In this blog, we recap a webinar discussing Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect

In today’s world, successful organizations anchor their innovation and complex product development processes on interconnected data across numerous workstreams. This requires gathering stakeholder input to build system architecture, managing high-level requirements to create detailed user stories and implementing verification and validation to detect issues. Collaborating with various stakeholders while achieving standards compliance and competing in today’s marketplace requires a deeper level of traceability.

Organizations also must balance the needs of these various processes and teams with their continued use of best-of-breed tools – including Jira and Excel. While these purpose-build tools often bring efficiency and precision to specific work streams, spreading work across multiple tools makes maintaining and leveraging the benefits of traceability particularly challenging.

Ultimately, that’s why leading organizations leverage Live Traceability™, enabled by Jama Connect, in their product development process to eliminate delays, defects, cost overruns, and rework.

In this webinar, join our experts as they discuss:

• The contrast between Live Traceability and after-the-fact traceability
• How to achieve and benefit from Live Traceability
• How the newly launched Jama Connect Interchange can help replace highly manual and time-consuming processes with an automated flow of information — even with Microsoft Excel

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect

Jeremy Johnson: We’re going to start with some of the common challenges that we see and hear from some of our customers and some of the companies and industries that we start working with around product development and requirements management.

We’ll talk a little bit about what we see as best practices of what we call live traceability versus a more after-the-fact and reactive approach. We’ll talk a little bit about how you can achieve live traceability, and then we’ll dive a little bit more deeply into how Jama Connect can help. We’ll also introduce you to, as Marie mentioned in her intro, a new product from Jama Software, Jama Connect Interchange. We’ll talk about how Jama can help enable live traceability and help support best practices.

We’ll end with a recap of some of the benefits and the impact that we’ve seen from customers in various markets. As Marie mentioned, we’ll get into some Q&A at the end. Again, let’s start with some of the common pain points that we tend to see. Things like managing legacy systems, various Excel spreadsheets, no single version of the truth. You have maybe tedious manual effort, need to automate change management. Impact analysis is slow and manual.

Related Jama Connect Interchange Datasheet 

Jeremy Johnson: If you’re ultimately trying to do this traceability, trying to manage data across different points, looking at risk management, maybe even desktop applications, that stuff is out of date two minutes later, right? It’s not very timely. You have a lot of these challenges from a complex product development standpoint. What this typically goes back to, what it typically traces back to is something that tends to look like this, where companies are managing a very complex product development process, have multiple teams, different functions, and it creates silos. It creates teams and data that are fragmented across functions and across tools. May have things like hardware and software teams running in parallel, but not talking, or at least not talking enough or not talking at the right times.

You maybe have risk and quality and compliance teams that are engaged too late in the process, and maybe it’s more of a serial flow rather than an early engagement and a more collaborative and holistic process. Certainly, some of these teams may be loosely coupled, maybe some of the data points, they always seem to come together at the last moment. But do companies, and do people really want to rely on that? Do you really want to count on those things happening so late in the game? How confident does that make organizations feel with a product launch looming, with an audit schedule? That can be a very daunting and very disconcerting feeling that a lot of those things are happening just in time, rather than a more cohesive and coherent process.

Related: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Jeremy Johnson: Another way to look at that this problem that we tend to see with companies that we start working with is in the context of the V model or the verification and validation model, which is fairly ubiquitous and complex product development. We’ll touch on it here a few times in this session, but companies have all of these points of intersections throughout this process, as this process flows. There’s all these points that you can see with Xs between where there’s a need for connected data, and these are points where barriers can exist potentially as companies work between siloed tools, again, maybe desktop applications, particularly Excel and things like that.

You have this myriad of tools, this myriad of best-of-breed tools to appropriately and efficiently execute this process. The reality is, to bring all of these pieces together, there really isn’t a single solution to this problem. It’s best of breed tools, and again, even in specific scenarios, maybe office apps like Excel, that’s really the norm and will continue to be. That’s the way people like to work. There are very bespoke solutions in certain parts of the product development life cycle, and that’s the way it’s going to continue to be.

Learn more by watching the entire webinar: Unlocking the Power of Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect

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