Bridging the Gap Between Business and Requirements for Faster Delivery

By Eric Nguyen, Director of Business Intelligence at Jama Software.
Successful IoT embedded product delivery faces challenging move toward customer-centric development processes lead by software innovation.
According to a May 2013 report on disruptive technologies from the McKinsey Global Institute, the number of connected machine-to-machine devices has increased 300% since 2008. As software becomes more and more embedded into technology, the rate of innovation accelerates. Software makes products do more, faster, while also escalating rates of delivery. Connected software has also evolved customer expectations around hardware technology. Systems engineering teams know that how critical it is to ensure that all aspects of a project are considered in order to deliver successfully. Most teams also know that the behavior and interactions between system components is not always well known or easily defined.

Successful systems engineers bridge the gap between user or operator requirements and technical specifications all the way through defining characteristics of the systems and subsystems interactions. It’s extremely complicated, and yet, most organizations have few tools for tackling complexity. Companies should focus on providing product and project teams with cross-functional collaboration and elevate the importance of everyone having clear understanding of customer or stakeholder requirements. This is the crux of product success. Additionally, improving relational traceability and instituting reliable change management drives higher-quality production. Finally, reusing existing IP can help accelerate new products and projects and keep you from “reinventing the wheel” each time your team embarks on the journey to a new product.
Unfortunately, the tooling discussions generally center of specific features and functions instead of on how robust solutions can further process transformations necessary to move with speed in modern systems engineering environments. A shift in thinking to a more customer- and stakeholder centric development process opens up opportunity to improve information sharing, collaboration and shared insights. These are the development challenges that can be most readily addressed and ultimately make product delivery more efficient even in the face of growing complexity.