yes, it’s quite a common problem, and I couldn’t comment on JIra of course without knowing it better. The great majority of businesses miss it, and the time of the team and the information is spread across different systems. This results in a flawed decision making process at the individual, team and organisational level; a lack of cohesive management information; double or triple entry; time wasted on overlapping work (not just tad entry); tasks missed or not considered; the list goes on.

It is not an easy problem to solve in a large organisation takes years. Our current systems are disparate, with client projects, support and other tasks being isolated. I am currently putting into production a system that has all these areas integrated, which will see our efficiencies improve substantially.

To scale an organisation successfully (ie still making a profit and all the staff being happy rather than stressed), systems and processes need to be aligned before expansion; otherwise costs become prohibitive. It seems that GR spend time considering the next steps, which is extremely positive, as there is a much greater likelihood of making the right sorts of decisions in this area.

Chris

If I am interpreting your comments correctly, what you are talking about goes way beyond our current use of JIRA.

For instance, at Beer O’clock today we talked about our need to make a record (in one place) of promises made to clients, in order that we can track when we have delivered on each and every one (another post about this coming later). Some of these might be not related to individual products.

I have not specifically looked, but am not sure if JIRA would even cater for being used in such an all-encompassing way (i.e. extending far beyond bug tracking into business process management).

Something for us to investigate further a little later down the line.

I suspect we might run into the old “form over function” resistance, were we to try to use JIRA in this manner.

Cheers

Paul

The “documenting” stage for Solutions is primarily about documenting the details of a new feature or improvement on our portal. It fits in with the philosophy that a solution isn’t truly “done” until the portal reflects it. Saving details of passwords / how things work is of secondary importance, and really only need to be added if it “helps us go faster” in the long term.

The other thing to note is that we are now recording tests to perform within the Jira jobs themselves. Which is helping significantly in the specification and verification of work.

By the way, I, Stephen wrote that post :).

As you say, that irritation is cognitive dissonance caused by doing things one way and knowing they should be done in a different way. The important thing is to capture all the inputs of work so that, when you categorise and push things into a workflow or process, you are not missing items.

To explain: your staff will have a certain number of things that they do, and having some of them organised still leaves some disorganised. Where I am, we have
- client projects work
- support work
- internal work
- personal items.
You need to be able to manage all of them from one place, whether or not they are corporate; then all of your decisions at a personal, management and business level are always made properly, and also they system/software captures those decisions as they are made, so you avoid double entry.

Hope that’s useful.