On today’s fast moving road to innovation requirements management can feel like a burdensome, yet necessary evil. For those of you who manage requirements with spreadsheets, word docs and power point, this process can feel even more unwieldy. Possibly worse? Using a heavy-handed tool like DOORS that adds extra overhead and requires additional skillsets for an already complex process. As products get smarter and connected, requirements management will only become more necessary. But it doesn’t need to be evil.

How? One way is by making sure everyone is working from the same, up-to-date information. Doing so lessens the burdens around requirements reviews. You can eliminate the waiting for the necessary stakeholders to provide input, or give approval. Teams can understand change as it happens, and analyze the up- or downstream impact of that change BEFORE change happens.

Why does it matter? The increased burden of regulations and compliance adds additional overhead to the product development process. Especially in the automotive industry where we are seeing rapid growth and leaps in innovation.  Organizations who haven’t had to confront functional safety standards are having to learn regulatory standards, like ISO 26262, on the fly without missing deadlines or features to deliver on time for their customer.

Part of that additional overhead comes from how these teams are managing requirements and tracing validation & verification back to their requirements. Often times teams retroactively trace their data. With a solution like Jama you can pre-build your relationships, so traceability is automated, reducing the manual effort associated with building your traceability, and reducing your regulatory overhead in the process.

Bonus points for using a “fit for purpose” certified solution. A certified solution reduces the manual effort associated with validating your process for ISO 26262 Certification. As AFuzion CEO Vance Hilderman states: “Products labeled ‘safety-critical’ used to be a small niche, but today almost all devices are critical, with many requiring adherence to certification standards…We need to validate and qualify not just the software we build for our client but our development tools as well,” Read more about the Jama Validation and Software Compliance Kit.

In the end, the “old” way of working doesn’t fit the direction of the industry. Legacy tools and manual processes can’t keep up with market demands. You have too much to do to rely on an outdated way of working. If a modern requirements management solution can help you ease regulatory burdens by streamlining traceability, resulting in a more connected way of working that helps you understand the impact of change and can also provide a platform to shorten the requirements review process, isn’t that worth considering?

See Jama in action today! Check out our completely free 30-day Jama trial.