Ultra Maritime UK Chooses Jama Connect

In this blog, we preview a section of our recent customer story, “Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect for Naval Systems Requirements Management” – Click HERE to read it in its entirety.

Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect for Naval Systems Requirements Management

UK operation chooses Jama Connect for its ease-of-use and administration.

About Ultra Maritime UK

Founded in 1944 and acquired in 2021 by Advent International
Over 2,300 employees across fifteen locations worldwide
Premier provider of undersea warfare systems, products, and solutions to US, UK, Canada, Australia, and allied navies worldwide.

CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW

This customer story is about Ultra Maritime UK, a division of Ultra Maritime, which develops equipment for surface, subsurface, and unmanned platforms, including acoustic and sonar systems and torpedo defense and radar sensor solutions. Customers include the Royal Navy of the UK, the U.S. Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Indian Navy.

Since the Ultra Group’s acquisition by U.S. private equity firm Advent International in 2021, Ultra Maritime has operated as an integrated company with lines of business headquartered in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, responsible for developing both worldwide and localized solutions.

Ultra Maritime UK’s products and solutions must adhere to the highest quality, security, and safety standard,s including ISO 9001-2015, ISO 14001:2015, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, and ISO 45001:2018. In addition, the products must satisfy customer requirements and regional naval standards, including U.S. DoD/MIL-STD and UK MOD DStan.

Challenges

Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements

Evaluation Criteria

Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence

Outcomes

Consistency across projects
Business mandatory requirements tool for all new projects
Quick user adoption with minimal training
Easy tracking of progress with dashboards and standardization
Reduced risk with pre-built standardized project structures
Easy management of large numbers of objects and changes
Easy initiation and completion of reviews to action items sooner in development

RELATED: IBM Customers Choose Jama Connect the Most

CHALLENGES

After years of managing project requirements with IBM^® DOORS^® Classic, these challenges drove Ultra Maritime UK to find a user-friendly collaborative tool that would enable them to increase their requirements management effectiveness and deliver projects faster.
Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Ultra Maritime UK identified several requirements management tools as potential replacements for DOORS Classic, including Jama Connect, which a member of the engineering team suggested. They then established criteria to be used for the evaluation.

Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Integrable with development and test software tools
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence

First, a top priority was for the new solution to have a modern, intuitive user experience for teams to get up and running quickly with their new projects. They needed software that people would want to work in. Otherwise, people might opt out of using the tool and work in disparate documents, which would introduce risk, impede productivity, and hamper efficiency. Second, it would need to have low administrative overhead that did not require team members to become full-time administrators. Third, it would need to be integrable with development and test software tools from different vendors. Fourth, it would need to support the reuse of requirements and test evidence from past development programs when starting new products or projects.

During the evaluation process, Jama Connect stood out from the competition as the solution that would best meet the company’s needs. “Looking at all the features, the user’s ease of use, and the low level of administrative time required, Jama Connect came out on top compared to the other tools reviewed,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.

In its search for a modern solution that would be quickly adopted, Ultra Maritime UK found that Jama Connect’s intuitive user experience made adoption extremely easy for engineers to get started managing requirements and test evidence more efficiently and intelligently. Tracking and finding information quickly and easily was achievable with Jama Connect’s powerful filtering and the ability to add hyperlinks to any architectural elements, requirements, test items or other objects. In addition, the ability to create a Definitions database and Glossary in Jama Connect was particularly useful for getting everyone informed and up-to-speed about projects. “Jama Connect has a highly intuitive user interface and allows for engineers to quickly and easily become accustomed to using it,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.

Having a simple and quick way for systems engineers to initiate reviews and for stakeholders to complete their reviews in a timely manner was a key area where Jama Connect’s Review Center led the way. The fact that reviewers were not required to be licensed as full-time users made Jama Connect more attractive. “Jama Connect certainly makes it much easier to initiate and manage reviews and be aware of progress through them,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.

“Jama Connect proved to be extremely useful for making sure that we’ve got complete coverage and traceability of a given set of artifacts to see which ones have or haven’t reached the approved step. This helps ensure we haven’t missed any anomalies such as system requirements missing verification cases to avoid rework,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.

Support for multiple IDs for the same object in Jama Connect made it easy to identify opportunities for reuse of older product requirements and test evidence for new products to efficiently manage shared elements of core and variant products. “The ability to identify, distinguish, and reuse global requirements across products and projects to reduce development time and cost is a strength of Jama Connect,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.

In addition to product capabilities, team expertise, and training resources provided during the evaluation demonstrated that Jama Software would be a good fit as a partner for Ultra Maritime UK. “We were impressed by Jama Software’s responsiveness to our questions and the online training, forums, and support available to our team,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.

RELATED: Jama Connect for Air, Land, Sea, and Space Datasheet

OUTCOMES

With Jama Connect, Ultra Maritime UK has benefited from:

Greater consistency across projects
One mandatory requirements management tool for all new projects
Quicker user adoption with minimal training
Easier tracking of progress with dashboards and standardization
Reduced risk with pre-built standardized project structures
Easier management of large numbers of objects and changes
Easier initiation and completion of reviews

TO READ THE ENTIRE CUSTOMER STORY, VISIT:
Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect for Naval Systems Requirements Management

Author
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Mario Maldari

Director of Product and Solution Marketing at Jama Software

Experienced in all aspects of the software development lifecycle with a particular focus on requirements management. Currently managing a team of pre-sales solution architects. We are passionate about understanding our client's business challenges and what it takes to solve them. We are innovative, agile, and have the pleasure of working with the best in class solution.

Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect® for Naval Systems Requirements Management