6 ms·

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majo

by beart 6y ago

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Well, we happen to have a world-ending event on deck right now, I assume at least some orgs might be interested in something free with a similar feature set to Jira... (of course, if it wasn't also sadistically hard to use and configure that'd be a plus).
iba99 6y ago
Does a pandemic count? JK. Frankly- RN we're more optimized for smaller teams. We lack the admin/user control and SAML functionality that Jira has for larger teams. It should be interesting to see if new teams about to on-board Jira cloud find the heavy config and long load times annoying and consider making the switch. Majority of teams (for now) switch from Notion for sprints, Trello or Asana.
rexpop 6y ago
> I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move. What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather, content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is there any semblance of democracy? I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual Contributor. As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change 1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ 2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/
- beart 6y ago
  I've attempted to push change at a local level (team + department) in various forms with limited success. Generally, I get a lot of positive feedback and "we should do that!" responses without any follow through. At one point some of my pushing lead to a significant departmental change. However, within a short time frame, just as everyone was starting to buy in, something new came down the pipe from on-high and became "the thing". More recently my approach has been to bypass any sort of organizational hierarchy. Instead I've identified a handful of peers who seem interested in these things and figuring out how we can make our lives easier even if no one else wants to get on board. But this only works for things that are not mandated by the company.
bberenberg 6y ago
Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company. In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there. If you're at an org where it feels like Jira is holding you back, and you don't see the org changing tools in the near future, the best thing I can recommend is to bring in an external team to show the org how to clean it up. Feel free to ping me if you need help (info in profile)
- Scarblac 6y ago
  Or maybe the problem with Jira is that bringing in an external consultant is the best recommendation.
  - bberenberg 6y ago
    Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can also learn how to use it and do it yourself. My experience is that if an org decides to use <HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE TOOL> then they will do it wrong the first time without external assistance. This holds true even for popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git. Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly configurable that makes it easy for users to set it up and then scale it over time without learning the specific domain knowledge. Jira is no different in that sense. If you have an example of a tool that bucks this trend, please share it, I would love to play with it and see what I can learn about how to better serve users in this type of use case.
    - Scarblac 6y ago
      I feel that Jira first adds a lot of restraints and red tape, and then makes those highly configurable. I prefer tools that don't have the constraints in the first place. Ie if in the middle of the sprint a developer finds that some tickets are stuck waiting for some other team and he wants a column on the board to make that visible, he should just be able to add the column. In Jira if I accidentally put the wrong issue in Done, I have no idea how to get it out... It's the complete opposite. A physical whiteboard with post-its is rather good. You can use different colors, if each team member has one magnet with his/her name then it can't be on multiple tickets at once, you can draw lines and write words wherever, it's very flexible. What an online tool should add, besides corona compatibility, is being a good issue tracker. Jira doesn't seem much different on that front compared to almost everything else I've used. What Jira adds is lots of rules and constraints and imposed structure that gets in the way. We are in the process of leaving it in favour of Github projects.

by beart 6y ago

blacksmith_tb 6y ago

Well, we happen to have a world-ending event on deck right now, I assume at least some orgs might be interested in something free with a similar feature set to Jira... (of course, if it wasn't also sadistically hard to use and configure that'd be a plus).

iba99 6y ago

Does a pandemic count? JK. Frankly- RN we're more optimized for smaller teams. We lack the admin/user control and SAML functionality that Jira has for larger teams. It should be interesting to see if new teams about to on-board Jira cloud find the heavy config and long load times annoying and consider making the switch. Majority of teams (for now) switch from Notion for sprints, Trello or Asana.

rexpop 6y ago

> I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move. What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather, content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is there any semblance of democracy? I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual Contributor. As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change 1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ 2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/

beart 6y ago
I've attempted to push change at a local level (team + department) in various forms with limited success. Generally, I get a lot of positive feedback and "we should do that!" responses without any follow through. At one point some of my pushing lead to a significant departmental change. However, within a short time frame, just as everyone was starting to buy in, something new came down the pipe from on-high and became "the thing". More recently my approach has been to bypass any sort of organizational hierarchy. Instead I've identified a handful of peers who seem interested in these things and figuring out how we can make our lives easier even if no one else wants to get on board. But this only works for things that are not mandated by the company.

bberenberg 6y ago

Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company. In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there. If you're at an org where it feels like Jira is holding you back, and you don't see the org changing tools in the near future, the best thing I can recommend is to bring in an external team to show the org how to clean it up. Feel free to ping me if you need help (info in profile)

Scarblac 6y ago
Or maybe the problem with Jira is that bringing in an external consultant is the best recommendation.
- bberenberg 6y ago
  Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can also learn how to use it and do it yourself. My experience is that if an org decides to use <HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE TOOL> then they will do it wrong the first time without external assistance. This holds true even for popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git. Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly configurable that makes it easy for users to set it up and then scale it over time without learning the specific domain knowledge. Jira is no different in that sense. If you have an example of a tool that bucks this trend, please share it, I would love to play with it and see what I can learn about how to better serve users in this type of use case.
  - Scarblac 6y ago
    I feel that Jira first adds a lot of restraints and red tape, and then makes those highly configurable. I prefer tools that don't have the constraints in the first place. Ie if in the middle of the sprint a developer finds that some tickets are stuck waiting for some other team and he wants a column on the board to make that visible, he should just be able to add the column. In Jira if I accidentally put the wrong issue in Done, I have no idea how to get it out... It's the complete opposite. A physical whiteboard with post-its is rather good. You can use different colors, if each team member has one magnet with his/her name then it can't be on multiple tickets at once, you can draw lines and write words wherever, it's very flexible. What an online tool should add, besides corona compatibility, is being a good issue tracker. Jira doesn't seem much different on that front compared to almost everything else I've used. What Jira adds is lots of rules and constraints and imposed structure that gets in the way. We are in the process of leaving it in favour of Github projects.