There’s a theory under agile, lean and similar methodologies that if something is painful, you should do more of it. If releases are infrequent and error-prone and once a quarter, do them 10 times a day and they’ll get easier.
Same idea with performance reviews, customer feedback, and security audits. If it’s a good idea and it’s painful, practice it and refine it until it’s natural and mostly painless. And the pain that’s left is manageable. Roll back the release, and have another catch-up tomorrow once tempers have dampened.
I’ve seen people make the mistake of assuming that it should apply to everything. Every pain point is a gathering, a thing to be controlled, minimised and made less painful, by repeating it over and over again. After all, if it works over there, it should also work over here.
But not all pain is equal.
Remember, focusing on doing something more means that we deal with the pain by eliminating it. We automate releases so we can throw out that painful checklist. We give small, actionable feedback at the time, rather than a sucker punch that brews for months until it’s released in the appraisal.
But don’t mistake pain for discomfort. Making big improvements will mean transitions that are scary and uncomfortable. And what’s painful for someone else might not be painful for you. That doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real and it still needs to be dealt with.
Here’s a few things that are painful because you shouldn’t be doing them. These are the pebbles in your shoes that you need to remove.
It’s painful because it was never built for that
I know there’s a lot of hate for JIRA. It’s the tool of choice for “Safe Agile” enterprises. Andit gets a bad rep for being an overcomplicated monstrosity.
I was a JIRA admin once, bringing the tool into our enterprise. There were things I didn’t like about it on a technical level, but the central tool, with the defaults, isn’t terrible. But it’s so customisable, that you can codify any corporate process you like. And when it causes frustration, people blame the tool, not the admin. When the tool is the process, it makes concrete what people could fudge, and suddenly everyone has to work the way of the manager who needs to show their impact.
Start with the people. Don’t build a process around what people should do. Find out what they actually do and build from there. Some of it might be wrong, but find out why, and help them fall into the pit of success.
Don’t blame the tool for a broken process.
Top comments (0)