Have you head the old joke of the lost helicopter pilot suffering electrical and guidance system failure? The pilot sees an office building, writes “WHERE AM I?” on a sheet of paper, and circles the building, holding the paper so the folks inside can read it.
All throughout the building, people begin holding up pieces of paper that say, “YOU’RE IN A HELICOPTER.” The pilot then goes and lands the helicopter safely.
When asked how that information helped land the helicopter, the pilot answers, “Well, the folks in the building gave me a technically accurate but entirely useless answer. That let me know we had found the Microsoft building, and I knew the airport’s location relative to that.”
You could easily swap in the Atlassian office for a modern retelling of the joke.
If you want to keep work moving, you need to make the work visible. Most places I’ve worked with interpret this as “entering a work item into Jira.” You could display that work item on a screen where ostensibly a human could see it, technically making the work visible. But much like our pilot’s experience, what value does that provide?
Jira gives one-dimensional lists of work, possibly a second dimension devoted to whether or not someone has started the work.
But work exists in a richer context than whether or not someone has started a work item.
- Who requested this?
- What customer workflow does this enable?
- Where does this work item sit in priority?
- Where does the larger customer workflow sit in priority?
- When will we release this chunk of work?
- What blocks this work from going forward?
- When did we first learn of the block?
- If we need to trim work from the current release, how could we redistribute that work to other releases?
- Can we we quickly make additional releases?
That list took about 3 minutes to come up with, and we could add more to it.
Technically, you can find answers to these questions in Jira, just like you can find that one kitchen tool in that drawer in your kitchen.
I like Leanscape’s 3-second rule. We’ve made work visual when we can understand the work at a 3-second glance.
So why does everyone and their dog adopt Jira? Jira promises reducing work management to mere data entry in a software tool.
Jira’s UX has achieved a level of obfuscation that governments could only dream of. I’ve had projects I personally designed and intimately understood become entirely incomprehensible once entered into Jira. Tools such as user story mapping and value stream mapping do this much better than a linear list, but always be wary of reducing something complex and subtle down to a mere tool.
Fun thought question: whose work do we optimize when we remove all this necessary context from work management?
Happy coding,
Ethan
