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Alex Hayman-Joyce
Member Posts: 4
My organisation has been using Jama for a couple of months now and I am pleased to say it has been well received. As a Business Analyst in a fairly typical in-house ICT services department, my main aim is to track, manage and test against business requirements throughout the lifecycle of our service delivery projects. We also use it for managing UAT and have found the Review Centre to be an excellent collaboration tool with the business. Recently I have been experimenting with adding more of our project controls to Jama with a view to maintaining as much interrelated information in one place, instead of scattered around in emails, Sharepoint lists and spreadsheets.
A major benefit is it enables us to use Jama's Relate function to maintain the traceability of Risks, Issues, Actions, Decisions, Discussions and Change Requests cross-referenced to Business Requirements as the project progresses, so I never lose track of who said what, why and when. No more hunting through old email chains or manually archiving decisions on Sharepoint against that dreaded day when the PM holds me to account for an obscure change made to a requirement 18 months ago!
Another key driver for me is the ability to create live, visual reports against data held across the project portfolio. I have demonstrated this to our PMO and they are intrigued with the idea of moving weekly reporting from Powerpoint slides (if I ever find the person who came up with that idea there will be a reckoning) to displaying a single Jama Dashboard with the capability to drill down into detail on demand.
I'm not quite there yet - Jama only has a rudimentary capability for tracking milestones (we could abuse the "Releases" functionality, but as we're not a development house it's not entirely satisfactory); and the tracking of project progress is challenging to do (Burn Down charts and similar features have been discussed elsewhere). Still, progress!
Please share your ideas. I'd love to know how others have used Jama imaginatively!
A major benefit is it enables us to use Jama's Relate function to maintain the traceability of Risks, Issues, Actions, Decisions, Discussions and Change Requests cross-referenced to Business Requirements as the project progresses, so I never lose track of who said what, why and when. No more hunting through old email chains or manually archiving decisions on Sharepoint against that dreaded day when the PM holds me to account for an obscure change made to a requirement 18 months ago!
Another key driver for me is the ability to create live, visual reports against data held across the project portfolio. I have demonstrated this to our PMO and they are intrigued with the idea of moving weekly reporting from Powerpoint slides (if I ever find the person who came up with that idea there will be a reckoning) to displaying a single Jama Dashboard with the capability to drill down into detail on demand.
I'm not quite there yet - Jama only has a rudimentary capability for tracking milestones (we could abuse the "Releases" functionality, but as we're not a development house it's not entirely satisfactory); and the tracking of project progress is challenging to do (Burn Down charts and similar features have been discussed elsewhere). Still, progress!
Please share your ideas. I'd love to know how others have used Jama imaginatively!
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Comments
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Hi Alex -
If the Jama dashboards don't capture everything you are looking for, you might want to try adding a custom BIRT report. We have had other customers use a BIRT report to look across all projects in Jama and it shows specific metrics for each project, as well as in aggregate.
Shawnna Williams0
