Tag Archive for: reviews

Image showing Review Center features demonstration in Jama Connect

In this video, we demonstrate Review Center capabilities in Jama Connect®

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Review Center

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect… in about five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Jama Software® subject matter expert Mario Maldari, Director of Solution Architecture, will demonstrate Review Center capabilities in Jama Connect.

 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Mario Maldari: Hi. My name is Mario Maldari, and I’m the Director of Solution Architecture here at Jama Software. In this video, we will demonstrate a powerful and easy-to-use feature in Jama Connect, the Review Center.

Reviews play a key role in successful product development. In this video, you will learn how to initiate a review, how to invite participants to a review, how users can complete tasks, provide feedback, and finish a review. You also see how moderators can view review activity, interact with feedback, publish revisions, compare review versions, and more. Now let’s get to the demo.

Anything in Jama Connect can be sent to the review center, individual requirements, or a set of requirements, simply right-click and send for review. This will put you into our, Review Center dialogue where you’ll have a few options to choose from, give the requirement to review a name, a deadline, and a time. You can include related items. Perhaps you want the test cases that are associated with the requirements to be reviewed as well and select those. You have a few additional options.

You can choose to have an electronic signature. You can enable time tracking, and notify when a participant finishes a review. I like that one. In this dialogue, you can add your users and assign them various roles, review approver.
And we’ll have a couple of reviewers here.

RELATED: Leading Quantum Computing Company, IonQ, Selects Jama Connect® to Decrease Review Cycles, Reduce Rework

Maldari: A very nice feature of our review and approval is the ability to invite users by email. This allows you to invite, participants in your review, that aren’t part of your project, your job or project, or aren’t even part of your company. Perhaps you have, vendors that have given you requirements that you want their feedback on, stakeholders. So you can add them.

They can participate in the review, and you don’t have to add them to the project. So let’s continue on here. This final dialogue is in the details of the email that’ll be sent out to the participants. Customize this as you see fit. And let’s initiate that. Alrighty.

Essentially, the email that your participants will see will look very, very similar to this. It’ll have some instructions. It’ll have the link to the review. Their role and what the deadline is. As soon as they click on this link from their email, it’ll send them into the review. Where they’ll be able to go through and accept or reject, each item as they go through the review. You’ll be able to see the related items here in this case, the test cases because we included that in the review. So very nice to be able to include that as well. So I’ll go through and I will accept.

And perhaps there’s a case where I disagree with something or I’d like to see a change. I can get very granular in terms of my commenting ability. I can select over text. And I can say and I could even @ mention users here as well as an FYI, and I could further qualify the comment. Perhaps, say, I have an issue with it, I can enter my comment. When I’m done with the review, I simply click complete review.

And it gives me a nice summary of what has changed in my review. And at this point, I could either be done, you know, assuming maybe I accepted all the requirements. I was happy with it. In this case, since I rejected one, I’d like to request a new revision after the update is made. So the moderator at this point would get a notification that someone has completed the review. They’d be able to come in and see all of the passing, requirements, but then they could also see the comments on the ones that I would like, to have updated so they could say, okay. It should be more specific. So they can simply go into the requirement. They could edit it.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Engineering and Development Process

Maldari: And I can get a little more detail in this case. They could resolve the comment right from here. And they can resolve that comment right on the fly. It could say, save and close, commit, ok. And now at this point, the moderator could publish a new revision, and they could let the reviewers know that there’s a new version of that particular requirement. So let’s publish that after the change that was made.

And now they can actually see that there are two versions. Of the review. You can compare version one to version two, and you can see what’s changed in the requirements between the two versions. So a really nice way of seeing how the requirements evolve over time by virtue of the reviews.

The moderator also has some really nice views here in terms of statistics of the ability to see where the team is in terms of, you know, how far along they are in their review, how many they’ve approved, rejected, the time spent, on the reviews, They can email the participants, send reminders, email the approvers only. A lot of different information and statistics here. They can look at the types of comments that were put as part of the review so they can get a sense of how many changes they may need to make. Maybe there are just some questions and general comments, but if there are proposed changes or issues, you know, that’s that translates to work, the moderator may have to do.

So it’s really good information in terms of statistics here. All of the reviews that are in progress, completed, are stored in the review tab, all the Jama Connect, And so that at any given time, you can go back. You could take a look at your reviews, you know, see how the requirements evolved over time. Maybe a year later, you need to produce an audit report.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Diagnostic

Maldari: Jama Connect allows you to create reports off on these reviews with all the comments and the states of the requirements. So very useful, for seeing how your requirements have evolved over time. A very powerful feature of the Review Center, but also as you can see, very easy to use and and very collaborative.

If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development processes, please visit our website at www.jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information on the Review Center, please contact your customer success manager or Jama Software consultant.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series


aerospace

In this blog, we recap this customer story, “Innovative Aerospace Manufacturer Chooses Jama Connect® to Help Revolutionize Space Transportation.” Read the entire story HERE.

Launching spacecraft and satellites into orbit are highly complicated endeavors and like many large organizations, this rocket and spacecraft manufacturer was struggling to provide visibility, manage, changes to requirements, and meet aggressive schedules.

In 2010, this industry-leading space exploration technology company selected Jama Connect to help its team develop new ways of working to simplify requirements management, improve visibility, and customer communication, and create an efficient, paperless product delivery process.

They saw significant improvements to its requirements management process with Jama Connect, including:

  • Reducing meeting times, simplifying cumbersome specification docs, and improving overall communication to ensure all requirements were accounted for accurately
  • Better traceability from requirements to derived requirements to verification events
  • Improved customer relations with shared project visibility and enhanced communications

RELATED: Certification and the Role It Plays in the eVTOL Aircraft Market

Jama Connect® helps an innovative aerospace company keep track of thousands of requirements by providing a platform for greater visibility and collaboration with its team and customers

This innovative aerospace launch company designs, manufactures, and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. In just ten years, the company has emerged as one of the fastest growing aerospace companies in the world working toward their vision to revolutionize space travel.

CHALLENGES

• Providing visibility and managing customer expectations

• Managing inevitable change to requirements and other important details

• Eliminating rework in order to meet aggressive schedules

EVALUATION

• Utilize Jama Connect’s Review Center for open customer and internal communication

• Track requirements for faster change management

• Maintain common requirements in one place to prevent repeats

RESULTS

• Helped reduce meeting times, simplify cumbersome specification docs, and improve overall communication to ensure all requirements were accounted for accurately

• Provided a method for traceability from requirements to derived requirements to verification events

• Improved customer relations with shared project visibility and enhanced communications

• Accounted for contract milestones and ensured timely payments

RELATED: 15 Digital Twin Applications and Use Cases by Industry in 2022

Challenge: This is Rocket Science

Launching spacecraft and satellites into space is a highly complicated endeavor. Like many other large organizations tackling complex projects, the company initially faced a few critical business challenges that Jama Connect could help them address:

• Providing visibility and managing customer expectations

• Managing inevitable change to requirements and other important details

• Eliminating rework in order to meet aggressive schedules

As a customer, NASA needed visibility into the company’s progress to ensure key requirements were being met. Prior to using Jama Connect, the company did not have an easy way to share quick status reports on requirements verification. As a result, many hours were spent compiling status and change-control reports.

This process, although effective, took too much time. Hours were spent in meetings reviewing large cumbersome spreadsheets – going line by line to review thousands of details. The company had to implement complex macros to pull information from Microsoft Excel into Word documents to create specific reports. This was time-consuming for everyone involved. The company wanted to share real-time information with NASA for their review and approval, but they did not have an easy way to accomplish this level of collaboration prior to using Jama Connect.

Solution: One Small Step for the Company, One Giant Leap for Efficiency

The company implemented Jama Connect in 2010, wanting to develop new ways of working to simplify requirements management, improve visibility and customer communication, and create an efficient, paperless product delivery process.

To read the entire customer story, visit “Innovative Aerospace Manufacturer Chooses Jama Connect® to Help Revolutionize Space Transportation.” 


Risk Management

In this post, we look at how Teledyne e2v leverages Jama Connect for improved communication and better risk management. 

Teledyne e2v is a global leader in specialized components and subsystems for innovative solutions in medical, science, aerospace, defense, and industrial applications.

  • Over 1600 employees in countries across Europe, America, and Asia.
  • As a result of their track record of innovation and technological breakthroughs, Teledyne e2v continues to be involved in many high-profile ground-breaking programs

Teledyne e2v’s success is built on long-established relationships with industry partners. The combination of their strong, in-house technical capability and links with technical authorities and universities, ensures that they can bring together the right level of expertise for a diverse range of technical challenges.

They offer:

  • RF Power solutions for defense, medical, marine, industrial, and security applications
  • Imaging solutions including CCD and CMOS sensors and cameras, for space and earth observation, life science, machine vision, and medical applications
  • Semiconductor solutions for aerospace and defense hi-rel microprocessors, high speed data converters, and high reliability ICs

A Single Source of Truth Increases Product Development Efficiencies and Improves the Flow of Information for Teledyne e2v

To meet the challenge of producing components and systems with increasing complexity, Teledyne e2v turned to the easy-to-use Jama Connect platform to provide a single source of information and end-to-end traceability for some of their product development teams.

OBJECTIVES

  • Optimize information flow
  • Improve formal review process
  • Find a product development tool that would garner broad adoption

After selecting Jama Connect, Teledyne e2v saw these results

Time-Saving Efficiencies in Meeting and Decision Making

With the single source of truth and real-time structured collaboration that Jama Connect provides, the Teledyne e2v team has streamlined the development process resulting in increased cross-team efficiencies and expedited decision making.

Streamlining and Simplification of Tools

After determining that Jama Connect was a sensible, easy-to-use, and easy to adopt tool that would increase efficiencies, having a customer saying they were going to use Jama simply sealed the deal and is helping Teledyne e2v achieve their goal of streamlining and simplifying their tools and processes.

Jama Connect has enabled a focused model of engineering leadership, with identified owners of top-level vision, and a streamlined, single source of truth. This has shown strong potential to leave developers with greater freedom to manage the detailed development and implementation in-line with the vision that is clearly communicated and controlled within Jama Connect. Leveraging this further across all projects and product developments is a key ambition for the team.

Driving Systems Thinking Across the Organization

Teledyne e2v’s leadership knows that tackling complex engineering problems and projects requires a structured and systematic approach. They needed a tool that would support their engineers and technical specialists to work in a structured way—without the tool getting in the way. Jama Connect enables this and is helping to drive systems engineering discipline further into the team, not only standardizing the way people work, but making it a positive experience.

To see how the team is now leveraging Jama Connect and how their risk management process has already improved, read the full customer story here.


You have questions, we have answers.

Ahead of our recent webinar, “Ask Jama: Tips and Tricks for More Effective Reviews,” we asked those who registered to quiz us with their toughest queries around reviewing requirements.

In response, we received hundreds of questions ranging from dealing with unresponsive reviewers to figuring out how requirements can best be reviewed collaboratively to getting the most out of Jama Connect™ Review Center.

Our experts who led the webinar, Erin Wilson, Senior Consultant, and Joel Hutchinson, Senior Product Manager, tried to answer as many questions as possible following their presentation.

For all the answers Erin and Joel provided during the webinar, they weren’t able to get to all the submissions. So we tracked Erin and Joel down following the webinar, locked them in a room, and grilled them about some of the questions that were still outstanding. You’ll find the output of those questions and answers below, and be sure to download our guide for more best practices around reviews.

Q: How can I review a large number of requirements effectively without consuming a lot of stakeholders’ time?

Erin: Choose the right participants and be thoughtful about the number of people you will invite into a review. Too many, and you risk not having enough time to incorporate the right feedback. Too few, and you risk not receiving enough feedback or missing critical stakeholder input. As far as the number of requirements, just performance-wise, we usually recommend 250 items in the review or less. I would like to see much less. I prefer to do things in more of an iterative fashion, where you’re sending things in and out of review as they become ready. I do understand that a lot of customers have to send something that resembles a document for review, and that might entail having many more requirements in there. I would hope that would be the exception rather than the norm. What do you think, Joel?

Joel: It’s a chicken and egg question. What’s the balance of too much content and not enough content? What’s the balance of too many people and not enough people? There’s no right or wrong answer.

I think there’s another consideration as well, in terms of electronic signatures, which is: how do you want to aggregate your signatures? Every review has the ability to configure electronic signatures. Let’s say I’ve got 250 requirements that I want approved. Do I need to show all their signatures in the same spot? Do I need to make sure that the same people reviewed all 250? That could influence whether you set up multiple reviews or one review. We have the ability to export the signatures that are made on the review, so if that’s enough, and you could stitch those documents together, great. If it’s not, and you need it all to be shown as the same general time frame that everything was approved, then you may want to lump them together.

Learn how much time and resources our customers save by using Jama Connect Review Center in this infographic.

Q: What are a few things I can do right now to conduct more effective reviews?

Erin: You can read our best practices for moderators and participants. Setting clear goals to make sure you tell people the type of feedback that you’re looking for so that people just don’t go down a rabbit hole. Are you looking for feasibility? Something grammatically correct, like, what is it that you’re looking for? Again, just picking the right participants is huge, and then making sure a team is prepared, so that they have been trained, that they understand why are we moving to the Review Center? Why are we doing this?

Joel: I think the tags of the comments is an instant improvement. When you come into a review, and you have a question on something, ask a question. If you’ve got an issue, raise an issue. That’s true in meetings, as well. If you have an issue, come out and say it. It’s the same thing in an online medium.

Q: How are we most likely to catch critical errors in requirements reviews?

Joel: Make sure you bring in the right people first off.

Erin: Making sure that people are focused on what they’re supposed to be reviewing for. If they are supposed to be reviewing as a mechanical engineer, make sure they’re looking at it through the lens of a mechanical engineer. Collaboration is huge, too. And again, if you see something that seems a little odd, don’t be afraid to say something. Your team should feel empowered to be able to speak up.

Joel: I think this is one of those questions where, just from a data perspective, smaller reviews are better. There are studies that have shown that, if you have to go through multiple pages of content, your attention span’s going to wane. Try to keep things down to a level that’s manageable, and then bring in the right people to actually unearth those critical errors. Smaller, more frequent reviews, I think would lend towards the ability to look at things more critically.

I think with a lot of things it’s a balance. When I was doing this in industry, we would mix together, there were certain things that we had to do by certain milestones. That’s forced, right? Those are bigger reviews. You have to do smaller, more collaborative reviews along the way, otherwise you’re never going to be ready for those big reviews. The same thing happens in a virtual environment. Really, we rely on the organization to know their product development process and what that right pace is. Those are the types of things that you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about when do we have to actually sign this stuff and move it, and what do we need to do to get ready for that?

Get an overview of the recent updates to Jama Connect Review Center on our blog.

Q: How do we get reviewers to move their requirements forward once approved?

Erin: It’s important to have the team understand what the process is: What now? What if? What happens here? And what happens when this review is done, and the requirements need to be transferred to some kind of end state. And then, after approval or acceptance of the requirements, you would want a way for participants and even non-participants to go back into the project and say, “Hey, now we’ve got all of these approved user needs. These are all ready for me to take action on.” We can set up filters, where we say, “Here’s all of our approved user needs, but show me just those approved user needs that are missing validation.” Maybe the validation team would know, “Hey, this is our bucket of requirements to go work on.” Stuff like that.

Q: How do you set a realistic review date, so you don’t have to keep opening the review?

Joel: There’s a balance of, when do I want people to actually look at this stuff? You set a date two months in advance. When is somebody going to look at it? Probably a week before it’s due.

That said, the reason we suggest a week is that usually, that’s the timeframe where somebody will actually think about needing to do something.

Erin: The expectations have to be clear. You have to be very clear, and this is where a Jama champion can come into play as well. You’ve got these Jama cheerleaders, so to speak, who are helping to coach team members along, and making sure that you’re monitoring the status, and monitoring the progress that people are making.

Whether you set the review for tomorrow or a week from now, you have to make sure that the expectation is understood, and that there’s something that’s going to happen at the end of that day.

If you continue to keep updating, and updating, and updating, because this one person is a holdout, then you’re going to keep doing that forever.

Joel: That’s also where the stats page comes in. As a moderator, you’re trying to drive the conversation and give people the environment to be successful. You can tell if somebody’s not participating. That’s where the stats page comes in. You could go take a look and see if there is an item, or is there something that we’re talking about that nobody understands and nobody’s reviewing? That’s something to ask questions about. Is there a person that just won’t play the part? That’s something else to ask questions about. Ultimately, the decisions of what you do with those, that information, that’s up to the team.

See how Jama Connect Review Center improves collaboration and increases efficiency in the approval process by watching our demo video.

Q: How can teams manage reviews with team members spread out across the globe, such as in the US, Europe, and China?

Erin: I recommend setting some kind of a cadence for reviewing items and giving feedback. When a moderator is providing feedback and making changes to the reviewed content, I would recommend that they get into the habit of publishing the revisions of the review at the same time, each day or every other day. That way, people can prioritize their own work and they can expect when a new version of the review is going to be published.

Jama Connect is inherently a really great collaboration tool. We just have to take a human approach, where we help people understand what’s going to come next and how to set those expectations.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about exporting review data from Jama Connect Review Center?

Joel: This is something we’ve been focusing on a lot recently, and we’ve been focusing on it for a particular reason. We want to be able to show that Review Center could be where you put your electronic signatures, and as a result of doing that, we’ve bought into certain things.

One is that we need to be able to get information out of the system that took place in the review. A review is a special place. It’s where all the collaboration happens. Depending on how much of that collaboration you want to share out, we have different types of exports for you.

We have an activity history export. That’s the audit trail. It’s just the facts: everything that’s happened in the course of all the versions of a review gets exported. That’s something that you could put in your document repository, you can send it to somebody. You can send that to Word or create a PDF.

In addition to that, we have an export that looks at a particular version of a review. It’s like, “Give me the content. Give me the people that signed and when they signed. Give me the roles that those people took as part of signing that thing, and then all of the comments that happened.” And then we put those comments out in almost like a blog post — a threaded style — so that you can follow along quickly and understand what took place in that review.

Q: What’s the one thing that people will take away from this webinar if they watch the full thing?

Joel: When a customer moves to Jama Connect in the first place, they need to have a heart-to-heart, and say, “What are we trying to do? How often should we talk?” That’s really what moving to an online medium for some of this content becomes important for. You can’t have all the conversations in Jama Connect, but you can have many of the conversations within the platform. How do you want to have conversations? How do you want to approve of stuff? When do you want to approve?

No tool is going to tell you the best way to manage your company. You have to think about that stuff before you move in. There’s a lot of choices, but once you make those choices, then the idea is that the conversation gets easier.

Learn how to get the most from Jama Connect Review Center by downloading our best practices guide.

Reviews play a key role in successful product and systems development. They help ensure a new product will meet stakeholder, market, and compliance requirements.
Unfortunately, not all teams recognize the importance of implementing a solution for a formal review process: Almost a third of teams either have no requirements management system in place and rely on informal forms of collaboration and reviews with email and shared spreadsheets, according to a research report from Engineering.com.

Outdated review processes — involving long email chains, shared spreadsheets, and lengthy meetings — stifle collaboration, increase miscommunication, and result in team misalignment. This often leads to long review cycles, versioning issues, and an abundance of unnecessary meetings.

While a breakdown in communication can happen at any point in the product development lifecycle, reviewing and approving requirements is a particularly important process for ensuring all stakeholders are aligned. In fact, collaboration and clear communication during the review process has tangible benefits that impact speed to market, product quality, and your bottom line.

And while every review is different, there are generally three primary roles that exist in a product review: Moderators, Approvers, and Reviewers. In Jama Connect™ Review Center, each of these roles can be formally assigned to mirror best practices and ensure everyone understands the scope of their responsibilities.

Formal and informal reviews may necessitate different things from each of these roles, but we’ve compiled a list of best practices by role to make reviews go quickly and smoothly.

See the development time savings and efficiencies that our customers are experiencing with Review Center in this infographic.

Best Practices for Requirements Reviews by Role

As the Moderator, you are ultimately responsible for facilitating the review and incorporating the feedback from Approvers and Reviewers.

Best Practices for Moderators:

Provide thorough guidance. What type of feedback are you seeking? That the requirements are valid and correct? Or that the requirements are feasible? Or that the requirements are written well with proper grammar and syntax? Be sure to include specific focus and instructions in the review invite so all participants know exactly what to provide.

Balance the number of participants. Think carefully about the number of people you invite to a review. Too many and you’ll never have time to incorporate all the feedback. Too few and you may not receive enough feedback or miss critical stakeholder opinions.

Incorporate all feedback. If you have thoughts, feedback, or ideas related to a requirement, add comments for transparency so all participants can see the feedback.

Revise! It’s ok to publish lots of revisions during a review. Just make sure that all participants are looking at the latest revision so they can easily compare differences across revisions.

Close reviews when they are complete. Reviews finish when 1) you have enough feedback or 2) the deadline is reached. If you have enough feedback prior to deadline, make sure that you close it.

Best Practices for Reviews and Approvers:

If you are taking the role of Approver or Reviewer, your primary responsibility is to provide feedback.

Focus your feedback based on the Moderator’s instructions. What did the Moderator request you to review? Technical feasibility? Validation of requirement needs? Grammar and syntax? If you’re unsure, ask your Moderator.

Highlight important feedback. When adding feedback, highlighting text helps others know that you are focusing feedback on that specific piece of the requirement.

Categorize your comments for clarity. Indicate if your feedback is a question, proposed change, or issue.

Clearly communicate when you are finished. Make sure you clearly communicate that you are finished providing feedback so the moderator will know you are done. Keep in mind that you don’t need to comment on every item – you can abstain from providing feedback on certain items in the review.

Register for our upcoming webinar, “Ask Jama: Tips and Tricks for More Effective Reviews.”

The Benefits of Conducting Reviews in Jama Connect™

Jama Connect Review Center allows teams to:

  • Assign roles such as Moderators, Approvers, and Reviewers
  • Send product requirements for review
  • Define what’s required
  • Invite relevant stakeholders to participate, collaborate, and iterate on resolving issues
  • Approve agreed-upon requirements

Facilitating the improvement of collaboration and communication during reviews is resulting in major returns for Jama Software customers.

Take RBC Medical, for example, who now saves an average of $150,000 per project after they moved from semi-manual processes to conducing reviews in Jama Connect.  Now that RBC Medical has a centralized place to manage and collaborate on reviews, they’ve all but eliminated the need for lengthy, in-person meetings or back and forth emailing, making reviews more efficient and scalable.

But cost savings isn’t the only positive business outcome to result from an improved review process. MediSync estimates that Jama Connect Review Center has saved the team 80% of planning time that previously would have been wasted on meetings, sorting through versioned documents and emails, and consolidating feedback in review cycle.

Another customer, global healthcare leader Grifols, says that Review Center has helped it shorten review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days, while reducing budget overruns. It estimates savings of over 80 hours per project in medical device development.

By simplifying the revision and approval process, Review Center streamlines reviews and facilitates team collaboration. With the ability to easily provide feedback where required, stakeholders and participants can move quickly and efficiently through reviews and on to the next stage of product development.

To learn more about best practices for moving through reviews quickly and seamlessly, download the Jama Software Guide to Review Center Best Practices.

Jama Connect Review Center

Reviews play a key role in successful product and systems development, helping to ensure a new project meets stakeholder, market, and compliance requirements.

By taking an iterative and collaborative approach to reviewing requirements and tests in real-time, Jama Connect™ Review Center improves stakeholder alignment, reduces lengthy review cycles, and eases the path to compliance.

To that end, we are excited to announce today that we have made significant improvements to Review Center, an already beloved feature of the Jama Connect platform, which are available now to our customers.

Within Jama Connect Review Center, users can now streamline reviews and ease the path to regulatory compliance thanks to:

  • A new Review Center Wizard that streamlines review set up for particular objectives
  • Simplified application, management, and accessibility of electronic signatures for reviews
  • Easier configuration of review settings, such as ones used to apply electronic signatures per FDA 21 CFR Part 11 to ensure they can be properly referenced and signed off on across different teams.

Additionally, customers can now add electronic signature roles, prevent reviews with e-signatures from being deleted, view review activity history for audits, and better set expectations for participants based on their role.

 

Streamline the review process with clearly identified participant roles and electronic signature settings.

These enhancements make the review process more straightforward and help customers meet compliance requirements for standards like FDA 21 CFR Part 11.

In the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in review and approval enhancements to improve collaboration and further address 21 CFR Part 11 compliance in Jama Connect Review Center.

Review Center Departs from Traditional, Document-Based Reviews

Traditional review processes often stifle collaboration and focus on a document-based approach, resulting in misalignment, long review cycles, versioning issues, and an abundance of unnecessary meetings.

By creating a centralized place to manage and collaborate on reviews, Jama Connect Review Center eliminates the need for lengthy, in-person meetings or back-and-forth emailing, making reviews more efficient and scalable.

 

Gain visibility into all major review activities.

Michelle Seitz, Senior Business Analyst at MediSync, believes one of the most significant benefits of Jama Connect is the reduced time and effort it takes to complete review cycles using Review Center.

“My favorite part of Jama right now is when I get a collection of requirements to send out for a review,” Seitz says. “It is so much better with Jama. It’s the first time I’ve had a product that works as seamlessly as Jama does to produce a review and get feedback without having to do all the track changes and stuff that we used to have to do in Microsoft Word.”

And the results of the improved review process speak for themselves.

MediSync says that Jama Connect has saved the organization 80% of planning time that previously would have been wasted on meetings, sorting through versioned documents and emails, and consolidating feedback in review cycles.

Global healthcare leader Grifols says that Review Center has helped it shorten review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days, while reducing budget overruns. They estimate savings of over 80 hours per project in medical device development thanks to Jama Connect Review Center.

As an organization, Jama Software is committed to improving stakeholder alignment, reducing lengthy review cycles, and easing the path to compliance by providing our customers with a modern approach to reviews and collaboration. And with Review Center’s new improvements and feature enhancements, we can confidently say that we are doing just that.

To learn more about best practices for moving through reviews quickly and seamlessly, download the “Jama Software Guide to Review Center Best Practices.” 

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.