Customer Spotlight

Industry Leader Telesat Selects Jama Connect to Evolve Engineering Requirements Management and Product Development

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Backed by a legacy of engineering excellence, reliability, and industry-leading customer service, Telesat is one of the largest and most successful global satellite operators. Telesat works collaboratively with its customers to deliver critical connectivity solutions that tackle the world’s most complex communications challenges, providing powerful advantages that improve their operations and drive profitable growth.

Continuously innovating to meet the connectivity demands of the future, Telesat Lightspeed, the company’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network, will be the first and only LEO network optimized to meet the rigorous requirements of telecom, government, maritime, and aeronautical customers. Operating under its global priority Ka-band spectrum rights, Telesat Lightspeed will redefine global satellite connectivity with ubiquitous, affordable, high-capacity links with fibre-like speeds.

Selecting Jama Connect – Objectives and Evaluation Process

From a state-of-the-art global, geostationary satellite fleet, to their Low Earth Orbit network, Telesat has a long history of building some of the most advanced communication systems in the world.

When the Telesat team embarked on a major new project to deliver its next-generation LEO satellite network, they knew it was time to look holistically at the portfolio of software and tools available to their engineering staff to ensure that they had what they needed to be successful.

Enabling connectivity across the planet is no easy undertaking. And the team views it as a lighthouse investment into the future of Telesat as a business.

“Starting a program of this complexity and scale really motivated us to think critically about how we manage our engineering practice and the tools that we use.” – Nicholas “Donnie” Laughton Director, Software Architecture and Engineering at Telesat. 

With robust and experienced systems engineering practices already in place, it was crucial to the team that they use a deliberate and considered approach to selecting the right requirements management solution.

Their key objectives were to find a formal requirements management solution that:

  • Would allow them to pivot from a documents-based approach to data-driven requirements
  • Had robust capabilities and flexibility
  • Was easy to implement and use
RELATED: Jama Connect in the Digital Engineering Ecosystem

At the beginning of the project, the team was able to use a documents-based approach to requirements gathering. However, as the conceptual phase of the LEO project ended and technical documentation started, the team knew they needed to pivot to a formal requirements management solution.

The importance of finding the right requirements management solution was not lost on the team, either. While their requirements management solution needed to have robust capabilities and flexibility, it also needed to be easy to implement and easy to use.

“We knew we needed to find a solution that gave us enough flexibility to manage requirements oriented at both software and hardware, but also not so complex that it required a full-time system admin to manage the platform,” said Laughton.

“Implementing the right tools and processes for our engineering team is critical to the future of our business. If we don’t manage our requirements well, it may impact our ability to meet our in-service target dates, which could negatively impact start of commercial service. The markets are demanding agility and these tools will help us be responsive to that demand.” Nicholas “Donnie” Laughton Director, Software Architecture and Engineering at Telesat. 

As a mature satellite operator with proven performance in spacecraft development and system operations, it’s not surprising that the Telesat team had a very stringent evaluation process for implementing new technologies. When Telesat embarks on selecting new engineering tools, they perform what’s called a weighted trade study. A simplified version of this trade study can be seen below.

Download the full customer story here to see why Telesat selected Jama Connect, and to hear about the incredible results.


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