This blog previews our recent webinar. To watch the entire presentation, visit: “Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption”
Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption
Change is hard. Even the most advanced semiconductor organizations struggle to adopt new processes and tools. Resistance doesn’t result from bad intentions; instead, it arises from organizational inertia: entrenched cultures, siloed teams, and the very human tendency to stick with what’s familiar.
In this practical discussion, we explore how engineering teams are overcoming these challenges. Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Lead at Jama Software, shares proven approaches to reduce resistance, align teams, and drive lasting adoption of new processes.
What You’ll Learn:
- Identify what organizational inertia looks like in practice and how to address it
- Reframe conversations with resistant teams and stakeholders to foster alignment
- Practical strategies for driving requirements management adoption and ensuring long-term success
- Build momentum for change in complex semiconductor environments
If your organization is struggling to turn process change into real adoption, this session will share actionable ways to create traction where it matters most.
WEBINAR PREVIEW – WATCH ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE
TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Steve Rush: Thanks so much, Juliet. I really appreciate that introduction. Well, hello everyone. My name is Steve Rush, and as Juliet said, I’m a principal solutions consultant here at Jama Software. And I’m genuinely excited to dig into this topic with you today. It’s one that’s close to my heart, and I think it’s something that everyone in our industry has run into at some point. Here’s what we’re going to cover. We’ll open up and frame the issue of organizational inertia. We’ll diagnose the inertia and profile the forms of it that may feel very familiar to you. We’ll talk about how to reframe the conversation with resistant teams. We’ll get into what actually works when it comes to driving adoption, and we’ll close with some questions from the audience.
Let’s get into it. First, let’s start with something I think we can all agree on. Change is hard. Even the most advanced engineering organizations in the world struggle with this, not because of bad intentions, but because of organizational inertia. That is a fact. Change agents trying to deliver better business outcomes, whether it’s digital transformation or getting ready for the era of AI, can feel like they’re steering ships through rough waters, and that’s because they are. Here at Jama Software, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, organizations with a huge collective history. Their tools, processes, systems, and people are deeply entrenched. Change can be volatile, turbulent, or just painfully slow. But here’s the good news. Adoption doesn’t have to be. Let’s unpack this together.
So what does organizational inertia actually look like? I chose this word inertia intentionally. I could have called this webinar overcoming organizational resistance, but I think that word, resistance, is confrontational right out of the gate, and I think it puts people on the defensive before the conversation even starts. I think inertia is a better term because this type of resistance or inertia can be passive or active. Institutional resistance is a form of active inertia. Organizational silos are a form of passive inertia, and I think the word is more precise here and more useful in our context. I think naming the inertia and understanding it serve you in two important ways.
First, it helps the change agent find the right solution. Not every approach fits every situation. Understanding which form of inertia you’re dealing with, whether that’s passive avoidance, hard personalities, institutional friction, or silos, helps you choose the right response rather than applying a one-size-fits-all solution. Second, it helps you communicate credibly to the people responsible for your success. Change agents can’t go it alone. You need support. The way you earn that support is by articulating the obstacles clearly, building a shared understanding of what you’re up against and what it will take to move through it.
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Rush: Here are three forms of inertia that will probably feel familiar. Let’s walk through each one. First, institutional resistance. Teams have established workflows, tools, and norms, and any new tool or workflow can threaten the comfort of the familiar, even if the familiar may be efficient in that individual team’s context. The problem is that a familiar individual process or tool is siloed off and not integrated into a larger system context, causing issues with collaboration, problems with traceability, and re-usability. The flags here to watch out for are people saying things like this. “This new tool you want me to learn is too hard, or this new process is slowing us down, or the classic, why are we being forced to do this?” And to be fair, that last one contains a legitimate question underneath it. People want to understand why. Institutional resistance isn’t always loud. Passive avoidance, like quietly working around a new tool or falling back to legacy processes and homegrown spreadsheets, is a form of resistance as well. It’s one that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.
Next, siloed teams. Teams are not working in a single source of truth, or not working in a common enough model. Requirements in this case can look different to the hardware engineer, the software engineer, and the systems engineer. And when teams operate in separate tools, with separate workflows and siloed off processes, they’re often solving the same problems in parallel, completely unaware of each other. The flags with this one tend to surface later, late-stage changes, missed approvals, finger-pointing at stage gates, and products that consistently miss launch dates, with everyone having a different explanation as to why. That is the silo talking.
These teams also miss the opportunity to learn from one another. A tool or process is being designed in isolation from the very groups that sit upstream and downstream that depend on their work. Personality-driven pushback. One skeptical voice can stall adoption across an entire team. Individuals drive organizational change for better or worse. And the loudest voice in the room isn’t always the wisest. The flags here to watch out for are lack of participation, unconstructive criticism, and skepticism without any rationale. Listen for this specifically. If someone says no without a reason, that’s a flag. No, and here’s why: it’s a conversation. No, just by itself is a wall. Here are a few patterns and sample feedback you’ll recognize when pushing a new tool like Jama Connect. We already track that in a spreadsheet. This is a software team problem, not ours. We don’t have time to learn a new tool right now. Our process works fine. It’s always worked. Can we map these patterns to the forms of inertia we just saw?
Here’s how I would map it back to the previous slide. I think this understanding is key, so we know how to respond and implement the right solutions, how to give support when we need more discovery, when we push back, and when we escalate. Now, the forms of inertia I’ve already outlined are broad, and I bet they’re familiar to everyone that’s listening in on this webinar, but I want to segue a bit and talk about the semiconductor industry specifically because I think they have a couple of unique challenges, but I hope that resonates across industries as well, and you pick something up. First, no unified data model.
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Rush: There is no one-size-fits-all data model for the semiconductor industry. The context in which the chips are utilized often drives much of the development. A chip going into a car might require a safety element out of context model. A chip going into a rocket might need to meet the objectives of DO-178C. A lab-on-a-chip project will need to adhere to certain medical standards. Oftentimes, these companies need to develop the data model from scratch, and that effort in and of itself is just a daunting task, so they choose not to do it because it’s too time-consuming and too difficult, and they only adopt a requirements management tool like Jama Connect if they’re forced to.
But we know there are studies suggesting that improved requirements and using a dedicated requirements management tool like Jama Connect reduce late-stage changes and defects and improve productivity. So it’s really in the company’s interest to adopt a tool like this. This is also where I think Jama Connect and our new semiconductor solution can help because it’s tailored for common semiconductor use cases. You can start using the tool right away for automotive manufacturing and shift design. It’s also very flexible, so you can configure it differently for different use cases very shortly after your Jama Connect purchase.
Too much functional safety focus. Functional safety tends to own the very first implementations of a tool like Jama Connect, which makes sense because good requirements management practices and processes are mandated in standards like ISO 26262 and DO-178C. So companies go out, and they purchase a requirements management tool if they’re mandated to meet the objectives of those standards, but they struggle to roll it out beyond those functional safety use cases, despite the fact that they have problems with traceability and collaboration, which the requirements management tool can help solve. So a functional safety bias may exist, which holds the tool back from expanding more broadly across teams and organizations, and those teams just end up not taking full advantage of the tool. Familiar wins the day.