It is fashionable to hate on JIRA for software developers. Project Management made spaghetti. It has its faults, but the biggest issue is what it allows. It’s not opinionated, so any user can define any process to follow. It’s a perfect machine for generating red tape, or paper clips.
Because every time something goes wrong, the natural instinct is to add a new process, a new safety net, to make sure it doesn’t happen again [see Agile is Dead blog post]. And once added, they’re very difficult to remove.
So we get processes upon processes, the simple rhythm of a ticket lifecycle or of a sprint adorned with Deferents and Epicycles as we try and tame ever-increasing complexity with more text boxes and more statuses.
Complexity cannot fix complexity. But who has time for simplicity? This is the fundamental paradox of enterprise that Agile, and every “new big thing” is meant to resolve: complexity is added to reduce risk, but the complexity itself creates risk, and makes the risk harder to name, harder to spot, and harder to recover from if it is realised.
We have the 5 whys, the blameless retrospectives. And whilst the intention is sound – blame the system, not the individual – the solution is often to add new trinkets around the edges of the system. And reinforce that the system is the only way. They mistakenly put process at the centre, and ask the people to support the process, whereas the process should support the people.
But of course, this creates the shadow IT departments and the “non-compliant” centres. One place I worked had a strict policy that no one has admin rights because that fixed a problem lost to the mists of time. I understand the benefit of the policy, but at the time all our developers were working on IIS and couldn’t develop the websites we were paid for without having admin access on our machines. And so we had dispensations and workarounds until ASP.net core fixed the underlying issue of requiring admin access to serve web content.
Some companies stack procedure on top of procedure because the project is the centre of their universe rather than business value. And every company is in danger of falling into that trap as they treat risk management as risk elimination, instead of mitigation or recovery. They condemn every project to the tarpit of success, sinking below the crushing weight of process where sunlight cannot penetrate.
You will never have a process that prevents the next failure. You need a process to detect and recover, and you need to remove 99% of the “just in case” procedures from your process.
You don’t need to double-check the prime DVD copy before sending it for distribution, because no one has a DVD drive on their servers. You don’t need to change the admin passwords when someone leaves because there should not be an admin account that isn’t attached to a user. Eliminate the process, because every process you have is a process someone can forget. The best process is one you don’t need because the risk it mitigates cannot be represented by the system.
Either accept that you are not the centre of the universe and rewrite your rules to understand that you merely orbit the sun like so many others, or live out the fantasy that you are special, that your problems are unique, and add deferents on top of epicycles when the universe tries to disabuse you of that notion.
You can’t control the universe, only how you react to it. So don’t use JIRA to enforce pi to be 3.2.
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