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Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by kqr on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @04:59AM (#36401414)
This reads like a really good review of Miro!

Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. That way you get both collaboration (because they picked one thing together) and the most appropriate tool for the work to be done.

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by gumby on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @05:32AM (#36401628)
> Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools.

Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem).

Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set and the other a different stack and there aren’t enough licenses for both.

And so on. It’s like having each team use its own code formatting rules or coding standard.

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by tobr on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @05:46AM (#36401734)
I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.
Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by OJFord on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @06:42AM (#36402113)
GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that.

(You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by tobr on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @07:44AM (#36402662)
“You must use this tool for this specific collaborative process” is not the same thing as “You must not use this tool at all”.
Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @03:04PM (#36408919)
As 'zokier pointed out[0], we live in the age of apps. If you're not allowed to use this tool for collaborative process, often enough you may just as well not use it at all - as moving data between apps is usually a manual process that's boring, time-consuming, and lossy. Modern apps are tools of control, not cooperation.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402497

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by gumby on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @10:30AM (#36404547)
It seems that at her company, some people do use Figma for internal documentation. SHM.
Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by kqr on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @06:07AM (#36401876)
For the first problem, I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions. Work however you want, but sure as hell publish in a standardised format supported across the organisation.

For the second problem, I guess I don't have much to say because I haven't tried running a large company. I just have never heard any good reason to be stingy with licences. On the other hand, the time I have wasted and the extra work I have done to get around problems caused by upper managment being stingy with licences has cost a lot more than the licence would.

I guess this will immediately make people discard my opinion, but I don't actually feel very strongly about each team having its own formatting rules or coding standard. It's not hard to adapt to the local conventions and the consequences of formatting rules are incredibly local.

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by zokier on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @07:27AM (#36402497)
> I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions

That is a position that has been lost ages ago; the desktop model has given way to the app model. Instead of having files and then programs that work with those, we these days have data enclosed inside apps.

Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by coding_unit_1 on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @05:28AM (#36401608)
There's a high chance a company will have already paid a large subscription fee to Microsoft for Office 365, and so they don't want to pay yet another licence fee on top for a tool that's already included with that. The people making these financial decisions are usually not the users of said tool.
Re:Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Mir... by lbriner on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @05:51AM (#36401768)
I think it's often a case of better the devil you know...

Imagine adding a new app. Can you just delete the existing? Not necessarily, maybe some people need to use that so now you are supporting 2 apps. Maybe there is a lot of legal work to check the status of a new app. Maybe the new tool seems great but maybe once you have committed to it and taken a large amount of time and money migrating, maybe it doesn't scale well. Maybe a certain feature doesn't work like it needs to.

The problem with the idea of the collective is that not all people have skin in the game. It costs nothing for someone to say they prefer something to something else but how do you make sure that the people who use it the most have more say in the choice?

The truth is, the status quo is always easier than something new.