collaboration Archives

Tag Archive for: collaboration

Systems thinking is an approach to solving complex problems by breaking their complexity down into manageable units. This makes it easier to evaluate the system holistically as well as in terms of its individual components.

A high-level, interconnected view of the product development process can yield new insights into how products are defined, built, released and maintained. Product managers sit at the center of the product development system, so they’re primarily responsible for understanding and directing the system.

You can think of systems thinking as a diagnostic tool: a disciplined approach to examining problems more completely and accurately before taking action. Systems thinking encourages teams to ask the right questions before charging ahead under the assumption that they already know the answers.

For product teams grappling with exceptionally complex design specs and requirements, systems thinking opens the door to procedure-level improvements and the ability to take full advantage of solutions that support them.

In this post, following up on our recent piece about systems thinking for medical device development, we talk about how product managers can leverage systems thinking to improve their processes.

The Iceberg Model: How to Put Systems Thinking Into Action

The Iceberg Model is a practical way to put systems thinking into action. We borrowed the following excellent example from the smart folks at the Northwest Earth Institute.

Picture an iceberg (doomed ship optional). The tip sticking out of the water represents the event level. Problems detected at the event level are often simple fixes: You wake up in the morning with a cold, so you take a couple of ibuprofen to feel better. However, the Iceberg Model encourages us not to assume that every issue at the event level can be quickly resolved by treating the symptom.

Just below the event level is the pattern level. As the name suggests, this is where you detect patterns: You catch more colds when you skimp on sleep. Observing patterns helps product managers forecast events and identify roadblocks before they rear their ugly heads.

Below the pattern level is the structure level. If you ask, “What’s causing this pattern?” the answer is likely to be structural. You catch more colds when you skimp on sleep, and you skimp on sleep when you’re under pressure at work or when your personal life is causing you stress.

The mental model level is where you find the attitudes, beliefs, expectations and values that allow structures to function as they do. These attitudes are often learned subconsciously: from our parents, our peers, our society. If “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is part of your mental model, you’ll have trouble making the attitude and behavior adjustments that could help you avoid another cold.

The Iceberg Model encourages you to stop putting out fires and start addressing deeper issues. Using this model can align your team members through shared thinking and reveal opportunities to make small changes to the process that will yield big benefits.

More Visibility, Superior Collaboration

With a systems-thinking approach, complex product development teams can improve their processes by enhancing visibility and enabling more seamless collaboration and coordination between stakeholders.

Complex product development requires that the right people have visibility into the right parts of the system at the right time. Systems thinking drives teams to coordinate and communicate through a common system need. Collaboration becomes easier and more productive when teams are free to find approaches within their disciplines that are most effective for them, while still meeting the needs of the system.

Compliance & Traceability

Simple changes to requirements can have far-reaching impacts, and it’s hard to isolate every system component that could be affected by a requirement modification. It’s easier to assess the impact of proposed changes – that is, to perform valuable impact analysis – when you have a roadmap that shows you precisely where each requirement or business rule was implemented in the software. Traceability gives you that roadmap.

By helping identify all the areas you may have to modify to implement a proposed change to a requirement, traceability enables impact analysis. With proper traceability, you can follow the life of a requirement both forward and backward, from origin through to implementation.

Traceability is difficult to establish after the fact, so teams can use a tool like Jama Connect from the beginning to track tasks, keep tabs on evolving requirements and contextualize test results. Traceability gives teams confidence in the safety and quality of their products, and helps them demonstrate compliance with national and international standards for highly regulated industries.

Since lower-level requirements and outputs are defined within the context of a specific system need, traceability allows teams to understand that context and the downstream impacts of any change made.

Customized Solutions for Complex Product Development

Organizations across a huge range of industries are engaged in complex product development. Systems thinking encourages teams to work through a common system need, while still employing the approaches that work best within their disciplines. To assist, Jama Connect provides visibility throughout the product development cycle and keeps stakeholders connected to minimize miscommunication and unnecessary rework.

And our Jama Professional Services consultants work with you to understand your objectives and configure the platform to support your process in the optimal way. As your process, people and data change, our experts help you realign development methodologies to best practices, elevate your requirements management skills and reinforce your process. For larger teams that want ongoing deployment and optimization assistance, our adoption services give you a team of experts at your fingertips.

Learn more about some of the ways systems thinking helps overcome complex product development with our whitepaper, “Systems Engineering and Development.”

It’s in the name: Jama Connect™ gives you superior visibility into every stage of your product development process by connecting stakeholders with the right information at the right time. The result is better collaboration within and across teams, so delayed replies and ambiguous feedback won’t hamper your forward progress.

Our Jama Professional Services consultants work with users across a range of organizations and industries to help them optimize collaborative success and get the most value from the platform. To share more of their expertise, our consultants recently conducted a webinar on Jama Connect best practices that covered a range of topics, including creating groups and finding information faster.

Today, we’ll be sharing more insights from that webinar, this time looking at some of the common functionalities and lesser-known features our consultants recommend for teams looking to improve their collaboration within Jama Connect.

(For this post, we’re assuming a reasonable level of familiarity with Jama Connect. If you’re looking for a more granular guide, start with the User Guide or get your questions answered in our support community.)

Stream View

On the far right of your Jama Connect dashboard, you’ll see a link to stream view. Stream view lets you see all the conversations happening at a specific level of the project or across the items located within a project. You can join an existing conversation or start a new one by @ mentioning the individuals or teams you want to connect with. For instance, start typing “system engineers,” and you’ll see that group pop up. Now you can initiate a conversation with a specific group, and everyone in that group can receive a notification that you’ve made a comment.

This brings us to another feature in Jama Connect that makes communication easier: notifications.

Comment Notifications

There’s an easy way to control some of the feedback notifications you receive in Jama Connect, especially during the review process.

By default, when you comment on an item within a review, you start following that item, and whenever anyone else comments on the item or anywhere within the review, you’ll receive a notification.

You can easily change your notification settings from your profile. In the upper right corner of your Jama Connect instance, you’ll see your name; click on it to access your profile. Select the Review Center tab. You have two notification options: “Email me updates to items on following” or “Automatically follow items I have commented on.” Uncheck the second choice. Now, when you comment on a review, you will no longer automatically be following that item.

If you’re already keeping tabs on the comments in Review Center, you probably won’t need email notifications outside of Jama, but this is an opportunity to customize how you receive information about your process.

Subscriptions Notifications

Subscriptions allow you to loop a group of users — like the systems engineering team — into notifications about new defects or updates to defects within the project. You can also subscribe yourself to any item in Jama Connect that’s relevant to you. For instance, if you subscribe to a set of defects, every time a defect is added or updated, you’ll receive a notification.

Just as with comments, you can control how often you receive email notifications. To do this, go back to your profile, click the “Subscriptions” tab in the upper right. There, you’ll see everything you’re subscribed to, and you can unsubscribe or customize how you’d like to receive notifications about updates or additions to items on your subscription list.

You’ll see that immediate subscription notifications are the default, but you can change that to daily or weekly notifications. One of our consultants suggests that daily digests are the most helpful: Weekly notifications contain too much information that isn’t pertinent, while immediate notifications clog up your inbox so that it’s easy to miss what’s most important.

Categorizing Feedback

There’s a single, powerful tip for improving the feedback you give and receive when participating in a review. We’ve all received emails or other communications where it’s not clear what the sender is asking for: Are they asking a question? Do they need action from you?

Jama’s Review Center includes a feature that allows participants to categorize their feedback as a question, a proposed change or a potential issue. Adding context to your review comments helps ensure clear, efficient feedback, and empowers the moderator to filter and manage feedback by its assigned category.

For a deeper dive into maximizing Jama Connect, check out the Ask Jama webinar or explore the Jama Connect User Guide, which is full of tools to plan and track progress and performance.

Collaboration in product development helps improve quality, reduce risk and speed up development. For this reason, Jama Connect™ has context-based, actionable collaboration built into the platform. Reviews are a formal, effective collaboration method that guides teams in fulfilling regulatory requirements.

Our customers use these capabilities to collaborate with external stakeholders. For instance, Jama allows you to invite reviewers simply by email (Jama licenses include more than enough reviewer licenses for this purpose). This works extremely well in practice. In fact, one medical device developer, RBC Medical Innovations, was able to shed hundreds of team-member days during development to save $150,000 in cost savings per project.

Firewalls, Policies and Processes are Preventing Collaboration

One concern that many organizations have is IT security. In order to collaborate with external stakeholders, your Jama instance must be made accessible on the internet, or at least shared with collaborators via a secure connection (e.g., a VPN). Even if this is possible, decision-makers may have concerns — justified or not — about IT security.

Further, the other party (i.e., supplier or customer) must be willing to accept Jama as a collaboration platform. As such, the same concerns around security must be addressed on their end.

Lastly, even if all parties are interested in collaboration, one of them has an advantage: the one who has chosen Jama Connect as the collaboration platform. After all, that party not only gets collaboration, but also takes advantage of the complete Jama platform for end-to-end traceability, workflows and many more capabilities. The other party – the supplier or customer – can only collaborate on the content that has been made accessible.

The Alternative: Controlled Data Exchange via ReqIF

Data exchange between organizations is nothing new, and many organizations have collaborated for decades, typically by exchanging documents. While this approach technically works, it results in unstructured data that provides no traceability, no understanding of changes between versions and no easy way to provide structured feedback.

The automotive industry, traditionally working with hundreds of suppliers, has been a pioneer in this space. It’s not unusual to find tens of thousands of requirements in an automotive specification, so managing these requirements is a challenge. In response, the industry developed an international standard for the lossless exchange of requirements called Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF). The standard was finalized in 2011 and has proven so popular that every requirements management tool today, including Jama Connect, supports it.

A requirements exchange with ReqIF has some similarities to the old (and dreaded) document exchange process: One party exports a ReqIF file and hands it to the other party. The transfer can happen via a portal upload, automated exchange or even as an email attachment.

But here’s where the similarities end: A ReqIF file contains structured requirements data consisting of individual requirements with visibility into structure, attributes, related elements and traces. It is loss-less: The data and structures that you see in your product development environment (like Jama Connect) stay completely intact.

ReqIF also supports incremental updates. If one party creates another version and exports a month later, you could import that version into your environment and the tool would show you clearly which elements, attributes and traces have changed. For instance, you could use suspect links to re-validate only those items that have changed.

Collaboration via ReqIF

ReqIF is commonly used to solicit feedback from a supplier. A producer could export the requirements for a supplier, including attributes for providing status feedback and comments. The supplier would then import the ReqIF file into the tool of their choice, where they could fill out the supplier attributes and send the resulting export back.

In addition, they could start integrating the imported requirements into their own development system. For example, they could establish traceability from the customer requirements through to design while keeping the process invisible to their customer.

Image Source: IREB Magazine

There are other use cases that ReqIF supports as well, but for all of them, the foundation is a controlled asynchronous exchange of structured requirements that keeps individual items, attributes and traces intact.

What about OSLC?

When talking about ReqIF, Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) is often mentioned as well. This is another standard, but one for connecting product development tools. It has some similarities to Jama’s REST API, in the sense that OSLC is also an API for connecting tools. While the REST API supports all activities of Jama Connect, OSLC only supports a small set of activities related to requirements. But since it’s standardized, many tools provide out-of-the-box adapters, including Jama Connect.

However, OSLC is not the answer to enabling cross-organizational collaboration between teams, suppliers and customers.

Bottom Line: How to Collaborate?

If you are using Jama Connect, the built-in collaboration capabilities are the most effective way to work together.

However, if you are working with people outside your organization, your customers and suppliers may not be able to collaborate using your Jama instance. In those cases, a ReqIF-based collaboration could be a great alternative.

Learn more about the benefits of upgrading your requirements management process with our paper, “Getting the Most from a Requirements Management Tool.”

Jama Connect allows you to create groups to manage permissions and facilitate collaboration at the project level. Groups allow you to work smarter and faster by empowering you to manage notifications, permissions, access and action for multiple users at once.

There are two types of groups:

Project groups: These groups are created in the context of a specific project and are available to that project when adding permissions.
Organization groups: These groups have no product context; they’re available to all projects in the organization.

You can name groups according to your internal structure (i.e. job title or work group), by access permission (read-only, read/write), or by role (project admin, review admin).

Jama Connect comes equipped with several pre-defined project and organization groups, such as Organization Admin, a default group with organization and project permissions.

Creating groups based on users’ roles or permissions allows you to:

Grant access and role permissions
Initiate reviews
Subscribe users to items
Notify users of changes to content or workflow

Only your organization’s Jama administrator can determine which people have access to which project. However, as a project administrator, you’re empowered to group your users in a way that makes sense for your project.

The Users tab within your project will display everyone who has any level of access to the project. (This is the list of users determined by your organization’s administrator.) To create a new group within your project, click Add Group in the upper right. You can change who’s in the group, manage the group subscriptions, change the group name or even remove the group. For stakeholders who work on the project in different capacities, you can also add users to multiple groups.

Groups aren’t just an easy way to manage multiple users’ permissions at once (although that’s certainly useful!). Groups enable collaboration, provide transparency and visibility across the product development cycle and allow for greater security when required.

Groups are where the organizational administration of Jama Connect really overlaps with project management within the platform. We recommend identifying high-level groups at the organizational level that are managed by the administrator, like a read access group, and then letting project managers handle the group permissions, notifications and actions within each project.

For more on creating and editing groups, check out the Ask Jama webinar, or explore the Jama Connect User Guide.

This article series is based on the findings of a VDC Research report, “Developing for Success in Consumer Electronics.”

Time-to-market pressures are a constant source of concern for product and software developers. The period between a product’s inception and public release is shrinking, and the dearth of developers, engineers, and coders allocated to tackle this challenge is requiring organizations to turn more and more to collaborative solutions to get the job done.

This transformation comes in the form of increased adoption of Agile software development methodologies and improving team integration from different engineering domains. These changes enable companies to efficiently complete the mountain of tasks required to get a product to market quickly and successfully.

However, according to a recent VDC Research report, the consumer electronics industry has been slower to embrace these methods than other industries. In fact, the report’s survey respondents in consumer electronics had the lowest adoption rate among all embedded industries.

Changing Standards, Changing Expectations

That may shift soon, as rapid change in industry standards and expectations are forcing holdout companies to start adopting new collaboration practices in earnest, or at least begin adding aspects of these new methodologies to their existing processes. Hybrid, or multimodal model development, processes are now being created to enhance collaboration, and include extensive preplanning or requirements documentation, along with stand-up meetings, sprints, and retrospectives.

Bringing in disparate teams — often located in different geographies or not full-time employees of the companies they’re coding for — requires a higher level of coordination to ensure the right hand is talking to the left. It’s also important to make sure all teams are making the most of their efforts without doubling up on tasks or repeating work that already completed by another team at a different site. Beyond those challenges, stakeholders are demanding detailed, real-time progress reports of these teams to ensure the projects are being completed efficiently and on time.

To meet these rigorous demands, as well as those of the end-consumer, alternative methods to completing projects are coming to the fire. Code generated by modeling tools, re-used from other projects, or acquired from third-party sources, are all options for helping developers meet the demands of expanding software requirements. However, these methods must be done cautiously to avoid potential liability, security, or vulnerability issues. That’s one of the reasons why risk assessments are a critical component of this multi-faceted method of development, and an integrated product development platform can be helpful in tracking code origins and providing traceability audits to ensure compliance mandates are met.

This traceability cannot be completed solely in-house, as consumer electronic device failures can have safety-critical consequences. By employing traceability data, teams finding and fixing software bugs can quickly find potential vulnerabilities and determine where else they might be located. But this solution is not a panacea — many organizations have difficulty effectively managing traceability across their development lifecycle, according to the VDC Research study.

Out With the Old, in With the New

Existing practices include the use of in-house tools or commercial software like Microsoft Word or Excel, but these methods are becoming less feasible as variant management needs and system dependencies bridge multiple engineering domains, as well as the number of applications facing compliance verification.

The number of organizations focusing on establishing collaborative development processes is on the rise. Integrated teams are helping the consumer electronics industry re-shape their practices to ensure products are delivered on schedule and free of bugs, which are too often discovered late in the process, and can require costly and time-consuming recoding.

As the industry catches up to other markets in the collaboration space, the result should be cohesive teams working together on solving issues before they become major calamities.

As part of an ongoing series, we’re looking at insights and trends uncovered within the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study, “Bridging The Gap In Digital Product Design.”

Product development is already a stressful endeavor. For companies focused on merging hardware and software into smart products, it’s only getting more intense.

According to the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, “Bridging The Gap In Digital Product Design,” nearly 90% of companies are either adding or planning to implement digital technologies to their products.

Given the new process and competitive landscape, 80% of those same businesses say they’re feeling extra time-to-market pressure. Not only that, but an even larger majority (89%) believes the strain will only grow in severity.

“There is pressure to always innovate and create the next generation version of your product,” Jama Software’s vice president of product, Jennifer Jaffe, says. “Sitting in that market is, by definition, a very uncomfortable place— specifically for a lot of companies who have been around a long time and who didn’t used to have all these pressures.”

Driving business concerns are fears of disruption. From cell phones to taxis, home energy management to automobiles, it can feel like no industry is immune to being blindsided by new technology. While companies can’t stop a savvy new competitor gunning for their position, how they innovate in response is crucial.

Software vs. Hardware

Traditional product companies are used to building hardware. When you add software development to the mix, there needs to be some alterations to the process.

That’s why one of the biggest priorities for businesses adding digital technologies to their products should be creating a plan to integrate the hardware and software teams. To do this, businesses must have a firm understanding of their existing development process, its necessary documentation, and logical gaps.

They’ll also need to recognize that software developers and traditional hardware developers work very differently. Figuring out how to unify these two practices, so they’re operating in tandem and not as opposing forces, is key. One of the best ways to do that is by having a method facilitating open communication and accountability.

“Most critical is having real time transparent communication, so that when things change on the software or the hardware side, all parties are informed and can adapt,” Jaffe says. “Without that collaboration, the two teams run the risk of working in isolation and developing products that are incompatible with each other.”

When to Innovate

Another area to consider when moving to connected products is not trying to start from scratch with every release. If a strong hardware platform has already been built, for instance, it makes sense to reuse it. Then, you can focus on incremental gains that can be handled in software updates.

“The more you can put the heavy lift of innovation on the software side,” Jaffe says, “The more likely you are to be able to respond quickly and create lots of different, compelling variants of your product’s experience — and do it as cheaply as possible.”

In that case, the product management team can set about envisioning the requirements of the future and brainstorm all the different use cases for the coming years. For instance, maybe that means creating hardware that can scale to accommodate a heaver usage on processing or memory. Then, looking ahead, if 80%-to-90% of the hardware requirements will basically remain unchanged, the development team can really be pushed to innovate on that extra 10%-to-20% of a new product.

This is also where a product development platform can really give developers an edge. With a simple, efficient solution for saving and reusing your hardware requirements, teams can focus on innovating iteratively.

That’s also why more than half of the companies going digital are partnering with software or other companies to assist with the digital transformation, according to “Bridging The Gap In Digital Product Design.”

What to Focus On

Today’s market is driven by consumer choice. Whether we’re talking about watches or coffee makers, customers have high expectations from products, and there’s a heavy push to constantly move forward. When one company’s product family goes smart, it almost feels inevitable competitors will too.

So businesses must listen to their customers to develop requirements. “The companies that are getting disrupted are oftentimes legacy companies whose business model, technical model, or both, don’t support newer methods for developing products,” Jaffe says. “And, specific to this idea of building to customer requirements, they’re companies that don’t have specific practices or tools to bring customer requirements to the forefront when they’re defining their product.”

Before production, then, companies should be putting prototype ideas in front of consumers for feedback on usability and value. And then running those customer requirements past engineers to sift through what’s feasible. Also, ensuring the requirements are documented in a clear way will keep various teams aligned throughout the process.

Moving Forward

All these shifts and crunches can significantly rattle a traditional product company not used to dealing with them. Keeping your team laser-focused on the evolving process will guide it to success.

“You have to prioritize the work that’s being done by your product development team and then not allow additional scope to creep in,” Jaffe says. “You really have to be judicious about the decisions you make, about what to prioritize, what to work on, and make conscious decisions to say no to projects that aren’t priority one for your development team.”

One thing that titans of any product category should avoid is kicking back with the belief that their winning days will be endless.

“A new, fresh company can come in today without all the legacy of old development practices, of old expectations of what it meant to serve a market,” Jaffe says. “Not only can they be more nimble and receptive on the technology front, but frankly, as a business, they can pivot quickly in the face of shifting consumer demand. That’s how they roll.”

Get a deeper look into the pressures driving companies to develop connected products with our report, “Bridging The Gap In Digital Product Design,” featuring insights from nearly 300 innovators from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, technology, healthcare, financial services, and more.

Companies that build products are familiar with this challenge: engineering and business teams not working together because they often approach problems differently. Engineers recognize that they need to change hypotheses and try again often and fast to build successful products. They quickly improve the product based on what they are facing at the moment. Business teams, on the other hand, focus on planning, predictability and reducing risk. They like a complete roadmap with everything detailed out.

While there are many strategies and solutions to overcome these differences, they generally all rely on one key fundamental: requirements management, which documents, analyzes, traces and prioritizes all the requirements for building a product.

Many companies try to track these requirements with existing, separate systems, such as Microsoft Excel and Word documents that someone must update, hoping the important information is seen by the right people. But when specifications, test cases, conversations, changes and decisions are separate, you must manage them separately. This makes it hard to keep the data flowing between the upstream and downstream work groups. Teams can waste hours waiting for clarifications, responses and decisions. They can end up struggling to understand what they are building and what they are supposed to be building because they can’t hold to a common vision. Frustration only grows as the product and the organization complexity increase.

The right requirements management solution can alleviate this frustration and struggle by tightly connecting the engineering and business groups. When it’s configurable (because companies are not all the same) and keeps valuable product data in one secure, accessible location, a good solution can ensure that development cycles increase by at least 50 percent and quality by 100 percent or more within the first six months.

One global entertainment company even realized a 42:1 benefit-to-cost ratio with the Jama™ solution. Read our white paper, Connecting Engineering and Business Teams for Better Products and discover how.

With an ever-growing global population and less farmable land to meet an equally growing demand for food, precision farming is poised to launch the agriculture industry into the technology spotlight.

What is precision farming?

Precision farming/agriculture is also known as satellite farming, site specific crop management or as-needed farming. The methods used for management in precision farming are technology based and include a wide range of software and hardware. The farm manager uses the technology to optimize crop production and soil protection based on data and analysis of information collected from all factors of the environment (soil, water, plant life and weather).

The main aims of precision agriculture are to increase food production growth, while at the same time ensuring profitability, sustainability and, in various ways, environmental protection.

Types of technology used in precision farming

According to Jerry Revich of Goldman Sachs, technology for precision farming includes:

Precise point positioning systems (such as GPS) used mainly for navigation and positioning assistance through large fields where farmers need high levels of accuracy. PPP systems work in assisted steering systems to help drivers follow field patterns and in automated steering systems where drivers can take hands off the wheel to concentrate on other equipment.
Autonomous vehicles are smaller and lighter vehicles which use sensors and driverless technology to replace heavier conventional farming vehicles that were detrimental to the soil due to compaction. The compaction resulted in lower water and nutrient retention ultimately decreasing crop production. By using autonomous vehicles, crop yields will rise as a result of higher quality soil. Also, costs will decrease when there is no driver involved.
Drones which fly over vast areas of hard to reach ground assist farmers by spotting problem areas in huge fields a lot sooner and easier than when people had to walk through the fields and manually enter observation notes on crop conditions. They are also useful for monitoring irrigation equipment and weed identification when fields are too large for humans to monitor efficiently.
Precision planting means more accurate seed placement including spacing and depth control. Better depth control leads to a stronger root system and in turn a stronger plant with a higher yield. In conventional farming, large tractors drag massive pieces of equipment through the fields and seed placement is not optimized as it would be in precision planting.
Precision fertilizer application means adding sensors to tractors to optimize fertilizer amounts for the best results. All fields and even areas within fields respond differently to fertilizers, therefore it is not efficient or cost-effective to apply a standard amount to the entire area. Now, with site specific, precision fertilization techniques such as ground-based sensors, satellite imagery and drone monitoring to collect information, precision fertilizer application is a smarter option for farmers.
Analytics software accesses data gathered from the technologies implemented and provides guidance to farm management about crop rotation patterns, optimal planting and harvesting times as well as soil management.

Who is using precision farming?

Farms, small and large, all over the world are using the technology of precision farming today. In the past, due to the nature of the IT infrastructure required to implement precision farming, only the larger agriculture operations were applying precision technology. But today, with smaller, easier to use gadgets like drones, smart sensors, cloud computing and special mobile apps, precision agriculture is a possibility even for small farms.

What does it mean for the industry?

Changes such as these to the agriculture industry are driven by the rise in software-driven products. The business imperatives of on-time delivery and extended supply-chain systems threaten to disrupt traditional manufacturing and engineering processes. Teams are pressured to accelerate product delivery and manage growing complexity in distributed organization and supply chains, within products, and across a network of interrelated and interdependent systems. The future of agriculture and its ability to meet global food production demands depends greatly on the development of precision farming technology. Learn more about how Collaborative Systems Engineering can help.

Developing new products is hard. Herculean efforts are required to take a concept all the way through the development process to launch. On top of that is the constant pressure to build faster, smaller, with higher quality at less cost than the last generation. Teams have to read the tea leaves to pick which features consumers will want, and architect a solution that will resonate at a certain price. Of course, these product development teams also have to worry about an army of competitors trying to get to market first.

If all of that wasn’t enough, the development landscape is constantly evolving. This article will explore five ways in which the world of product development is changing, and how these trends will impact teams building new products in 2017.

Software tipping point

At some point in last few years the contribution of software to typical new products became the majority of the development effort for the project. What does that mean? It used to be that a typical device consisted of hardware and some firmware. That firmware was the software that allowed the product to operate, and was, by today’s standards, quite simple and wasn’t updated often. Think about your old VCR, the firmware controlled the play, pause and stop buttons as well as the clock that flashed 12:00 for years at a time. Teams designing new VCRs back in the day spent the majority of their time working on the mechanical bits required to precisely drag the magnetic tape across the read head. Firmware for the VCR was important, but it was far from the largest task in the project.

Fast forward to today and the TiVo device sitting in your entertainment center. The TiVo media device is custom built computer with its own customer operating system and advanced software. Their hardware is quite complex, but clearly the software embedded in their device accounts for the majority of the development process.

As product development teams reach that tipping point and more than half of the effort is on the software side of the ledger, interesting dynamics start to occur within the team. The full effects of this shift are beyond the scope of this post, but as fast moving ‘agile’ software teams become more central to the development process their impact is felt within the entire development team.

Distributed teams

Talking about teams, they are becoming more dispersed across multiple geographies. Clearly there are many companies today working out of a single office, but the trend is to go where the talent lives. It’s not at all uncommon to see even small companies with a hardware team in Phoenix Arizona, a software team in Redmond Washington and a team of scientists working on the next great technologies in Madison Wisconsin. Typical product development processes become tedious across multiple locations and time zones. Stage gate reviews are tough enough with the entire team in one conference room, distributed teams are forced to find new collaboration tools to bring teams and project data together virtually.

Working within an ecosystem of products

It’s not enough for a new product in 2017 to just work well on its own. Many new products today have to work within an ecosystem of products to solve complex problems or create dynamic solutions for the customer. For example, at the Consumer Electronics Show last month a whole slew of smart home products were announced that are designed to work with Amazon’s Echo voice activated device. Consumers are less interested in stand alone devices and are looking for their products to work seamlessly together as a single network of devices. This creates complex challenges for product development teams. Which ecosystems should they target working with? Once a target is defined, what are the unique requirements that come along with that system?

Massive amounts of data

Today’s smart connected products are loaded with sensors; microphones, GPS location, cameras, temperature sensors, etc. Data from these sensors, along with the software to make sense of the data, create the unique customer experience. The data is also hugely valuable to product development teams as it can paint an accurate picture of product use, which shapes how the next product is designed. However, all of this data adds up and has to be managed. When autonomous car researchers starting recording the vast amounts of data produced by the array of sensors embedded into the car, they found that they could fill a normal computer hard drive every few seconds. For a product expected to stay on the road for a decade, this amount of data becomes an issue for the development team to manage.

Possible security event impacting views on privacy

All of this data also create questions of security and privacy. Many new products today could, in theory, be hacked to transmit your location, your images, or voice to bad actors.

In 1982 seven people were murdered when Tylenol capsules were tampered with and laced with cyanide. That event had a profound impact on how products were packaged and how consumers shop.

In consumer products we have yet to see a ‘Tylenol’ moment…an event that greatly raises shoppers understanding and feelings about smart connected product security. Not saying such an event will happen, but product teams need to be aware that if a security event happened, consumer views about their product security could be negatively impacted, so it’s best to be solid on privacy requirements from the outset.

“The health industry will continue to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions in 2017, but the new year also likely will bring an uptick in alternative transactions, such as joint ventures, partnerships, strategic alliances and clinical affiliations.” Top health industry issues of 2017 PwC

Innovations in the medical device industry are often not created within one team. Increasingly teams are augmented with many different types of players through contract manufactures or acquisitions or even strategic alliances. The benefits of collaboration are rarely lost on industry leaders. Bringing together innovators to create a new way of doing things can revolutionize a sector, but without the correct support and infrastructure collaborations often fail.

Collaborating across cultures, institutional and geographical, adds unique challenges with each group having their own standards and entrenched ways of doing things. How do teams cross these divides? Unified goals, clear expectations, unique points of view are a great place to start, but also having the right tools makes overcoming the challenges of modern collaboration possible.

Unified Goal: When cross-organizational teams have a clear and unified goal for developing a product, innovation or service, they can better overcome the challenges inherent with collaborating in a complex environment. Having the shared vision makes the unity worthwhile.

Clear Roles: Clearly communicating the expectations of how and when each member of the team will be asked to participate helps alleviate the uncertainty of collaborating in a new way. Documenting the goals and setting, communicating and tracking of the collaboration help keep programs moving forward smoothly.

Unique points of view: Unlocking the creativity needed for innovation requires harnessing the insights and unique understanding across different stakeholders. Bringing unique points of view will result in more robust and better considered ideas for implementation. Having representation from across the team will help better asses the impacts of decisions and can help identify issues before they become problems.

The Right Tools: As teams seek input and feedback, tools like Jama Software are critical in capturing these insights in real-time. With everyone having the most up-to-date information, reviews can be streamlined and allow for more clear communication to what is expected by who and by when. This helps reduce complexity of communication and save time by having a single place to provide input. The teams have a single source for collaboration regardless of geographic or institutional location, which enables collaboration across a variety of relationships. Suppliers can have clients directly involved in reviews for input and progress checks or academia can collaborate with industry partners so communication can maintain an even pace despite cultural differences. Having a single platform where these teams can come together to innovate, review and connect will keep programs on track, teams collaborating and not let insights slip through cracks.

People working together is at the very core of all product development work. The ability to collaborate is critical for innovation. For companies or academia to turn the research of today into the products of tomorrow, it is critical that teams stay connected and synchronized.