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Admin
Hmm... Semms them never heard of a Theme...
Admin
Seems to me that the PMO never heard about Themes. Or exactly how agile is... Or what project management is, actually.
Admin
... or as Machivellie wrote in The Prince (1513) “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”
Admin
Is Jira TRWTF of today?
Admin
Yes.
Admin
Use of JIRA as an issue tracker is a key indicator of company quality & processes.
In that, if company X uses JIRA and company Y don't, always go with Y. If we accept that 'Code Smell' exists, JIRA is a strong 'Support Smell'
Admin
Been there, walked out (of a lucrative contract). When will people learn:
Admin
You'd be right, except so many of the alternatives are also terrible. There is a narrow edge between too lightweight a set of support processes and too heavy. That edge might be thinner than a razor…
Admin
If I had the chance to start over, I would make prison grade kiosks, something that could survive a truck hitting it and can be hosed down from about 50 feet away. I wouldn't hire anybody. Just make it an open air job shop, and people go there to click and tap stuff. I don't want to hire anyone. I don't want to know there names. I don't even want them to read. Just use icons like the McDonald's cash register. People in. Software out.
I wouldn't tell anyone either. Something pops up under a tarp like a black monolith spurring human evolution. No. I don't want to use your phone. Your phone sucks and is full of garbage schemes.
That's how the Japanese envisioned continuous improvement, the grocery store. Anyone anywhere can walk into one and know what to do. Instead of money for food, reverse it.
Admin
No, that's pretty much the essence of Agile.
After all, what could be more Agile than changing the name of a slab of work from "epic" to "story?" I mean, there's no definitional value in either label. Have at it! Play cretinous "agile" management games!
In real life, Agile is bereft of use.
But then, Agile is designed for Management. And Management is far from real life.
Admin
| Any sort of organizational change is potentially scary, to at least some of the staff.
Well yes, because we've been here many times before - and 4 times out of 5 management f@#$s it up and just makes things worse. Or doesn't make it any better or worse, just spends a phenomenal amount of time and effort rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
I AM a cooperator - at least till it becomes clear that things are really off the rails - but at least allow me my well earned trepidation.
Admin
In situations like this it's usually best to ignore management entirely if you want to keep your job. As soon as their tangled web of organizational complexity gets in the way of actual work, they'll throw you under the bus immediately when you get snagged by it. On the other hand if you ignore them, they probably won't notice.
Admin
I got the impression that Initech is my employer. Nothing is ever done and the rules constantly change.
Admin
I'm sure the process this company was going through was terrible and chock full of stupid politics and people protecting their position.
But changing your mind about what level an Epic is versus labelling feature stories, whether to use stories or tasks for the things in each sprint and so in isn't really a WTF - they are non-obvious subjective calls and until you try you won't find what the best fit for your organisation is. JIRA (or whatever tool you use instead) is where engineering/development meets management, so it's always going to have some compromises to have things in a way that both sides understand, and when you switch platform you need to work out where those are.
Admin
Agile is designed to get things done. It mostly leaves management out, so management has fought back by twisting agile to a point where it is no longer serving its original purpose.
Admin
The Scrum variant of Agile tend to be more of Scrotum
Admin
Looks like my company
Admin
Treat Features as Epics Treat Stories as Features Treat Tasks as Stories Treat Sub-tasks as Tasks If you need Sub-tasks, create a spreadsheet to track them within your team.
By the transitive law, everything is an Epic, but only the PMO guards can create Epics. Everyone was effectively booted out of Jira, back to their old, lovely spreadsheets. At least they can actually compute things using spreadsheets.
Admin
#iminthispictureandidontlikeit
Admin
You can get the same effect even without anyone being obstructive. All you need to do is change part of your tech stack every year or two, especially if not everybody does it at the same time.
For instance, our IT department some years ago put Jira into place for managing tickets, which was kind of OK. Then the company, having seen the benefits of task management, decided that all teams (not just IT) would use Asana for their tasks, which after a while also worked kind of OK once everyone got used to it. But the support people needed Zendesk so they could talk to customers, and then the IT department wanted to use Jira Service Desk to impose some kind of order on the requests that were flooding in, so now IT is using Jira, support uses Zendesk (there's some integration between these, thankfully, though not really enough), and most other people are using Asana. A few of my backlog tickets have moved from Jira to Asana and back to Jira again.
My team's documentation is partly on Confluence, partly on MS Teams, and partly on SharePoint. Sometimes there are different versions of the same document on all three. Which version's the current one? That depends on the document. At the moment we're aiming to have it all on Confluence, but ask me again in a couple of years.
Communication apps are another source of fun here. We've thankfully managed to mostly standardise on MS Teams, although we also need Webex because that's what the meeting room systems are set up with. (It didn't take much time to identify which was superior once the whole company started working from home. The first corporate briefing killed Webex utterly.) We did also use Zoom somewhat while working from home but thankfully that's relegated to the margins now. Still need to have it installed of course, because sometimes external parties organise meetings over it.