Predictable product development - new products at Jama
A while ago I reported on the Acquisition of Notion by Jama. In the meantime, Notion has been successfully integrated into Jama and has been given a new name: "Jama Analyze". The previous product is now called "Jama Connect".
I have already mentioned the purpose behind this: Business intelligence, i.e. deriving useful, actionable activities from data, is becoming increasingly important for the success of product development. In this article, I describe the underlying problem, which comes directly from the boardroom. Whether this problem is tackled with or without Jama is completely left out.
There are also a webinar coming soon with Jama CEO Scott Roth and VP of Product Jennifer Jaffe:
Until recently, ensuring reliable processes and on-time deliveries was a systems engineering problem. This was seen as a technical problem. That has changed: If the development process does not function reliably, then this can jeopardize the existence of companies. This also includes dealing with changes with confidence. If a new feature is to be implemented at the last minute or another component is to be installed, the development team must be able to react quickly and reliably assess the impact.
Rethink procedure
How to deal with these challenges has already been discussed several times in this blog. Unfortunately, many of these approaches require existing procedures to be reworked from the ground up. However, few established companies can afford to stop development for a few months and then start again. This is because the "green field" that consultants often talk about almost never exists. Instead, the transformation must be carried out in real time.
There is almost never a greenfield site. Transformations must be implemented in real time [tweetthis]The greenfield almost never exists. Transformations must be implemented in real time[/tweetthis]
Transformation of product development
In most companies, product development therefore has to be transformed while work is ongoing. However, this also has a decisive advantage: it provides feedback almost in real time as to which measures are effective and which are not. However, in order to utilize this advantage, we need to measure success. This is often difficult.
Measuring success should actually be a matter of course. But in practice, it's not that easy: can data be retrieved at any time, or does it have to be exported in a complicated way and then processed in Excel spreadsheets? How many people understand these spreadsheets? How meaningful are they? It gets exciting when the data is derived from different data sources. Is the data consistent at all, for example between requirements and test results?
Predictable Product Development
At least with Jama, the answer to these challenges is Predictable Product Development. The idea is,
- Evaluate product concepts from a market perspective at an early stage
- Observe information from system development in real time, which provides information about interactions, opportunities and risks with regard to all artifacts of product development
- To gain strategic insights that generate the knowledge over time to plan the next successful product.
These approaches are strategic and initially independent of a specific tool. And Jama is not the only solution in this area. However, alternative solutions are often based on existing data sources. In contrast, Jama has the advantage that the analysis (Jama Analytics) is closely interlinked with product development (Jama Connect),
Conclusion
There is no question that we are living in exciting times. As a systems engineer, I am naturally very interested in how current trends affect my work. I find the approach pursued by Jama extremely exciting. As I am currently working for Jama, I am naturally delighted to be able to experience this at first hand.
