Project management and monitoring tools are to help us
One of the recurring themes from my mentoring sessions across different industries is this.
Not-yet-agile teams are often reluctant to introduce project management tools (e.g., JIRA) or monitoring / goals-tracking solutions (crash analytics, KPIs dashboards, etc.).
The reasons are primarily due to miscommunication and trust between teams and management.
Management's message is "We introduce these things to have better control and visibility".
The message is taken very literally by teams. "They want to look at our hands, control us and squeeze even more out of our hard work."
Often the same teams struggle with:
- Non-planned tasks are being added to their scope on the fly.
- Unrealistic deadlines are coming "from the top."
- Hiring requests which are rejected by management over and over again.
- Technical debt never addressed on time or being low-prioritized (fix it in your free time).
Metrics, KPIs, or project management tools are to control these things rather than people.
- Crash analytics is not to blame someone for bugs but to help prioritize tech debt.
- KPIs and metrics will help you to deliver a message about hiring needs (think of ROI - you pay X to make this or that better/faster).
- Project management tools will help you discuss deadlines, prioritize work and reduce the number of side projects which pop-up unexpectedly in the middle of the team's work.
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Mirosław Stanek