It’s in the name: Jama Connect™ gives you superior visibility into every stage of your product development process by connecting stakeholders with the right information at the right time. The result is better collaboration within and across teams, so delayed replies and ambiguous feedback won’t hamper your forward progress.

Our Jama Professional Services consultants work with users across a range of organizations and industries to help them optimize collaborative success and get the most value from the platform. To share more of their expertise, our consultants recently conducted a webinar on Jama Connect best practices that covered a range of topics, including creating groups and finding information faster.

Today, we’ll be sharing more insights from that webinar, this time looking at some of the common functionalities and lesser-known features our consultants recommend for teams looking to improve their collaboration within Jama Connect.

(For this post, we’re assuming a reasonable level of familiarity with Jama Connect. If you’re looking for a more granular guide, start with the User Guide or get your questions answered in our support community.)

Stream View

On the far right of your Jama Connect dashboard, you’ll see a link to stream view. Stream view lets you see all the conversations happening at a specific level of the project or across the items located within a project. You can join an existing conversation or start a new one by @ mentioning the individuals or teams you want to connect with. For instance, start typing “system engineers,” and you’ll see that group pop up. Now you can initiate a conversation with a specific group, and everyone in that group can receive a notification that you’ve made a comment.

This brings us to another feature in Jama Connect that makes communication easier: notifications.

Comment Notifications

There’s an easy way to control some of the feedback notifications you receive in Jama Connect, especially during the review process.

By default, when you comment on an item within a review, you start following that item, and whenever anyone else comments on the item or anywhere within the review, you’ll receive a notification.

You can easily change your notification settings from your profile. In the upper right corner of your Jama Connect instance, you’ll see your name; click on it to access your profile. Select the Review Center tab. You have two notification options: “Email me updates to items on following” or “Automatically follow items I have commented on.” Uncheck the second choice. Now, when you comment on a review, you will no longer automatically be following that item.

If you’re already keeping tabs on the comments in Review Center, you probably won’t need email notifications outside of Jama, but this is an opportunity to customize how you receive information about your process.

Subscriptions Notifications

Subscriptions allow you to loop a group of users — like the systems engineering team — into notifications about new defects or updates to defects within the project. You can also subscribe yourself to any item in Jama Connect that’s relevant to you. For instance, if you subscribe to a set of defects, every time a defect is added or updated, you’ll receive a notification.

Just as with comments, you can control how often you receive email notifications. To do this, go back to your profile, click the “Subscriptions” tab in the upper right. There, you’ll see everything you’re subscribed to, and you can unsubscribe or customize how you’d like to receive notifications about updates or additions to items on your subscription list.

You’ll see that immediate subscription notifications are the default, but you can change that to daily or weekly notifications. One of our consultants suggests that daily digests are the most helpful: Weekly notifications contain too much information that isn’t pertinent, while immediate notifications clog up your inbox so that it’s easy to miss what’s most important.

Categorizing Feedback

There’s a single, powerful tip for improving the feedback you give and receive when participating in a review. We’ve all received emails or other communications where it’s not clear what the sender is asking for: Are they asking a question? Do they need action from you?

Jama’s Review Center includes a feature that allows participants to categorize their feedback as a question, a proposed change or a potential issue. Adding context to your review comments helps ensure clear, efficient feedback, and empowers the moderator to filter and manage feedback by its assigned category.

For a deeper dive into maximizing Jama Connect, check out the Ask Jama webinar or explore the Jama Connect User Guide, which is full of tools to plan and track progress and performance.