[Webinar Recap] Building an Efficient and Effective Product Development Process
|
This blog recaps a preview of our webinar, “Building an Efficient and Effective Product Development Process” – Click HERE to watch the entire video.
Building an Efficient and Effective Product Development Process
Managing shifting priorities, complex requirements, and compliance across teams is no easy task. But optimizing your workflows could make the difference between staying competitive and falling behind.
Join Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, for this 45 minute webinar to learn how to build more efficient and effective product development processes — and avoid the preventable setbacks caused by outdated workflows.
What you’ll gain:
- Understand how ineffective requirements processes lead to costly delays
- Discover strategies to accelerate development with structured, fine-grained data
- Improve visibility and collaboration to address risks early
- Learn how dynamic workflows replace outdated, linear processes for greater success
Whether you’re tackling recurring challenges or looking to refine your team’s processes, this session will provide practical solutions backed by industry insights and real-world success.
Patrick Knowles: Hello everyone. My name is Patrick Knowles and I come from a background of systems engineering across the aerospace and defense industry in both defense and commercial space. During my time in industry, I was a Systems Engineer, Lead Systems Engineer, and Systems Engineering Manager, where I’ve been privileged to see multiple different product development processes and life cycles.
Today I want to share my experience in industry and marry that with how Jama Connect can help each of your teams be empowered to effectively improve and develop products. During today’s webinar, I will share the key challenges of developing complex products and how Jama Connect can help alleviate these pain points. This will include how collaboration can mitigate issues, teams face, how compliance to standards and regulations can be simplified, and how to accelerate the final portion of product development, V&V.
What we’re hearing from customers is that they need to move faster, that their products are becoming more complex, and integration of the engineered products as well as within teams is becoming increasingly common. In engineering, we like to go fast. We like to run first and fail early, none of which is inherently bad. However, when teams are unprepared for the inevitable mistake or misstep, things can fall off the rails pretty quickly.
RELATED: The Strategic Transition: From Word and Excel to Modern Requirements Management
Knowles: Teams that are pushing to keep on schedule, sometimes miss standards, regulations, or even properly validating their product. Many times these things that teams lose track of, they lose track of their documentation that will be critical to the field when they go to field that product. Things get lost in emails, Slack channels, teams chats or worse, on someone’s hard drive that gets left out in the rain, of course, that would be the nightmare scenario.
Moving fast is probably the root of many of these issues, but it can be prevented by teams doing some other things that don’t inherently slow them down. As we progress throughout today’s webinar, my hope and what I’m trying to get across here is that it becomes incredibly clear that we want to enable your teams to run at full speed from the get go here at Jama. The pressure of speed is of course not the only challenge teams face though. The products that we develop nowadays are becoming more and more complex, right? If we think about just the evolution of a calculator, or a cell phone, or a computer over the last 20 years. Everything is getting smaller, tighter, better form, better fit, better function, but that also increases the complexity.
So when all the parts are moving, all the data is spread across a plethora of channels and teams are pushed to develop to the next generation of the greatest gadget. These increased complexities lead to preventable failures becoming unfortunately more routine, but we are going to discuss some of the ways to treat that as we go forward here.
Creating a thread of data that can be traced from the top to bottom is one of those ways in which Jama Connect can support a team facing these issues. In fact, starting simple in Jama Connect can help a team develop their complex products more efficiently. But as you will see later in this presentation, start simple does not mean you must maintain that simple starting point. In fact, we actually really want to talk about how you evolve and optimize as you go forward. That’s really the main theme that you’re going to see throughout this presentation.
RELATED: Why Investing in Requirements Management During an Economic Downturn Makes Good Business Sense
Knowles: Finally, integration between teams and products is becoming more and more challenging, particularly in the end stages of development. Teams are typically fantastic at creating things and talking together while they’re creating them, but when it comes to properly confirming that they created the right thing in the right way, we see a lot of unforced errors, to use a sports term, that typically is due to a lack of centralized stream of consciousness. Where all the thoughts, all the design energy goes into the same centralized location. This, of course does not to be the case, and in fact, we’ll spend a good portion of today’s session discussing collaboration and efficient centralization of information.
So how do we improve development processes, especially when we’re talking about collaboration? I want to dig into that topic here to help illuminate how to engage with some of the best practices in Jama Connect, as well as why these approaches are suggested.
One of the worst things in the digital age is trying to find something. You want to find that document, you can’t, but I actually believe that the next worst thing, or maybe even worse, is when you find the information and you simply can’t understand its intention, why it was written the way it was, and you’re trying to decipher why the decision was the way that it is, why the requirement exists or generally why something really came to be in the way that it is today. So let’s pretend you’re a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new engineer developing something like a next-generation munition for cutting-edge, new fighter jet.
The team you are on has been tasked with taking a legacy design, 25 years of work, and revamping it for the modern age, using more sophisticated components and integrating whatever else it might be there. You show up day one of this effort and begin to realize all the legacy design was completed 25 plus years ago. There are a few Holy Grail documents that really guided the design, but much of the system was developed before teams that adopted data-centric tools like Jama Connect. So you sift through mountains of paperwork to determine why the system was designed the way it was, and that’s not inherently all that easy to do. It’s time staking, it is difficult to get the right information out.
Now imagine 25 years in the future still you, still same person. You are now leading the charge of another new development, same scenario, new fighter jet, new munition, but now it’s another new fighter jet, another new munition. This time you sit down on day one and you log into Jama Connect filled with itemized requirements, regulations, interfaces, and other information that has comments and commentary like you see here on the right side of the screen from engineers who develop stuff and you see the call and the response between them and their teammates. You can filter on all this information. You can search for key topics. You can start from either one single item or sort through all of the information and commentary in the database.
In this example, I think it’s easy to see the difference first hand of how centralizing communication can support long-term wins.
To Watch the Entire Webinar, Visit:
Building an Efficient and Effective Product Development Process
Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software
Patrick Knowles is a highly accomplished Systems Engineering and Project Management expert with a deep understanding of the Aerospace & Defense industry. As a Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, he empowers a diverse portfolio of clients to achieve their strategic objectives. Leveraging his extensive industry experience and profound expertise in Jama Connect, Patrick is dedicated to optimizing his clients' Systems Engineering and Requirements Management processes. He is renowned for his ability to translate complex technical challenges into actionable solutions, ensuring seamless implementation and measurable success. He accomplishes this by relying on his experience in developing and fielding missiles, software, and commercial space products over the course of his career. Patrick's insights are invaluable for organizations striving for peak efficiency, compliance, and innovation in the demanding Aerospace & Defense landscape.
Latest posts by Patrick Knowles (see all)