Choose Jama Connect Over Microsoft Word and Excel Documents for Requirements Management and Traceability

Using documents to manage your requirements management process isn’t scalable, reliable, or efficient for larger, more complex products, software, and systems development.

Jama Connect is the ONLY platform that enables Live Traceability™ across best-of-breed tools throughout the end-to-end development lifecycle — ensuring that everyone is always working from the most up-to-date version to achieve business goals. Benefits of this shared, real-time connectivity include faster time to market, less rework, lower risk of human error, and higher quality.

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Key Benefits of Jama Connect Over Disparate Documents

Automated Processes

• Eliminate the hassle of an outdated, manual, time-consuming, human error prone document-based requirements management

• Modern, efficient, collaborative, item-based requirements management

• Single source of truth provides up-to-date version for all product management and development team members

Live Traceability

• Automatically track every new and changed requirement, in real time

• Trace requirements, tests, reviews, and approvals across the development lifecycle

• Detect issues early in the development lifecycle to reduce risk

Accelerated Compliance

• Customizable item types, relationships, and report templates based on expert industry knowledge, regulatory standards, and best practices

• Flexibility and customizability to fit business requirements

• Pre-built frameworks aligned to industry standards

Powerful Collaboration

• Designed for connecting remote/distributed development teams and disciplines

• Real-time communication captured in context through processes automated that saves time for your team members

• Role-based, permissions-controlled access for internal and external stakeholders who contribute to achieving project requirements and business goals

Best-of-Breed Tool Integrations

• Automatically synchronize requirements, tests, and other data

• Allow team members to continue working in their own preferred tools

• Excel Functions module allows for the full power of Excel without leaving Jama Connect

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Jama Connect vs. Microsoft Excel & Word Feature Comparison

Areas of Focus	Key Buying Factors to Consider When Choosing a Vendor	Microsoft Excel & Word
Reviews & Approvals	Ability to have one single and consistent review mechanism designed for the whole team and external stakeholders. Capturing and managing user comments through a review sequence in real time	N/A
Live Traceability	Live Traceability enables any user at any time to see the most up to date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement — no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans.	N/A
Measured Process Improvement	Allows for organizations to measure and optimize their development processes, improve product quality, and accelerate time to market, in addition to providing engineering performance benchmarks.	N/A
Requirements Authoring & Quality	Enables efficient requirements authoring and reduce requirements authoring errors to improve the accuracy and consistency of requirements quality.	N/A
Requirements Baseline & Variant Management	Enables the user to baseline the requirements set in the event of a key milestone (i.e., a product has been released to a particular customer). Effectively manage product variants with easy-to-use variant management UX which includes categories, baselines, and version history.	N/A
Flexibility & Ease of Use	An easy to adopt, friendly intuitive interface, applicable to both the casual and frequent user.
Integrations	Integrates with market-leading tools across the development lifecycle to improve productivity. Enables teams to work in their preferred tools (including No Magic/Cameo, Jira, Excel, and many other best-of breed tools) while ensuring all requirements are verified and validated to achieve complete traceability.
Security	Codes with Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) best practices, hosts in a secure AWS cloud, performs regular static and dynamic scans and PEN tests (third party), and certified for SOC 2 type 2 compliance for the environment and application.
In-House Expertise	Vendor has in-house (not third-party) Professional Services experts to efficiently and effectively support requirements, migration, implementation, and adoption. This should include in-house expertise in regulated markets such as Automotive, Avionics, and Medical Device.	N/A

Read Why Teams are Choosing Jama Connect to Replace Word and Excel

“The problem was that if we wanted to make a change, it was a very manual process when using Word and Excel to make sure there were no errors in documents covering any references downstream from the changed requirement or upstream in the top-level requirements.”

Dan HendersonGlobal Standards Manager

“With our previous process, a requirements document, which could include 30 to 50 individual requirements, could take two weeks to process, requiring the manual gathering of comments, exporting them, and then copying and pasting updates. With Jama Connect, we reduced requirements approvals down to minutes and collaboration is much smoother. We can knock out easy requirements first and then focus on the more difficult ones, streamlining the entire approval process.”

Eric ZaremskiLead Program Manager

“In our previous, paper-based system, as you add requirements the complexity increases, and the difficulty increases exponentially. The pile of documents grows and the links between those documents grow, and at a certain point you just lose track. Now that we’ve gotten rid of our documents-based system and moved to Jama Connect, we finally have a clear change management driver. This is going to increase our time to market immensely.”

Rene WenmekersDirector of Quality and Regulatory

“A document-centric approach often requires a gatekeeper and really limits collaboration – that creates a bottleneck. With Jama Connect, all our development teams can work together from anywhere with a shared collaboration hub.”

David CubbageDirect, LEO Satellite Engineering and Production

“We’re looking to bring our partners and customers directly into Jama Connect so we can collaborate with them in real time. Instead of sending around Word documents and having long email chains, this will make everything more effective and efficient and will allow us to have traceability right from the get-go.”

Jana F.VP Technology

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Investing in a Requirements Management Tool Makes Good Business Sense

Organizations building complex products, systems, and software can always benefit from improved efficiency across the end-to-end development process. Making strategic changes that optimize development, automate processes, and improve team productivity will undoubtedly save your organization significant time and money. A modern requirements management tool like Jama Connect® can provide a dramatic ROI in short order — making it a smart-sense move to invest in new product development software. These calculators can help estimate your organization’s potential savings.

Check out these calculators to see how much you could save with Jama Connect!

Reduce Risk Across the Development Cycle

Trying to manage your product’s requirements solely in documents carries a lot of risk of human error due to manual tasks and will gradually eat away at your company’s bottom line.

Aligning product management and development teams across engineering disciplines is crucial during hardware and software integration, particularly when it concerns safety and regulatory standards. Relying solely on documents falls short in today’s complex product development. For precision, context, and accountability in requirements, a modern, purpose-built approach is essential for success. Download this free eBook to learn how to supercharge your development process to save time and attain high quality as you achieve your business goals.

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Jama Connect is the Leader in Security, SLAs, High Availability, Touchless Upgrades, and Disaster Recovery

Jama Software is the only vendor in the space that offers the following: SOC 2 Type 2 certified application and data center (others data center only), SLAs above 99% (others at 95% or lower), touchless upgrades (others require your IT to manually update hosted app), high availability SLA (others don’t offer), disaster recovery SLA (others don’t offer).

Suitably validated by TÜV SÜD for safety-related development

Jama Software® codes with OWASP best practices

Jama Connect is SOC2 Type 2 certified in both the server and application

Ensures strong privacy management practices

Transport Layer Security (TLS) ensures data transferred is secured and encrypted

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Learn More About Switching to Jama Connect

Our experts can provide guidance even at the early stages of your exploration. We look forward to connecting.