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Author: Josh Turpen

  • Future-Proof Your Product Development Life Cycle

    Future-Proof Your Product Development Life Cycle

    In product development, change is vital. In fact, some might say that product development is the embodiment of change. Continuous improvement keeps products from becoming stagnant, which, in turn, keeps companies afloat.

    While change is important, it’s not always helpful, especially when it involves the management of employee attrition and retention. Over the last year, many organizations have witnessed how an uncertain business environment can leave their workforce in chaos. Every year, thousands of experienced developers and engineers in the product development ecosystem leave their jobs, taking valuable tactics, insights and tools with them to their next role. Though these workers often pass on their expertise to those who take their place, without formal systems or standardized processes for gathering that information, much of the knowledge will be lost. The ultimate result is an increase in development costs and deployment delays.

    We’ve all heard the phrase, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” When it comes to an employee, that individual’s informal knowledge isn’t always easily captured by existing internal company processes. To retain and protect this knowledge, companies need technology that makes it easy to gather, store and access for future use.

    Enter future-proofing, the process of using digital tools to capture knowledge and make accessibility seamless for future employees at various stages of product development. Employing future-proofing strategies will help IT company leaders and decision makers ensure a continuum throughout the product development life cycle.

    Future-proofing is especially vital in this age of digital transformation, as it helps address common concerns that crop up about collaborative environments, team efficiencies and product integrations. Let’s take a look at what this entails.

    Future-Proofing in the Age of Digital Transformation

    The best-case scenario for adept future-proofing in the age of digital transformation is to have product development adapt alongside any systemic changes. Under these terms, software solutions that holistically capture both formal and informal knowledge are the secret to future-proofing the product development process. An effective digital solution will help you do this in three ways:

    • Comprehensively enables collaboration: A comprehensive solution will give users a single source of truth to track decisions, questions and problems. Unlike a shared Excel spreadsheet or Word document that can get overwritten, forgotten, corrupted or contains incomplete, fragmented information, future-proofing tools can effectively gather, store and then pass along knowledge.
    • Increases team efficiency: By working from a single source, teams can capture knowledge – often without even realizing it – through feedback and team communication. Additionally, a single source of information reduces design inconsistencies and discrepancies.
    • Seamlessly integrates digital tools: Because product development does not rely on a single digital system, solutions need to be integrated across different digital tools and throughout the product development life cycle. By integrating with tools that track development and with other information gathering and tracking solutions, knowledge is captured at multiple levels, streamlining future projects.

    Overall, fostering an environment that encourages teamwork is the best way to ensure knowledge sharing and preservation. However, when that is not possible, companies need to have a backup plan. By merging talent with technology, you can capture both formal and informal knowledge before an employee walks away, and, therefore, future-proofing your product development life cycle.

  • How to Solve 3 Significant Development Challenges

    How to Solve 3 Significant Development Challenges

    As products, systems, and software grow in complexity, so does the development process. This can lead to an increased risk of flaws and can result in expensive and potentially reputation-harming mistakes or recalls.

    These new complexities have shifted the product development process entirely, requiring optimization from end to end. Engineering and design teams need solutions that answer the most common challenges they face in this process. This means being provided purposeful, structured collaboration tools; connecting distributed team members; and accurately capturing and facilitating feedback, decision-making and context for requirements under review.

    Navigating Development Challenges

    To do this, teams developing complex products, systems and software must first overcome some significant obstacles. To help navigate this journey, let’s examine some of the most prominent product development challenges engineers are facing today.

    Outdated Legacy or Document-based Solutions

    The traditional approach to managing risks and requirements is highly manual, operating in an old mindset in which numerous spreadsheets and versioned documents are shared via email. This method has serious drawbacks, including no guarantee that data is up to date. This results in valuable time lost deciphering different versions or painstakingly making changes manually to achieve cross-team alignment.

    Additionally, without a clear path of traceability—which can be difficult to achieve for those who rely on static documents—teams often end up referencing older and often outdated versions of requirements. This inevitably leads to misalignment, increased risk and costly rework.

    The solution? Uplevel your traceability practices. Moving on from outdated legacy solutions to a modern requirements management tool is the first step to bolstering creativity, productivity and collaboration.

    Compliance, regulations and standards processes 

    Product, systems and software development has become much more complicated over time. As a result, so has product risk and the accompanying regulatory compliance required.

    To ensure the long-term success of organizations developing these complex systems, software and products, strong collaboration between teams, knowledge of applicable regulations and effective requirements management platforms are necessities. These tools provide a simple path and single source of truth for defining, verifying and validating key regulations. However, despite numerous industry studies indicating that requirements issues are a prominent factor of project distress, not everyone is convinced their team needs to focus on requirements development and management. Further, they’re unsure of how it will all pay off.

    To address these challenges, companies need to streamline their quality and risk management strategies. This can be done by incorporating detailed traceability across the development life cycle—from the high-level user needs and systems requirements through to validation and verification.

    Effective Review Cycles

    Review cycles are often time-consuming and fragmented. For example, when approaching requirements management manually and with disparate documents, a cycle can be repeatedly delayed due to versioning issues and lack of a single source of truth updated in real-time. It also reduces team visibility throughout the review process; individuals end up spending hours per week in review meetings just to ensure everyone is on the same page.

    To up-level this process, it’s necessary to have:

    • One source of truth for requirements and tests.
    • A straightforward way to send items such as requirements, user stories or test cases for review.
    • Best practices for each major role involved clearly outlined (i.e., reviewer, approver, moderator).
    • Real-time collaboration within a shared, dynamic requirements management platform.
    • An outline of a formal approval process to capture and record sign-off.

    Collaboration is Key to Development Success

    At the end of the day, collaboration is at the core of all product development work. The ability to effectively work together is critical to ensure innovation doesn’t stop. In this era of rapidly accelerating change, structured and strategic team collaboration is the means for improving the product development process for all involved. By updating your legacy traceability solutions, establishing effective review cycles, and streamlining your regulations, compliance and standards processes, your team will be well on its way to a much more effective and unified product development process.

  • 3 Ways Traceability Boosts Decision-Making, Accountability

    3 Ways Traceability Boosts Decision-Making, Accountability

    Traceability can be a key tool to allow for a streamlined process of complex decision-making

    New software is being developed at an incredible pace to help make our lives easier. This doesn’t change the fact that humans are still held accountable for product development decisions, whether these are made with or without advanced analysis tools. To make informed choices, product development professionals need tools that allow them to see comprehensible information in real-time as change is happening, both within the team’s structure and throughout the system in which their product exists.

    Modern traceability makes it possible to both manage and respond to change in a systematic, auditable and confidence-enhancing way. Below, we will discuss three ways traceability has evolved to support key decision-makers in a number of industries.

    Modern traceability captures when you make a decision

    Decisions often have varying levels of durability. Sometimes, when you make a decision, you know then and there it’s final. Other times, you make what seems to be a minor choice and you end up dealing with the repercussions for years to come. With this level of uncertainty, it is essential to have mechanisms that allow you to see when decisions are made. As I discussed in a previous article, “5 Ways Traceability is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce,” this process can be compared to a map. By leading a team through every step of their processes, modern traceability helps product developers reach their goals without any surprises.

    Often, products are expected to be maintained for years. This is significantly more challenging when you can’t properly track where a ruling originated or a change was made. While the team may move quickly in the development process, the record should always live on to provide future context where it’s needed.

    Modern traceability provides people the context of what they’re working on as they go, not after the fact

    Rather than rely on sharing often lengthy and disparate documents or running time-consuming general meetings, traceability allows teams to streamline their collaboration. Mapping out work items, including owners and contributors, gives people a reason to care and to trace those items carefully. It helps everyone know why they’re there, what they are discussing and how to address it.

    Many smaller companies are fortunate to get by using Word documents and other legacy tools for their traceability measures. However, as these companies grow, so do the complexities. That’s why traceability has been evolving to account for the multi-dimensional nature of requirement, test and risk management. For a company that is seeing major growth to be truly successful, all related variables must work together continuously, at scale and across teams. Legacy tools simply do not provide the agile capabilities that modern traceability does.

    Traceability captures and tracks past decisions and allows users to access them

    Traceability is all about relationships. Each product in development has its own particular set of customers, stakeholders and internal team members associated with it. Therefore, traceability is only possible if these individuals can be accurately connected to the items for which they are responsible.

    Knowing who made a decision and what information they accessed is equally as important as the information itself. If you can’t quickly piece that together, your traceability is incomplete. The responsible thing to do is to ease the process by keeping useful records. It doesn’t need to be forced behavior if it’s captured along the way as a byproduct of doing your job.

    Overall, accountability is incomplete and past decisions can’t easily be seen, learned from or built upon without robust, modern traceability tools. It’s much harder to legitimately hold someone accountable when they’re working in the dark. However, when done correctly, traceability can be used as a key tool to support genuine liability and allow for a streamlined process of complex decision-making.

  • How Collaboration Can Optimize Product Development

    Strategic collaboration allows companies to build partnerships and seek solutions that are adaptable and specialized

    Systems engineers have faced complexity since the dawn of time. And while bringing complicated projects to market under old rules, methods and technologies was never a walk in the park, today’s highly competitive market presents new challenges to prove the old rules of product development are defunct. In fact, a recent report from Machina Research, now part of Gartner, estimates the number of connected machine-to-machine devices will increase to 27 billion by 2024, up from 5 billion in 2014. The sheer increase in machine devices alone provides a clear picture of the importance placed on systems engineers to stay the course when navigating product development’s complex nature.

    Within the constantly evolving modern product development system comes an increasingly intricate development process. Today’s system engineers are fighting to fit a square peg into a round hole by using old tactics to solve new challenges. This includes an accelerated rate of innovation, increasingly complex end user asks, tighter deadlines and ever-changing regulations. Alongside these challenges, Forrester Consulting found that product development is facing five main obstacles in keeping teams from true optimization:

    • The confusing and constantly changing nature of requirements and a lack of quick development for solutions.
    • Stakeholders providing conflicting priorities, assumptions and unclear objectives.
    • Difficulty collaborating across globally distributed teams.
    • Unnecessary handoffs and delayed decisions.
    • The increased need for collaboration across diverse roles.

    So what is the solution to these problems, you ask? One could argue strategic team collaboration is the best way to address both the challenges of the modern product development landscape and the obstacles systems engineers are facing. Let’s dig into that a bit deeper.

    Team Collaboration: An Enabler of Innovation

    Teams that are still operating with outdated strategies and systems find themselves unable to adapt and adjust quickly when the market changes. With rapid growth predicted to stay at a steady rate, strategic collaboration allows companies to build partnerships and seek solutions that are adaptable and specialized. This includes sharing data throughout your whole business, including distributed teams and partner organizations, which allows transparency to reach the entire supply chain. With the COVID-19 pandemic causing supply chain halts and the backup of product releases, it is now more important than ever to ensure communication throughout the entire development process.

    With the country leaning on a remote workforce more heavily this year, virtual meetings and emails are not sufficient enough as communication tools for a team that has to coordinate across departments, roles, companies and geographic boundaries. As a first step to meet these demands, system engineers should consider the following strategies:

    1. Ask your team the question, what does success look like? If each member has a different end goal, you will end up wasting valuable time. By defining what success looks like, you can align your teams on what you are building and clarify expectations upfront. This saves time and allows for better communication across teams.
    2. Support better decision-making through situational awareness. When you have communication upfront about a team’s end goal, they are far more likely to make decisions that work toward achieving that. Without situational awareness, employees are unable to comprehend the impact of their decisions or clearly define their roles and responsibilities. This makes it difficult to settle on the right choice when faced with a bump in the road.
    3. Ensure you’re up-to-date with your traceability practices. Especially for those who need to adhere to regulations, traceability analysis allows you to ensure your system holds up under regulatory demands. Further, it meets contractual terms before you encounter a problem.
    4. Create collaboration with a purpose. Ensure relevant data is accessible to everyone to whom it may be relevant, and keep them in the loop on decisions that happen outside the process as much as possible. When you keep your teams in the know, they are able to work collaboratively and with greater situational analysis.

    At the end of the day, your goal should be to empower your whole team through data sharing, transparency and a clear definition of success. When you are able to do this, your team will be better positioned to make decisions that benefit the project and work symbiotically across diverse roles.

    We may not be able to predict exactly where the product development industry is going, but know that there will be rapid innovation. It’s best to prepare your teams now; otherwise, it will be a bumpy ride.

  • 5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    Traceability has always been a useful tool in the development process, but it has become especially important since the COVID-19 outbreak and the increased remote workforce. 

    Where developers and engineers were once working side-by-side, with the ability to discuss their process and keep their team informed, they are now navigating a remote collaboration landscape. According to a 2017 study done by Stack Overflow, there is a correlation for developers between remote work and job satisfaction, and the highest job satisfaction ratings are seen from developers who work remote full time. As technology has grown to make this process easier, remote working is expected to become a norm. 

    Advanced traceability has the potential to hold teams together by allowing increased visibility into each move throughout an entire project. Without traceability, it would be nearly impossible to keep remote teams aligned and on schedule.

    Product development tools have continuously been forced to evolve to keep up with the multi-dimensional nature of requirement, test and risk management. For these processes to be successful, all related variables must work together continuously, at scale, and across teams. 

    We’ve only just started to see how traceability tools can use updated capabilities to streamline the product development process, but we know enough to discuss two things: what’s happening now and what the future may hold.

    Traditionally, traceability could be compared to a map. While not limited to a single view, maps exist to help you navigate your way to a destination. Similarly, traceability leads product developers through every step of their processes, eventually helping them reach their goal. If your map was constantly changing you’d never be able to figure out where you were going, but what if people ahead of you could update it as they went along? This would keep you in the loop of the upcoming twists and turns, and no one would feel blindsided. Traceability makes it easy to share similar production changes with your entire team, all at once.

    In the traceability process, links are built automatically which lets major decision points, reviews and approvals be captured in final documents and reports. This allows for faster and more informed decision making and these live references can exist across versions. 

    With the switch to remote work across the globe, and no immediate end in sight, developers don’t have the option of working side-by-side with their colleagues. Because of this, it is pertinent that they are able to streamline their work in every way possible, and increased traceability is expected to be a pillar of that transition. 

    At the end of the day, connecting the dots is all about making sense of everyone’s decisions. Why did they follow that process, and what factors led them to make the choices they made? 

    In the early days of traceability there wasn’t always room to include every piece of information that you might find relevant down the line. Legacy tools such as the act of manual reporting through Word documents left much to be desired. Today, that’s becoming less of an issue, as developers are allowed more meaningful accountability and insight into interconnections as they happen.

    As we look ahead, we can expect to see these capabilities grow in five different ways.

    Less Manual Effort

    Updating your traceability reports with as little manual effort as possible will be essential to a streamlined, remote workforce. As traceability becomes more advanced, the work to create and maintain it should not become more difficult. 

    More Nuance Captured, Related and Parsed for Meaning

    Improvements in software will make data gathering more precise, and increase the number of items a team can consider relevant, traceable information. This will take additional workloads off of the developers as more items are automatically traced and easily accessible.

    More Attributes Can Define and Predict a Project’s Success 

    If you have a more data-rich, detailed record of activities, it is possible to understand the past with more context and less reliance on costly manual documentation or memory. 

    Dispersed Systems Holding Relevant Information Will Start to Feel Closer and More Interconnected

    Through more dense integration and aligned processes, systems feel more controlled and connected, giving users a more seamless experience.

    Expansion of Communication and Review Capabilities for Stakeholders Who May Be Impacted by Changes

    The availability of a full audit trail of participation will make a big difference in the ease of the review process. The ability to easily see who is impacted by changes will allow teams to proactively manage the effects of said changes.

    In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number of companies who are maintaining their remote work policies, we can expect to see more innovations related to product development workflows. These innovations will enable easier remote collaboration between colleagues and across teams, overall streamlining the product development process.

  • Getting Past Legacy Software Pains in Requirements Management

    Getting Past Legacy Software Pains in Requirements Management

    If you feel like you have outgrown your requirements management (RM) software, you are far from alone. From complex systems, such as IBM Doors, to document-based tracking through Microsoft Office, legacy RM tools are having a hard time catching up to the innovation occurring in highly-regulated industries. As we see the line between hardware and software become increasingly blurred, development methodologies are evolving faster than ever before. Sometimes, these changes happen day-to-day or even hour-to-hour, making project traceability feel impossible.

    No matter how complex the software or notable the reputation, RM providers don’t always deliver a system that matches the goals of teams that need to quickly adapt, innovate and grow. This misalignment can create several pain points that interfere with productivity. While some can be attributed to shifts in the marketplace, others are directly rooted in the software tools you are using to meet compliance.

    Here are some common snafus and how to work your way out of them.

    Multiple Stakeholders, Multiple Problems

    From avionics to automotive to medtech, highly-regulated industries see many different stakeholders and players, and that is a good thing. In order to reach peak public and functional safety, it’s crucial to value the input of multiple roles and skill sets. But, what happens if one or some of these folks don’t know how to use your RM software? At best it’s a shame that they can provide their two cents and at worst this begins a recipe for compliance disaster. To sidestep this conundrum, opt for a software that seamlessly flows with multiple roles. More so, make sure whatever software you choose integreates user-friendly traceability. It’s crucial that each and every individual on the project be able to see the progress made from beginning to end. 

    So, You Missed a Deadline…

    It happens to the best of us. You were asked to provide feedback on a requirement and you missed your shot to chime in. Whether a colleague left a comment for you in a Word or Google Doc or shot over an email to glean your opinion, the mode of collaboration you have in place failed you. That’s right, this isn’t all your fault. Review processes are too complex these days and they require collaboration software that sets the intentions of the users clearly. This requires real-time editing and notifications to help keep you and your team on track. To prevent falling into this trap, look for an RM tool that prompts next steps and sends timely notifications with clear instructions. Conversations about “who dropped the ball” aren’t productive or fair, the RM software you integrate should fill this gap in human error.

    You’ve Been Blocked

    You are frantically trying to enter crucial data into the system but you are somehow locked out. You can’t get a hold of the person who manages access and you are beginning to feel frantic. This isn’t just frustrating for you, it also poses some substantial risks to the company. On top of losing a couple of hours trying to break into the system, this clunky process inevitably chips away at the desire to provide feedback with any regularity or confidence. This goes against the entire purpose of collecting data in the first place. To facilitate continuous growth and data collection, your RM tool should be open, accessible and intuitive. Only then will you encourage the kind of constant input and collaboration from stakeholders that is necessary to keep up with breakneck innovation. 

    When an Upgrade Spells Doom

    Back in the day, we all used to get skittish when an iPhone software upgrade notification popped up on our screen. Will I lose all my photos and contacts? What about all those passwords I saved to log-in to my favorite apps? With the advent of the Cloud, much of this fear has dissipated. When it comes to your RM software, your team shouldn’t be afraid to upgrade the system to fix issues, improve security and access the latest features.

    Yet, these systems are often so customized or patched-together that an upgrade could mean disaster. Because the products you are building change and improve over time, you should have a RM system that can adapt quickly. When it’s time to purchase legacy software, weigh the opportunity costs of investing in something so stale. Ultimately, is the pain of being locked-out or unsupported on various platforms worth the headache?

    Pain points aside, we are living in an age that has bred the most disruptive and creative products to date. From ultra-fast and sleek electric cars to life-like prosthetics to self-piloted spaceships, we have some of the best and brightest minds toiling away on how to propel us into the future. At the same time, the regulatory environment has become even more stringent to meet both the demands of the marketplace and public safety. It is going to take synced and streamlined teams to decrease time-to-market and meet the ever-increasing demands of compliance. To pull this off, you need collaboration infrastructure in place that keeps your team organized and catches mistakes often missed by disconnected individuals.