Requirements & Requirements Management

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Product Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

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This image portrays an energy industry worker and implies that the blog is a buyer guide for the industry.

In this blog, we’ll recap a section of our eBook, “Energy Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Product Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

Use a Single Platform to Streamline Complex Energy Product Requirements Management and Traceability

Energy companies face numerous challenges in managing product requirements and traceability due to growing complexity and enhanced regulatory scrutiny to ensure quality, safety, and security. Delivering products or systems on time, reducing rework and recalls, and speeding up reviews and approvals, are critical in the intensely competitive environment.

Energy companies often attempt to manage critical processes using Word, Excel, or PDF document-based technology. While this manual approach may be adequate for small, simple projects, it fails as complexity and scale increase. Reliance on legacy document management software such as Confluence or SharePoint for tracing, storing, sharing, and retrieving requirements and traceability documents means dealing with data siloes, lack of interoperability, constant changes, security threats, and limited collaboration and analysis.

As a result, companies have difficulty:

  • Tracking the decomposition and implementation of their requirements
  • Managing the traceability between requirements, tests, designs and software
  • Generating documents to demonstrate adherence to standards for auditors
  • Managing updates and changes across concurrent or similar product development
  • Identifying product defects early in development
  • Delivering high quality products on time and budget
  • Collaborating effectively with all stakeholders around product requirements and standards
  • Creating an audit trail around sign-off and implementation of requirements

BOTTOM LINE

The increasing complexity of the energy industry and continued reliance on Word, Excel or outdated tools that lead to rework, delays, inefficient work processes, and late discovery of defects make it difficult for energy companies to efficiently manage product requirements to meet both internal and customer needs.

RELATED: Power Efficiency and Innovation Across Your Development Process with Jama Connect® for Energy Storage Systems

What if you didn’t have to compromise?

This Buyer’s Guide incorporates insights from Jama Software’s more than 15 years of experience partnering with forward-thinking product development teams and industry experts. We’ve designed a modern, digital platform that helps energy companies efficiently manage and deliver complex products by providing a centralized repository for all requirements, tests, and reports that are accessible by all stakeholders.

This allows energy companies to:

  • Reduce rework and product recalls significantly
  • Deliver products on time
  • Find defects faster and earlier
  • Reduce manual work associated with managing data in documents involving searching, duplicating, and formatting data, and tracking communications around requirements and reporting
  • Speed up review and approval cycles for requirements, feasibility, and certification documents
  • Increase product and data quality to ensure full test coverage, track end-to-end decomposition of products, and enable a unified data model for reporting and data extraction
  • Understand the source and impact of changes better and remove scope creep
  • Assign clear ownership over product definition

Use these insights to better understand the challenges you’re up against and thoughtfully consider potential solutions. Plus, learn how to get the buy-in you need to undertake the kind of transformation necessary to succeed with complex products.

Making the Case for Change

Jama Connect® helps energy organizations transition their product development from a document-based way of working to a powerful —but easy-to-use—digital platform that provides a single source of truth which is easily
accessible by all stakeholders at any time. When product requirements and traceability are managed in a centralized platform, users benefit from a straightforward process and the business impact and value of the platform becomes clear across the organization—making management buy-in easier.

If your company is not considering the importance of transitioning to a more modern, digital, streamlined process, time is not on your side. Failing to act quickly can leave your organization even further behind.

But to see the value of a positive impact a system can have, stakeholders in an organization must appreciate the challenges first.

This is where you come in. You can help quantify the problem within your organization and provide data to help make the case for change.

Go through the exercises in the next section using data from your organization to identify your current situation and the size of the potential opportunity.

Tools to Assess the Situation in Your Organization

Throughout the past decade of working with energy (among other industries managing complex products or systems), four common pain points continuously arise for those who have yet to transform their process.

We’ll provide context around the problems and share equations with examples to help you uncover the savings from a modern product requirements management and traceability solution. Remember to adjust the variables according to your company’s metrics to get a more precise estimate, and rethink how your team functions.

Improving any one of these four aspects of your process produces real savings. While the calculations on the following pages aren’t cumulative, they impact one another and can add up to significant value for your organization.

This is the potential of using a modern digital platform. If realized, it can radically change your business and be the competitive edge you need in today’s market.

THE FOUR COMMON PAIN POINTS

  1. Rework
  2. Delays in Product Delivery
  3. Inefficient Process for Working with Internal and External Stakeholders
  4. Failure to Find and Fix Defects Early

Rework

In our experience, approximately 30-50% of a given product development process is rework. Rework is any time spent on extra work — including mid-product development changes, incorrect testing, or fixing problems — and it costs your company big time. Requirements errors cause the majority of rework. Improving the ability to track requirements from definition through testing to catch changes and adjust scope can ensure you’re doing or building the right thing and massively reducing overall lifecycle costs. Complete the equation below to get an understanding of the number of hours your team spends in rework and the value of that in working hours alone.

RELATED: Reduce Rework – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

If your organization is working on more than one product at a time, repeat this calculation for each and add up the savings for a holistic view.

Delays in Product Delivery

Delivering products quickly and maintaining high quality are usually seen as compounding challenges. Conventional wisdom says the quicker you complete a product, the more likely it is to have issues, and vice versa. Understanding the impact of change, capturing decisions, communicating feedback, and reusing existing intellectual property — all aspects that can help speed time-to-market — can be improved with a modern requirements management and traceability solution.

RELATED: Reclaiming Productive Work Time – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

Cost savings can certainly be great and have an impact on your bottom line, but don’t forget the qualitative implications. Consider what it would mean for your company’s reputation to complete high quality, product development faster.

Inefficient Process for Working with Internal and External Stakeholders

Are your days spent in inefficient meetings with internal stakeholders, customers, and subcontractors, sifting through emails and document versions for historical information, waiting for reviews and approvals, or creating documents for auditors? You’re not alone. Many teams suffer the repercussions of archaic, siloed product development work. A modern process maximizes efficiency by tackling the root causes of momentum-killing delays and holdups. Calculate how much unproductive work time is costing your business and imagine the possibilities of getting that time back. What could you do with one extra hour each day?

RELATED: Improving The Review Process – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

We’ve seen long status meetings shrink or vanish when teams have the right solutions in place. Think about your team’s schedule and adjust the average time saved per person based on the time spent in meetings each week.

Failure to Find and Fix Defects Early

It’s common for product development to reveal defects at some point between launch and delivery. The important thing is to have a system in place that can quickly and accurately identify defects and track their impact up and downstream. This provides visibility into the problem as early as possible when it’s less detrimental to fix.

RELATED: Identify Defects Early – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

This calculation factors in personnel hours, but you should also think about the cost of delays and missed opportunities. Plus, should defects go undetected due to sub-par product requirements or testing or delivering lower-quality products could have devastating consequences.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS EBOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Product Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

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