Requirements & Requirements Management

Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn

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Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn

Regardless of the state of the economy, 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 processes and team productivity will undoubtedly save your organization significant time and money.

And, while it may seem counter-intuitive to invest in new technology during an economic downturn (dare we say the word recession), 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 right now.

During economic uncertainty, spending capital on the right tools can improve product quality and increase productivity, well-positioning your organization to save time and money over the long term. But regardless of what happens with the economy, it is never going to be wasted effort to optimize your product development processes or begin to think about how to weather the impact of an impending economic storm.

RELATED: The Jama Software Guide to Requirements Traceability®

Invest in Requirements Management Software Now to Save In Both the Short & Long Term

Many of our clients come to Jama Software to help optimize their product development process after experiencing some of the following core frustrations:

  • Using cumbersome legacy requirements management solutions that have non-intuitive challenging UI/UX
  • Engineers spending valuable hours of tedious manual documentation across disparate documents and tools
  • Engineers wasting time on in-efficient workflows that can be streamlined to save upwards of 80%
  • Insufficient, ineffective cross-team collaboration across various stages of the systems development process starting from requirements, design, development to testing and validation
  • Inefficient and cumbersome review cycles
  • Difficulty in easily producing the necessary documentation to prove compliance
  • Siloed tools and processes that misalign teams and workflows, and leave visibility gaps
  • Lack of Live Traceability™ which results in finding errors late in the development process which can cost upwards of 100x or more to resolve than if they had been found earlier in the development process
  • And the list goes on and on…

Think about the corresponding monetary burden these outdated solutions and misaligned processes place on the organization’s shoulders.

Making an investment in a modern requirements management platform isn’t simply about the time and money that will be saved or improving productivity and efficiency for just a few months — it’s about the savings and reduced re-work that will be realized from the moment the application launches and for years beyond. Depending on the organization’s goals, they either save costs with the gained efficiencies or they use it to be competitive, win new contracts, and bring products to market faster and more cost effectively. You may be thinking that now is the time to pause on spending, not invest. To the contrary, we’d like to share how investing in a modern requirements management solution now is the right decision to help your organization protect itself from an economic downturn and increase your ROI.

RELATED: Accelerate, Measure, and Improve the Systems Development Process with Live Traceability in Jama Connect

For Startups: Build Your House on Bricks, Not Sticks

For startups, investing in a modern requirements management solution, like Jama Connect, is a smart idea irrespective of the state of the economy.

While long established large organizations may be able to withstand a period of lowered sales and slow development, startups may not have that option. A startup’s ability to get to market fast – and first – often is a great indicator of success, and on the flip side, failure.

Doing things right the first time is crucial.

While startups might be hesitant to invest in software initially, a great number are investing in Jama Connect in order to reduce rework, speed development, meeting regulatory compliance, and get to the market before their competitors.

And it’s paying off.

For medical device startup, Proprio, VP of Software Engineering, Rama Pailoor knew it was imperative to establish a requirements-driven development process from the very beginning. Pailoor recognized that their existing approach of using only a Quality Management System (QMS) was not capable of supporting the level of complexity needed to develop their product. Like many document and spreadsheet-based processes, the Quality Management System (QMS) Proprio had in place technically supported requirements management at face value, but when it came to complex engineering efforts, the system came up short.

“Establishing a requirements-driven development process helps to formalize the user needs, getting all the stakeholders to come to a common forum, to express the requirements from their perspective, and avoid confusion. The right requirements management solution can facilitate all of that.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio

For medium to large organizations: Strengthen your foundation by investing in modern tools and digital transformation

While big enterprises have large teams spread across various geographies and different divisions working on multiple projects, there is a strong need to optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies to reduce costs — especially during challenging economic times. Putting resources towards digital transformation and modern software tools (which result in more ROI) will also reduce overall product development costs over the long term. Through these investments, companies can strengthen their foundation to remain competitive and be better able to weather external market forces.

It is also worth re-visiting how enterprises can improve the engineering efficiency of product development by investing in requirements management and traceability tools. Optimizing the systems engineering process by bringing in traceability across your development stages can immediately create a positive impact on cycle times, and faster execution of testing and validation.

Requirements management software, like Jama Connect, can help development teams improve product quality and accelerate time to market. The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process.

 

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Karrie Sundbom
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