4754.
What You’ll Learn:
How to Enable Categories: Simplify system development milestone tracking from start to finish.
Clarity on Deadlines: Learn how to make engineering deadlines easier to understand and act on.
Improving On-Time Performance: Organize milestone deliverables and optimize workflows to avoid delays.
Compliance Alignment: Map development milestones to standards such as ARP4754 with ease.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Knowles: I’m Patrick Knowles. It’s great to meet all of you. Today, we are going to be looking at simplifying airborne systems, specifically lifecycle milestones, by using Categories in Jama Connect. As I mentioned, my name is Patrick Knowles. I’m a senior solutions consultant here. And it’s just a pleasure to work with y’all. I’m in our aerospace and defense vertical, so my expertise comes from that within the industry. And now I’m happy to be sharing that with you all as I work through consulting, as well as webinars. Today’s agenda, we’re going to tackle really the core problem, the complex challenge of milestone deliveries. From there, I’m going to introduce this category’s functionality and features to all of you. If it’s something you’re familiar with, this will be a breeze. If it’s something new to you, I hope this is a great introduction to how it works.
Then we’ll talk about how you categorize information specifically with some best practices. So, for even those who are used to using Categories, this should be a refreshing little bit with maybe some new tricks that you can utilize. And then finally, we’re going to talk about deploying this to your collaborative teams, which is really critical. Because if the data’s Categorized on day one and then the data changes or new data comes in, your teams are going to need to know how to manage this, how to look at the information. And it’s going to help solve that complex challenge of milestone delivery and some of the issues that we’re going to talk about there.
So, this complex challenge, deadlines, and stress. There’s data everywhere. It’s disconnected, it’s disparate, it’s annoying. That’s the core root problem here. But to elaborate on it, engineering in the digital age can feel like a maze. There’s sometimes a lack of top-down visibility to deliverables. So, if you’re a program manager or a lead systems engineer or a chief engineer, you might struggle to see all the work that your teams are doing. And sometimes there’s a lack of bottom-up visibility to the milestone. So, if you’re an engineer, you might not know about what milestone comes next, what’s due at that milestone. A lot of the time, that information is on a Word document or an Excel sheet, or maybe a Confluence page at best, where it’s listing out everything that’s due, but it doesn’t inherently connect to anything that is due and what those exact bits of information on.
And that leads to some unclear methods for contributing. How do I, as an engineer, ensure that we’re going to meet this deadline? I know what I see on my scrum board or I see from my manager, or whatever it might be, but maybe at the end of the day I don’t really understand exactly how my little bit of data is getting into that greater picture for this delivery to our customer or to our internal stakeholders. And then, of course, the common issue is always that data is disconnected, but that’s what Jama Connect is here to help with. We’re here to help you guide through that maze and to connect your data together to solve these key issues.
So, the risky scenario here is that your data is disconnected from a milestone, and that maybe you forget to deliver a certain part of the data, or you deliver outdated bits of data, or anything else that might happen there. And it’s pretty common across engineering. It doesn’t really matter where you work, there’s always this struggle to get everything ready from pencils down to delivery or whatever it might be. There are bigger views related to all of this work. There are stakeholders, customers, and, of course, the program leaders who need to see this information. And they need to see the most up-to-date, correct information. And without a clear way to connect your requirements specifically, because that’s what we’re going to mostly talk about here, is requirements. But without a really clear way to connect your requirements to your milestones or the rest of your data to milestones, you run the risk of simply leaving things behind.
Knowles: So, how can Jama Connect help? Well, the specific use case we’re going to talk about today is enabling our Categories functionality in the tool. And we’re going to line it up with milestones from regulatory documents. Specifically, this example is going to be based on ARP4754B. However, if you are running the NASA systems engineering life cycle and you know the milestones in there, you could also line this up to that or any other number of product lifecycle milestones. We’re going to categorize data directly into things. And that’s going to help you really line it up to each of these listed items over there in the screenshot on the right. And then your members of the team are going to be able to filter, and view this data, and see it grow and add to it. And it’s going to be very transparent for them, how they’re connecting their information to the greater milestone.
With our foundation laid, there on what the problem is, I want to talk more about what Categories are. So, what exactly is a Category? Why do we believe this is a great option for you and the team to try and enable within your tool? Specifically, Categories have a similar feel to some other features within Jama Connect, like tags and pick lists. However, Categories win out overall with this specific use case for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Categories are admin-enabled and controlled, so your general user can’t populate a Category. They can assign information to a Category, but they can’t create new ones. Which means that, unlike tags, this is a kind of configuration managed by your admins. Pick lists are also configuration managed by your admins. However, they aren’t globally accessible to all item types. You’re going to have to create a field for every single pick list that you want assigned different item types.
Categories, however, can be globally applied to an entire project or to the whole instance of Jama Connect. That means that you don’t have to go and assign them to each of your item types. They’re going to connect to folders. They’re going to connect to texts. They’re going to connect with your specific requirement types, whatever it might be. And so, that’s an advantage that Categories have. Also, Categories can be available across multiple projects or just one specific project, which helps if you have a kind of multi-layered approach to your Jama Connect development of requirements. Finally, I’ll explain why not to use tags and pick lists. Tags, again, are creatable and by the user, and prone to error. If you type a capital letter in the wrong spot or put the wrong vowel in the wrong place, that’s going to be there in perpetuity, unless you have really strong tag cleanup processes.
And pick lists and multi-selects, you have to create it for each item type. You have to maintain the pick list. And then if an item type is introduced to a project, you’re going to have to re-add that pick list to it, and so on and so forth. So Categories is a little broader, but also just as controlled. And so, you’re able to kind of manage in a smoother way. So, how do you set up Categories? Well, you go to admin, Categories. And then over there on the far right of the screenshot, you’ll see enable Categories is turned on. It’s defaulted off for most instances, so make sure you turn it on first. From there, we’re going to set up all the Categories you see in front of you on the screenshot, as well as any number of other Category you may want to enable.
Knowles: Now, once you’ve got everything enabled, it’s all about how do you Categorize the information. So, we’re going to walk through some instructions, some best practices, and then we’ll do some demonstration, of course, here at the end of this section of the slides on how you do all this work. The first thing, like we mentioned, is enabling Categories. You do that through the admin. You assign things to either projects or global within your Jama Connect instance, and then you start utilizing them. One of our best practices here is to manage Categories through logical organizers, so folders, sets, components. That allows you to then click into the list view of that logical organizer and then assign all the Categories to the items within it. You don’t have to do this. This is just one of the more efficient ways, especially if you’re enabling an architecture-forward approach within your database. And of course, you can manage Categories in bulk, otherwise this whole explanation wouldn’t make much sense.
So, some of the tips, tricks, and best practices. Here, we’ve got the managing in bulk. And I’ll show you how to do that live. We’ll view categorized information in the exploratory via a filter, and so we’ve got to set up filters. Of course, those same filters can be exported or sent to reports, and then you can use multiple Categories on the same item. So, if one item is going to be delivered at the first milestone and you want to continue to deliver it at the next milestone, you simply add both Categories to it. And finally, you can always create baselines of everything filtered. So, these filters that we’re going to use to shrink down and narrow down the exploratory are also going to be very, very useful for baselining, for exporting, and for a number of other things.
So, now it’s time to demonstrate some of these best practices. The first things first is enabling Categories. As we discussed earlier, there’s this enable Categories button here on the far right. Once enabled, you’ll be able to add Categories with the add button here. Doing that is as simple as populating a single field with the information and hitting add. I, of course, have the whole system ddevelopment phase added already, and so I want to show you exactly what that looks like, how these things got nested underneath each other, and so on and so forth, by adding an eighth step. So, for today, the webinar phase is what we’re going to add to our development phases here. When we add, it’s going to actually add it at the top level. And so, then we need to drag it down into the system development phase.
We are going to use the move functionality here, as that’s the best practice in this scenario, where the copy Category functionality is better for using this for variant management. Now you can see that the webinar phase has been added to the system development phases. And you can also see that the system development phase is a project Category. This was done by managing access here on the right side, where you can pick the specific projects you’d like this Category to be assigned to. Or if this is something you want globally accessible, you can use the globally accessible button here. When you hit that, you’ll see that it turns orange and has a globe, instead of the project specific icon that you saw originally.
Now let’s look at how we categorize information within the tool. Our screenshots were showing this functions portion of this project, and so we’re going to dive into that to continue the continuity of this example. This specific set here, we’ll view the details of it, and we’ll simply scroll down and manage Categories. So, if we wanted to add that eight system development phase, webinar phase, we’ll simply select it, and click add and it will be added to this set of information. From there, we can bulk edit everything underneath the set by selecting all the items and clicking manage Categories. Same pop-up shows up, and we’re able to add that eighth phase of the lifecycle.
Now, this is really, really fantastic. If we want to go see everything in the eighth phase of the lifecycle, we can select the Categories feature over here. We can expand our system development phase and select webinar phase, where we see the items that were added there, including the set up here, and are able to kind of view this information in the list view. Now, if we wanted to see this in the explorer, we would go to filters and we’re just going to rely on this pre-built one here. And we’re going to right click apply filter to explorer. This is going to show us the information in a more succinct way. And we’ll talk more about this as we go on.
Knowles: Now that we’ve looked at how to enable Categories, we want to talk about how we develop this and deploy this data and these Categories for your collaborative team. I talked a little bit about this and showed you these exact steps here to narrow down your explorer tree, but what really is the benefit here? Well, you can set up a simple filter that’s based on the Category itself and right-click apply that filter to the explorer. This lets teams see just the information they need to care about coming up, especially if your sets, components, and folders are all categorized. This will show a team that, hey, we need to make sure all of the aircraft functions are populated for this coming milestone, because that set is there. Same with the aircraft validations, the requirements, and the plans and assessments.
Each of those logical organizers are categorized, showing the team this is something that is due at the upcoming milestone. The team then will populate information underneath that and they will categorize those items as well to bring them into the overall filter. Now, public filters are just kind of one of the ways we want to see this deployed to the team. We also need to demonstrate to the team how do you bookmark the filters, and how do you even manage Categories in general? So, in the next step here, I’m going to demonstrate managing Categories for single items, as well as a couple other little nuances within the tool that the teams will need to understand as they go ahead and use this in the deployed environment.
When deploying this information to the teams, it’s really critical that you’ve set your filters to be public. A quick way to note if something is public is if it’s got the asterisk next to the name here. You can always right-click and edit your filter and click the make public, and that will denote that it is public to all users using this project. Once your filters are all built out, you’re going to have them there. You’re going to teach your users exactly how to use them, of course, with the apply filter to explore. But also, if they need to send these for a review and get signatures on them or add a baseline, there’s also these features available to them.
And of course, bookmarking is really, really critical. Without it bookmarked, you can see I’m now missing phase one, so I have to go to all, and then go find phase one, and add it to my bookmarks and it’ll now show up in my bookmarked section here. Users most of the time are going to be adding new items to the tool. And so, if we add a new item here, we’re going to populate this new item, a new item for webinar. And that’s going to be our example item here to show that once we’ve saved it, this is when we get to add the Categories. It’s not a field that’s available directly when editing a brand new item. It shows up after the fact here down at the bottom with the managed Categories button.
You’ll then grab the applicable Categories that you want to add to this item, save it, and you’ll see them here. This helps, and it automatically adds things to the filter. You’ll see here that we’ve gone up in the number of items, and our new item for the webinar right here is now part of the filter automatically. Additionally, you can show your users that they can come directly here in the category section to see the same information, just without the filter and without some of those right-click functionalities that you get to see when you’re in the filter section. It’s been fantastic to work with you all today and show off these features in the tool.
