A good tool cannot guarantee good results, but a bad tool can shape its user's behavior in bad ways. The same individual without that tool might have behaved differently. I have seen this in what I call design-by-ticket where all the why and how for a design decision, including design by committee meeting notes, get put in jira tickets.
It is hard to say for sure, but this organization used configuration controlled documents for design documentation before atlassian came along. When they made the switch (and hired oodles of graduates) suddenly about half of them ignore confluence or latex for design, because "jira has markdown". Oh hurray, we have a bad typesetting language mixed in with our bug tracker, lets shove our entire design in there! It is possible this is the influence of the graduates we hired, but it felt like everyone got there together while playing with the new toy.
Can't but help to feel that what you describe is a breakdown of both organization and work process.
It wasn't atlassian that "came along" - someone penned down an agreement and, from what it sounds, there was a lack of clarity both in regards to current and future principles of work and collaboration.
What we can do, as devs, to protect ourselves from the madness you describe is to be explicit about our work processes and their purpose.
Nothing much, but just a set of agreed upon principles and ways of working which should have nothing to do with tools.
What you end up with, by being explicit, is for having "something" to be supported by one or several tools.
Makes it easier to evaluate, select and change tooling that is fit for purpose.
The thing I've found is that Jira has so many fields on its tickets that beg to be filled in, that PMs start filling them in, and before you know it they're all mandatory and must be filled in. And organising that much state in the tickets becomes a full-time job, and so the PM ends up doing that - managing the state of Jira rather than managing the state of the project. The two become synonymous when they're not. When they inevitably diverge all the usual problems of project management get exacerbated horribly (in part because what should happen is all the state in Jira gets thrown away as it doesn't reflect reality, but that's a huge sunk cost so no-one does it).
So yeah, I have found that the tool shapes the process, not the other way around.
It would probably work the other way around if every organisation built their own project management tooling around their own processes. But that would be insane.
If you provide a tool that let's managers easily and arbitrarily increase the requirements on their employees, over time they'll continue to do so, because it's a management tool and their job is to manage.
I experienced this phenomenon when I was a designer / CNC programmer. We had a form for requesting a part to be designed and machined. It had a box for tolerance allowance, where the person requesting a part could specify how tight all the tolerances should be, and we had recently added in 0.0005 inches to the options, at the request of a customer. I left for a month to do training at another location and came back to find a ridiculously long backlog of work. The manager who'd stepped in for me had decided that tighter tolerances would make better products, so was selecting 0.0005" tolerance for every feature on every part.
To make up for how ridiculously slow that made the machining process, he tried to micro-optimize work flows, readjust hours, push machine operators to "work harder". He wasn't a bad person, was an okay manager, we'd just given him the option of doing something stupid, and he'd done it then tried to use his managing skills to make it work.
If you give someone the tool to do their job, make sure that misusing it feels hard.
He obviously did not understand what his job as a manager is about.
Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?
It makes no sense and is first and foremost a management and cultural issue. Second a work process issue. Solid third, one of competency. Probably ways below numerous other problems lies the tool.
You obviously needed to be able to set tight tolerances for some work, so… you seem to need the setting on occasion.
These stories just blow wind in my sails!
If you have management like this (american?) you must be measured like crazy - set goals based on metrics that will push things in a direction you see effective.
> Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?
Because the tool allowed it. What you’re failing to grasp is that UI has a massive influence on how humans behave.
People see empty fields and think they should fill them out.
Jira very frequently encourages over-specifying things by the ticket filer (it doesn’t hide fields by default and “helpful” human behavior is to provide as much info as possible).
The second order effect is that the project managers realize they can add fields and people start filling them with data. This is great for visibility without having to poll all of the employees! Except now it’s garbage data because the wrong people are filling in the data or they are bad guesses and inevitably that rolls up into a report that causes problems later.
Jira is a bad tool because it misleads both people and product managers into thinking they can get data from it that they realistically can’t.
> He obviously did not understand what his job as a manager is about.
> Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?
He's not the expert in the field, I am. Normally, I would have vetted the work orders and fixed it before hand. This is similar to managers in the software world, where the team lead or senior engineer would say," No, we won't do that, it's a bad idea". He never should have been exposed to an option that could screw everything up so badly, but I mistakenly left it on the form. He was just trying to fix what he perceived as a potential problem. He was used to making small changes to work orders to save money or get a more refined product.
The biggest problem with our company's structure is that the operators, for whatever BS org reason, don't have the "pay grade" to tell him to pound sand. Managers need to sit below engineers, in my opinion.
> you must be measured like crazy - set goals based on metrics that will push things in a direction you see effective.
In my sector of manufacturing, margins are king (regardless of locale). If you can cut 10 seconds from an operation, or find a tool that lasts 20% longer, you can save tens of thousands of dollars a year, so we track everything.
I'm willing to entertain that the teams using Jira are just making worse choices about the work principles they agree on than our teams using gitlab issues, and that it is coincidental and unrelated to the tool. Surely you agree though, that in general a tool can adversely affect user behavior? The agile manifesto said to value tools and process es less than individuals and interactions, not to discount their impact altogether. Developing software in a single paradigm language when your domain is better suited to a different paradigm is a horrific blunder I have witnessed twice in my career. Developing giant systems using vba macros in excel is a common mistake you hear about. I can however believe that the teams that selected jira over gitlab might have done so because they already bad this use pattern in mind, and not because the tool encouraged it.
many organizations are overwhelmed with inexperienced new graduates; they end up doing what they want or how they did things in college projects.
then they get promoted, and may never learn / experience why a task / defect tracker is not where you store requirements / design.
(note: the above comments are for long lived software only. it you rewrite your web site from first principles every you, do whatever. it doesn't matter)
