Requirements & Requirements Management

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements and Compliance Management Solution for Complex Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Projects

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In this blog, we’ll recap a section of our eBook, “Best Practices Guide to Requirements and Requirements Management in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements and Compliance Management Solution for Complex Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Projects

Use a Single Platform to Streamline Complex AEC Project Requirements and Compliance Management

Architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies face numerous challenges in managing complex project requirements and compliance due to growing complexity and enhanced regulatory scrutiny and business competition.

Project delays and cost overruns are common for a variety of reasons. Poor planning, miscommunication, and unanticipated changes can create a chaotic environment. Incomplete or mismanaged requirements are often dispersed across various isolated systems. Keeping up to date and demonstrating compliance with the latest safety, environmental, zoning and land use regulations, building codes and permits, labor, and employment laws are time-consuming and resource intensive. Without a structured approach, identifying and mitigating risks in projects is challenging. Inadequate documentation and poor knowledge management can result in lost information, repeated mistakes, and inefficiencies that lead to higher project costs and delays. Traceability – the ability to connect the dots between requirements, standards, and tests – is fundamental for AEC projects to succeed.

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

As a result, companies have difficulty:

  • Reporting compliance to standards
  • Directly tracing regulations and standards to project requirements
  • Managing updates and implementing changes across concurrent projects
  • Collaborating effectively at a granular level around standards and design requirements
  • Creating an audit trail around sign-off and implementation of requirements and compliance
BOTTOM LINE

The increasing complexity and reliance on outdated tools make it difficult for AEC companies to efficiently manage requirements and compliance for complex projects that meet both internal and customer needs.

RELATED: Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect®

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 project requirements and compliance teams and industry experts. We’ve designed a platform that helps AEC companies efficiently manage and deliver complex projects by providing a centralized repository for all project requirements and regulatory compliance accessible by all stakeholders. This allows them to:

  • Take advantage of modern digital solutions
  • Manage regulations and standards with more confidence and efficiency
  • Demonstrate compliance with regulations systematically and consistently
  • Provide visibility into latest requirements, regulations, and standards
  • Collaborate in a single source of truth with a complete audit trail of activities
  • Avoid unnecessary costs and delays

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 projects.

Making the Case for Change

Jama Connect® helps AEC organizations manage complex project requirements and regulatory compliance by replacing documents and legacy tools with 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 project requirements, regulations, and safety analyses 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, 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 have to 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 AEC (among other industries managing complex projects), 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 project requirements and regulatory compliance 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
  • Unproductive Work Time
  • Lengthy Time-to-Completion
  • Rework
  • Project Issues

Unproductive Work Time

Are your days spent in inefficient meetings, sifting through emails and document versions for historical information or waiting for reviews and approvals? You’re not alone. Many teams suffer the repercussions of archaic, siloed project 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: Reclaiming Productive Work Time – 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.

Lengthy Time-to-Completion

Time-to-completion and quality are usually seen as compounding challenges. Conventional wisdom says the quicker you complete a project, 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-completion — can be improved with a modern project requirements and compliance management solution.

RELATED: Improving The Review Process – 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, compliant projects faster.

Rework

In our experience, approximately 30-50% of a given project is rework. Rework is any time spent on extra work — including mid-project changes, incorrect testing, unnecessary scope creep, 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 project at a time, repeat this calculation for each and add up the savings for a holistic view.

Project Issues

It’s common for a project to experience issues at some point between launch and completion. The important thing is to have a system in place that can quickly and accurately identify and track their impact up and downstream. This provides visibility into the issues 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 issues go undetected due to sub-par project requirements or testing, achieving incomplete compliance or delivering lower-quality projects could have devastating consequences.

Five Key Elements to Help Shape Your Decision

Now that you have a clearer picture of the opportunity a new solution can bring, how should you assess the available options?

There are five key elements you’ll need to factor into your decision. There are multiple facets to each component, so we’ve laid out what to look for as you’re evaluating solutions.

This image shows the 5 key elements for AEC requirements management.

1. Requirements/Compliance Process

From defining and prioritizing, to reviewing, negotiating, and approving, to verifying and validating changes, project requirements and compliance management is an ongoing, complex process. A single source of truth and visibility helps minimize interpretation — often a top barrier to success.

With Jama Connect you can:
  • Create and Analyze Traceability – Traceability ensures that project requirements have been met and verified, providing necessary evidence from the requirements and compliance management process. Jama Connect allows you to easily produce traceability documentation required by certifiers and contract deliverables. Your Trace Score™ enables you to continually measure and improve your process.
  • Reuse and Baseline Management – Compare versions of a requirement, generate branches to develop a variant, and create catalogs of reusable project requirements to improve requirements and compliance.
  • Manage Risk Analysis – Jama Connect helps teams identify and mitigate risks earlier, saving teams from frustrating late-stage changes and supporting the path to safety, environmental, and security regulatory compliance.
  • Reviews and Approvals – Increase early stakeholder visibility and participation in the review process cutting review cycles drastically.
  • Maintain Audit Trails and Export Data – Real-time reporting and baselining allow you to track all changes to information within the system, including timestamps and associated users. Data is easily exported from Jama Connect if your current process dictates release to customers or partners as contract deliverables or storage in a document management system.
  • Verification and Validation – Seamlessly manage traceability to verifications and validations, providing evidence to comply with government regulations and standards or contract requirements.

2. Compliance and Reliability

When regulatory compliance is necessary, you want a solution you can trust. We help you get ramped up quickly with templates, training and documentation aligned with regulatory agency regulations and industry standards they reference as an acceptable means of compliance. A platform’s features can inherently ease the process of proving compliance.

A respectable solution instills trust through:
  • Relationship rules aligned to Trace Matrix needs, configured item types, pick lists and views, workflows guiding, requirement acceptance, and project and export templates.
  • Export Templates to support document generation from Jama Connect. Remote consulting is available to apply style and align with the customer’s desired output.
  • Customer Success Programs supported by the Jama Software Professional Services team to ensure systems adoption success with your team’s information — and exclude noise that may cause unnecessary risk.
OUR SUCCESS PROGRAMS: AN ACTION ORIENTED APPROACH, DESIGNED FOR HOW YOUR TEAMS WORK

At Jama Software, we put client success at the forefront of everything we do. We are dedicated to helping you achieve your business goals and accelerate time to value. Jama Connect Success Programs are designed to help you align your people, processes, and data to maximize the success of your project requirements and compliance management process. We work with your team to quickly onboard and launch Jama Connect. Learn more here » jamasoftware.

RELATED: Tighten Control Over Project Costs, Compliance and Completion with Jama Connect® for Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO)

3. Implementation and Configuration

An efficient rollout increases adoption and shortens your time-to-market. There are many aspects to consider when updating your process. An expert can assist with process alignment and optimization to ensure a smooth launch and operation. When you purchase Jama Connect, our consultants partner with you to adapt Jama Connect to fit your process and build adoption of Jama Connect within your organization.

Alignment Phase

The alignment phase aims to determine and implement the best use of Jama Connect for your organization based on an understanding of your processes, business objectives and desired team workflow. This phase includes:

  • Preliminary project planning and discovery sessions to understand your people, process, and data as it pertains to requirements management, verification and validation, and risk management.
  • Onsite workshop or remote working sessions focused on alignment of processes to governing regulations.
    Consultants partner with you to determine exporting needs and properly configure standard templates to generate necessary documentation
  • Your Jama Software consultant will work with the core implementation team to prepare Jama Connect for use by end users, over a small number of remote working sessions if needed.
Launch Phase

Once Jama Connect is ready to use, your Jama Software consultant will lead a remote or onsite training to show your teams how to use Jama Connect. Following the training, your consultant will be available remotely to provide assistance in other activities as needed to support your initial implementation.

4. Customer Experience

Customer experience should be a driving force — not an afterthought. A project requirements and compliance management solution must have the functionality to get the job done, but added benefits like customer care, collaborative consultants and online user communities help turn things like a potentially frustrating experience into a delightful exchange. For a top-notch customer experience, look for:

  • A partner who will have your back. Whether it’s a technical issue or you just want assistance with process improvement, you need to know the person on the other end of the phone will take the time to troubleshoot and thoughtfully consider your situation.
  • Quick and consistent support. You need a support team that makes you a priority. We offer 24/7 support for any production outages.
  • Industry experts. Sometimes you need consultants to help with getting started and maximizing value from a new solution. Make sure you’re working with experts who understand your needs including process alignment, deployment and adoption, training and optimization.
  • An active, user-led customer community. The ability to leverage insights from your peers — those solving the same challenges as you — is priceless. The Jama Software User Community connects users with educational resources, support, articles, and ideas to get the most out of your Jama Connect experience.

5. Adoption

Software on its own won’t solve any of your organization’s problems. Your team needs to use it as intended to reap the benefits. And for people to willingly adopt it, the introduction of the software must be seamless.

A convoluted tool that doesn’t match your company’s process or workflow will result in teams reverting to rudimentary methods.

Look for a solution that:

  • Works with any project requirements and compliance management process. A solution should fit your way of working, not the other way around.
  • Leverages a balanced license structure. Not everyone in your company creates and edits content, but they still need visibility and a voice in the conversation when necessary. Jama Connect offers named licenses for core users and floating licenses for those who access it less frequently.
  • Incorporates familiar behaviors. An intuitive understanding of certain aspects of the software will go a long way in making the solution feel like second nature.
  • Provides customized training. Training centered around your people, process and data can improve deployment for minimal negative impact on your teams.
  • Gives you an opportunity to test drive the software through a trial. Key stakeholders can get their hands dirty interacting with both the functionality and one another to
    determine how relatively seamless it is to use.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS EBOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY:
AEC Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements and Compliance Management Solution for Complex Projects

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