Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything, especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved. At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras don't lie, right?
Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views.
Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand.
And yet when you ask if we can change from JIRA to something else they say "but my reporting".
Twice now I've worked at places that used Jira, and all it takes is one corner of the company to leverage it for some random oddball purpose to make it painfully slow.
One place started using it for managing thousands of assets, and eventually they were paying contractors tens of thousands to optimize their JIRA instance and untangle the mess.
Same thing is happening at my current company, where even in the last few months it's gotten painfully slower.
You're spot on about that. I've been the "someone" dev lead doing this so often I decided that someone should build a system that does this. You can see my progress so far at fixed.pm
If you are a PM and you come on a team that isn't using JIRA, and you want JIRA with all it's fancy bells and whistles, that's fine. Set up a board yourself, write all the tickets, capture all the work that's happening based on the dev's tool they are currently using, and update all the knobs and buttons to your heart's content.
My guess is the infatuation with JIRA would quickly diminish if this was so.
JIRA is the case of a product made for buyers/deciders rather than for final users, like the dreaded enterprise ERP.
Atlassian's Product Managers believe their product is mostly used by other product managers, but they're dead wrong. Not that it matters, anyway. Atlassian could probably fire all PMs tomorrow and it would be the same, as long as the software ticks all the necessary boxes it will still sell the same. Just hire more marketing, sales and evangelists.
