The use of JIRA is (often) a symptom of a Management problem.

JIRA. The ticket management come agile project management tool, so regularly selected by clients. I have no beef with JIRA per se, but its the one we come across the most.

Here’s what a colleague said, just this morning about JIRA:

“We must ensure JIRA usage is identical across teams, in order to ensure velocity parity”

Now obviously this is a blatant transgression — absolute, unequivocal application of Taylorist management in the context of a Product Development mindset. I carefully pointed out to her that the team, the work, the system of work were barely comparable, but to no avail. Rules are rules after all. This is because the use of JIRA had been mandated centrally and teams have been carefully instructed on how to use it, down to tracking start and end times of individual tasks.

So, clearly this is no fault of JIRA — I (as I’m sure you) have seen it used many a time successfully, but all to often, it is used (and abused) as a top down management tool, mandated from the centre. Its a pattern that we see so regularly, we’ve developed a tooling to keep JIRA and boards in sync, hacked systems together to enable “people and interactions over process and tools” but this point seems to consistently be missed.

Until managers can accept that in order to create true centres of innovation, they need to stop creating, and start removing the very constraints that got them to the standstill they are at today, I’m afraid their initiatives for improvement are destined for failure.