Jira: Love it or hate it?

Start a conversation about using Jira, and you will receive lots of strong reactions. Most people either love it or hate it. There isn't much middle ground. I've been either a Jira user or Jira admin for quite a while, and I happen to be one of those people that love Jira. I have come to the conclusion that there is one factor that really determines whether you love or hate Jira. It all depends on who was there before you.

What do I mean by that? Your Jira experience is really going to be determined by the skill level and experience of the people that setup your Jira instance. Jira has a lot of capabilities and offers a lot of flexibility; however, there is often a rush to take the deep dive. After all, Jira is often equated as being the tool for Agile work management. It's better to just make the best of it and dive right in. Just get it done. Create the workflows. Create the custom statuses. Start tracking all those data points in custom fields. Right?

It's a journey that many organizations make. They adopt agile practices, and then immediately focus on tools. We need to use Jira. They forget completely about Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I have been witness to several companies that took the deep dive into Jira only to find that their teams grew to hate the tool that was supposed to help them. The urge to create custom statuses, fields, and workflows often results in an overly cumbersome maze of bureaucracy that actually hinders your teams rather than helps them. Teams quickly get bogged down with updating fields and moving tasks through rigid workflows. This was obviously not the intent of being agile.

If your company is new to Jira, I recommend taking it slow and using the default configuration for as long as possible. Being agile does not mean that you need to rush into things and do everything right now. Being agile is efficiently delivering product while taking into account evolving inputs. Jira is there to help your processes evolve. In fact, I would even recommend delaying that Jira purchase until your teams have figured out what being agile means to them.