21–30 of 79 posts
Some of our clients use MS TFS and it's a complicated mess
My biggest problem with using these tools is mandates forced by someone in the company that no one on my team has ever met. As another commenter pointed out, I just want a big checklist, with sub check lists, and a handful of properties, that i can create update and delete at will. Instead of being a tool to help us do our job more efficiently, it has become a source of busy work, that requires extra employees to use…
#1 - "Those who manage best, manage least." Spend the minimal amount of time on project management. Even project managers should spend a minimal amount of their time "project managing," which leads directly to #2...
#2 - "Project manager is a task, not a job." No one in the company should be a "project manager," and nothing else.
The rationale is that if project management is a job, project management becomes the sole work output. And optimizing for that output leads to all the worst excesses I've seen at companies. And consequently, all the shit products (or shit design choices within good products) listed.
If you have a perfectly tracked project that took 100s of person-hours to generate and update tracking docs, what does that do for your end users?
People do their jobs. Make sure everyone's ultimate job is to bring value to the company.
PS: And to head off the complaint that this ignores project scale, your company is not IBM. You don't have the management problems 1960s IBM had. So stop using solutions to "How do I orchestrate the progress of 100s of developers all working on the same project?!" Because the number of projects that large, that can't be broken into subprojects, is very few.
If you've got a team of people that need a lot of hand-holding, the two can be the same. In most cases though there is a lot of experience on the team. In that case task management too easily becomes micromanaging.
What is needed instead is managing against milestones and trusting your team members to execute against it. Some team members can be trusted on certain tasks more than others, but the solution is closely monitoring those that need support, not forcing task tracking across the entire team.
Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1
Atlassian is a blight. Developers are supposed to be informed consumers of software. Yet Atlassian applies an information hiding strategy to UX which means that their tools often have features that you simply do not know about because your role doesn’t allow that feature. How are we supposed to reason about the possible if people are hiding information? I have coworkers doing horrible manual processes or stuffing she…
Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1
It ticks all of the boxes and more boxes than its competitors in customers' managements' requirements spreadsheet, it's priced to sell well, there is an ecosystem and a marketplace, and the sales demos show that all of this works smoothly.
We should be praising Atlassian for following the UNIX philosophy, not condemning it.
Many problems have come from people conflating "task management" with "project management". If you've got a team of people that need a lot of hand-holding, the two can be the same. In most cases though there is a lot of experience on the team. In that case task management too easily becomes micromanaging. What is needed instead is managing against milestones and trusting your team members to execute against it. Some…
Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1
I'm hesitant to post the link as it's still very alpha, but I am developing a Jira alternative for exactly this reason! Check out https://tahsk.com and let me know what you think I'd love some initial feedback.
Everyone does Task #1 fantastically. Task #1 is easy, it's greenfield by definition.
How does your solution scale to Task #5509 when things have gone pear-shaped and there are legacy considerations that demand consideration?