[eksemplar]

I think jira is terrible because it’s complexity does the opposite of what you want management tools to do. It slows production to a crawl unless you invest heavily into change management and into building processes and training.

That being said, I think you’d be facing an impossible fight.

No developer loves these tools, and as a manager you hear complaints about almost everything imaginable, and if you have jira, and you think it’s working for you, then it’ll be hard to change your mind.

Leading upwards is really challenging, because you’ll need to show the financial cost of using jira and present an alternative as well as a plan and a budget for how to get there if you want to convince your manager, and you’re probably not paid to do that.

[dahdum]

I know some orgs end up with crazy Jira processes, but after using it for 7 years in my last company it would be (or similar) the first thing I set up for company larger than 5 people.

We never used the workflows much, didn’t go crazy with required fields, and didn’t over analyze reports. It quickly expanded beyond the tech team. Each department created their own projects of their own accord and used them heavily. It saved a ton of emailing and left a record we could refer back to.

OP shouldn’t have too much trouble mapping their current process to Jira unless they aren’t organizing their work at all.

[eksemplar]

We use jira with around 10 different partners of ours. Where we buy software development on open source projects, but take code-base ownership and handle project management.

We use jira because it’s what the companies use internally, and being in project management in the public sector with more than 500 it systems, well, we’ve been around a lot of tools and know how to adapt to them.

I’ve only seen jira utilised in a way that wasn’t wasteful at one company though, and they’d spent a lot of time streamlining the way they used jira as well as how they wanted us to interact with them.

Every where else they would have done better with a white board and sticky notes, even though that’s not something I’d really recommend either. The worst example was a company that had to assign their own project manager to everything because their developers didn’t know how to label, move or even register things “correctly” in their own jira.

That’s why I think jira is terrible, because it’s designed to fail you miserably unless you spent resources beating it into submission.

Once you’ve beaten it into submission, however, it’s a marvellous tool. I’m just not into that process, I want my technology to work out the box without customisation. That gives me less freedom, but I don’t really care about freedom in “hour registration/planning” software, I simply want it to be as anonymous and easy going as possible with minimal effort.

[mbrodersen]

You are making broad sweeping statements about things you can't possibly know ("No developer loves these tools" and "It slows production to a crawl ...") It might be the case that it is your subjective experience. However it certainly isn't mine (having used JIRA for years).