Three days ago, Ben Hughes wrote on Medium that the use of Jira is quite often a symptom of a management problem. Which I completely agree!

In my recent past, I worked for a company that use(d) Jira like hell on earth.

“No ticket, no work” they said.

Jira was used to log everything and to manage everything. From agile projects, to waterfall, features, bugs, to calls, to-do’s or even reminders.  “No ticket, no work” remember ? That would then be used to check your daily tasks and measure your performance. The more tickets closed, the better you were. The more tickets open, the more innovative you were. The more assigned tickets, the better manager you were. You get the picture here.

Ben focused this issue on just development across teams, but I found Jira to be a powerful tool for bad managers to have. It creates a terrible culture for employees, an artificial environment that doesn’t cope with innovation, exploits the wrong metrics at work and hides a bad manager under a ‘process’ excuse.
This isn’t Jira’s problem, but rather how it’s used and by whom is using it.