"Selling" Jama In-House

Bob Dilly
edited July 2016 in
I'm in an interesting situation at the moment.  Our department has a new manager as of a couple weeks ago and I'm spending a fair amount of time discussing our processes and tools.  This afternoon we plan to spend 30 minutes on Jama (which won't get us very deep).

Moreover, over the course of the past year there has been a lot of organizational churn, while at the same time our adoption of Jama has grown significantly.  However, all the people involved in evaluating, selecting and deploying Jama who were in my management chain are not there today.  My QA team is of course working in Jama constantly, as few other teams do.

So I got to thinking- is there "role-based" training or help for Jama available (recognizing that our deployment introduces many local tweaks)?  Manager is one role, though that could be sub-divided by QA, Dev, etc.  Another role which I've "trained" is PM- similar, but a little different.  We have engineers watching QA testing progress in real time, sometimes questioning a fail before we have a chance to open a Jira (after convincing ourselves it is repeatable).

In my head, this relates to 
https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/do-you-have-some-time-to-share-your-jama-experiences-... in that thinking about the folks interested in the Jama data may be another way to organize one's approach to deployment.

Anyway, I thought this might be an interesting Jedi topic, since I expect many of us are the go-to people for training, or at least understand the value of Jama to our teams...

Cheers,
Bob

Comments

  • Angela Southworth
    edited November 2015
    Bob- I'd be happy to tell our story about our enterprise rollout and in-house training. Maybe you and I could schedule a time to discuss on the phone.
  • Victoria Mahoney
    Victoria Mahoney System and Business Analyst Manager
    edited November 2015

    I can share what we have implemented so far for training here at CalSTRS and it seems to be working so far. I really hope this concept helps.

    1. We have made the completion of Jama e-learning a pre-requisite for any request of in classroom training. Users have to provide a screenshot when e-learning is completed to be able to enroll to an in class session.

    2. We are scheduling small training sessions (like 10 people) per role (collaborator, creator or reviewer)

    3. We used the License type capabilities matrix and added a few more to develop some material/job aids per role. https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/license-types-and-best-practices for the in classroom sessions. We go per tab (stream first, then project tab, then review tab)

    4. We are using our Jama training environment for real playing with real data. We now have a scheduled maintenance window for refreshing our training environment with production data.

    5. After a training sessions is completed, I send an email with resources available for end users like: Jama user guide, processes if any developed for a project, Jama community link and a mailbox that we created for questions.

    6. After all the above is completed, if there are any customize or ad-hoc training requests then this is given by the Business Analyst handling the project or by the Jama functional Administrator. To the Project Managers, developers, managers and others, because at step 6 they know the functionality of Jama already and what is capable of doing. We then just focus on specific tasks.

    7. We also ask for feedback of our training via surveys to know how we can improve.  

    8. We are keeping a log for reporting purposes of who requests training, who completes and to what level.

    Victoria Carvajal. :o) Good luck Bob!

  • Sebastian Theiß
    edited November 2015
    At my company JAMA is mainly used in our development department. There are only internal customers. Therefore, we don't need special training for different roles (at the moment). 

    We offer two different trainings to all project teams or departments:

    1. Web-Session or on-site training
    This small training (5-15 people) includes following topics:
    - Why doing Requirements Engineering
    - What is a requirement and how to formulate it
    - Why JAMA for requirements?
    - How to Log In 
    - Different Item Types
    - Creating, Relating and Editing Requirements
    - Searching and Filtering
    - Exporting a report
    - Reviews
    - Document Structures (of our specification templates)
    Depending on the audience and their level we focus on different topics. The complete topic of testing is handled by another department.

    2. Hands-on training
    It's a one day training with max 10 people and at least 5 PCs. We are doing some games to introduce JAMA. Everyone has to work with JAMA directly.

    In the future we will need some more training courses especially for processes. I can imagine to split these courses for different roles like (product manager, project manager, developer, tester, reviewer).

    Cheers,
    Sebastian
  • Bob Dilly
    edited November 2015
    Folks - This is great input!  Thanks so much for sharing.

    I love what Victoria described, but Jama is only a (small) part of my responsibilities, and when I'm buried in QA projects I just can't find the time to develop much training.  I think we have around 150 active users, and many not very active at that (just a few logins).  I/T has taken over license management here, but hasn't gotten involved in any training that I know of.  We've found that license type or Jama permissions don't always map to usage role.  Within QA, we've noticed the biggest split is between team leads (Jama Project managers) and team members executing tests.  Our test executors also update as we go, or write test cases, so they need more permission that just for Test Runs.  For the latter group Jama is pretty straightforward.  The former, small group, we deal more with filters, groups, etc., and we rely on a fair number of work-arounds and procedural things to make it hang together.

    What Sebastian describes may be closer to what we do (somewhat) informally.  Elsewhere I think I've mentioned we use a MediaWiki for a knowledge-base of sorts, and the largest topic is Jama (though much is related to out porting process ... now mostly historical).  I think somewhere we have a sort of syllabus of suggested online resources, but not (yet) broken down by role.  We've changed enough in our usage of Jama that the standard Jama help resources only go so far.  Our hands-on training is where we get into our specific usage - which varies considerably by team.

    Bottom line is from a QA team perspective, we have maybe 30 reasonably active users (in 3 parts of the world), so thus far our training has been rather ad hoc.  It has caused some issues and requires occasional reminders about procedural matters.  I can see where better training, perhaps some ongoing would be of benefit, but I've seen that PMs and Managers really visualize Jama very differently than those of us in it every day and all day.  The difference between QA team leads and members is significant, but all the leads have been in it since we started with Jama about 2 years ago- so we've not had to train a lead yet...

    On my long-term to-do list, I'd like to get the stakeholders in our Jama deployment together to discuss consistency in our usage and training.  That's nowhere near the top of my list at the moment...   :-)

    Cheers,
    Bob
  • Knowledge Base
    edited July 2016
    What a timely discussion. As the Learning Specialist here at Jama I am currently developing a workbook that folks like you can use as a starting point for guided hands-on practice tailored to your organization and a user's role. It is designed to be used very much as you have all discussed. 

    This role-specific training speaks to 2/3 of the "universe" of knowledge that I am working in. Success depends on knowledge of people, products, and processes. The product is Jama (and related systems.) That is pretty straightforward. The processes and people are different for each of you so Jama will be counting on you to add those pieces and tailor the training to your organization and your users. 

    I'll be sharing the new workbook in the next week or so, and welcome your feedback. In the meantime let me know if there is anything you must have in such a document.

    Thanks everyone,
    Jerry McCorkle
  • Ryan Dill
    edited November 2015
    Our company has also discussed the idea of in-house role-based training, but we haven't had the time to put a whole lot of work into it at this juncture; it's mostly captured via a "cheat sheet" per R&D division using the tool (since each division has somewhat different processes and work items).

    After each of our divisions using Jama have done a complete release cycle inside the tool, we expect to have much more information about what worked and what didn't, including the importance of developing more specific role-based training.
    Ryan Dill
  • Sebastian Theiß
    edited November 2015
    That's sounds really good.