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by wharvle 871 days ago
> 5. Excessive time on making agile work such as time on Jira story points, backlog grooming, retros, meeting minutes, agendas, scrums (designed to again, make management appear like they are doing something)

I lose so very much time to not just the ceremonies, but to wrestling-with/losing-things-in all these bafflingly complex tools like Jira or Asana or "Azure Devops" and such.

Most places I've been use Github or Gitlab. The issue trackers there are fine. They're close to the code, and in a site I'm already using. They're easy to have conversations in. They work well with built-in review processes, and with pull/merge requests. They don't permit enough strict structure that one worries about smashing some PM's carefully-constructed sandcastle by just trying to use them, but have enough filters and tagging and such that you can apply every bit as much logical structure as I've ever seen in Jira and friends, if you want to, it just won't also make it horrible to use when you do.

I wonder sometimes what % of productivity companies are losing by letting PMs pick where tickets & communication about tickets live. Plus the extra cost of the tools themselves.

1 comments

My previous team is getting into a fight with a new project manager who doesn't want to acknowledge the logistical issues of trying to fit a new agile framework into "Azure DevOps", and the team doesn't want to admit that their current workflow is suboptimal because of the change that will entail.

And of course, the politics of using anything besides ADO will take years.