My day job is working for a company that competes with Jira. There is a huge trend in the enterprise space to replace their PPM tools with something that is "more agile but still has accountability".
What has happened is enterprises realize they need to change how they do business in order to compete. So, they implement agile, slap a new "trendy" software on top of it that isn't Planview and BAM! We're in digital transformation mode - right?
Here's a super dirty secret that will come as no surprise to folks in this forum: organizations that do this see, quantifiably, very low change in velocity. They see higher levels of accountabilty which, a nasty byproduct of this, is siloed teams and company politics (ever heard "that's not my job"?). In fact, people who institute software like this experience an increase in overhead for creating decks, dashboards, and the like to report out on how "accurate" their timelines are. Guess what? The project timeline rebase rate for MOST enterprises is still the same or higher.
What I do find fascinating is that there is a small subculture of companies who are getting that it's not the software that makes them better - its the culture. And the culture starts with their managers. To further this, the ones that we see become most effective that that BS term "digital transformation" and ultimately more competitive/innovative, are the ones who get rid of their managers and hire leaders who can lead a culture, lead teams, inspire them, push them, and GTFO out of their way. In our research, teams and organizations that focus on outcomes instead of deadlines produce faster, higher quality, and measurably larger ROI than ones that don't.
Anyway... sorry for the rant. This is a sore topic in our company right now because we tout that we're helping shape the new world of work yet internally we do the same stuff we've always done.
Once the boss has thrown it through a pivot table and generated their own conclusions you're now not only fighting to get the correct conclusions forward, you have to fight management's ego when you tell them they've missed some important aspect in their analysis.
no matter how good the software is , the people using it can make it suck , especially something like communication software
Ive said that things like jira are all about clarity , organization and making process strict. If you dont have that then the tickets become a bunch of unproductive threads.
Also with enough determination you can turn an excel/google spreadsheet into a good bug tracker
I think their software is pretty good , but bad PMs bad process and it doesnt matter. If you managers cant decide a consistent way to run a sprint youll never be able to efficiently record and track it.
Its like we are putting the cart before the horse. Before we can create a good organization tool we need people that want to be organized.
I hate Confluence and am absolutely stealing that phrase!
Confluence is actually pretty useful.
So much mumbo jumbo that says absolutely nothing.
Or a future AI "CEO" that is optimizing across a portfolio of companies.
The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward.
This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual day to day work.
I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders (1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and summary tooling that doesn't add any overhead to team leaders and ICs, not more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need better information on the desks of leadership, not more data points. We need more efficient communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose.
These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now, and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well-aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which functional task-board does it belong to?