I think this is what drives a lot of the workflow usability issues with JIRA.
A bug not being tested fully, a developer working on a ticket that a PM didn't approve, a fix with no time logged... these are organizational problems. Yet the JIRA hammer lets you "fix" them by restricting workflow actions to certain users and making dozens of custom and required fields.
The result is a downward spiral: people avoid using it because it's painful and always getting in the way, which means no one puts extra effort in to link tickets together, write good descriptions/comments, or fill in non-required fields. The whole system becomes less useful overall, and in the worst case causing more workflow rules and required fields to be added.
It's sad, because JIRA can be good (though: slow). JQL is awesome if your tickets contain good data (after all, garbage-in garbage-out). It's very possible to have well formatted content that's easy to read. The "screens" customizations for transitions can make things faster by showing useful fields at just the right time. And the automations possible by integrating with PRs and builds can save even more time and prevent mistakes.
But all that can (and is) horribly abused to make something that is awful.
Well said. One of the better companies I've ever worked from had a strong "pull culture" for this reason.
Aside from the very rare exception, IT (and IT leadership) was prohibited from pushing tools onto users.
They built tools or sourced and implemented products, and users either adopted them or didn't. This seemed to create a much healthier adoption and feedback loop.
It's ironic that companies praise free market capitalism... and then internally implement command economies (and are flabbergasted by the resultant inefficiencies and supply/demand mismatches).
Note that in "theory of the firm" language, there is a distinction between "markets" and "free market". The "free market" is broader, and subsumes the firm because you have a choice to participate/not participate in any given firm; but it is generally true that within firms you do not operate under market dynamics, and "theory of the firm" seeks to answer both descriptivist and prescriptivist questions about when firms do/should use markets.
When set in that basic language, I guess my observation was that companies unnecessarily increase internal transaction costs by overly distancing internal buyers and sellers (which I guess in turn forwards into Managerial and Behavioural critiques and explanations, as to "why").
A bug not being tested fully, a developer working on a ticket that a PM didn't approve, a fix with no time logged... these are organizational problems. Yet the JIRA hammer lets you "fix" them by restricting workflow actions to certain users and making dozens of custom and required fields.
The result is a downward spiral: people avoid using it because it's painful and always getting in the way, which means no one puts extra effort in to link tickets together, write good descriptions/comments, or fill in non-required fields. The whole system becomes less useful overall, and in the worst case causing more workflow rules and required fields to be added.
It's sad, because JIRA can be good (though: slow). JQL is awesome if your tickets contain good data (after all, garbage-in garbage-out). It's very possible to have well formatted content that's easy to read. The "screens" customizations for transitions can make things faster by showing useful fields at just the right time. And the automations possible by integrating with PRs and builds can save even more time and prevent mistakes.
But all that can (and is) horribly abused to make something that is awful.