So you think you want Jira

Picture this: You’re sitting down, imagining all of the cool features you are going to ship. Or maybe you’re preparing for a cool demo to show investors. Your brain struggles to keep up with all of the swirling topics that come in. “Shit I need to do X, but before that I need to do Y, and probably I should think about Z.” Putting aside your brain’s crashout, organizing all of your work is a core part of running a team/business/kindergarten/home/whatever. Many people at this point start looking to add solutions because it’s sexier to pretend the problem is a lack of tools rather than a lack of initiative.

Don’t worry brothers and sisters of the corporate or entrepreneurial world! I got you covered with some alternatives that can get you forward and perhaps kick you out of the delusion. I might even save you the trouble of your company’s inevitable push to remove said tools later on.

Asking the tough questions

Before I delve into some of the alternatives I love to use personally in my projects or with friends and even within enterprise change management setups (what you thought Jira was the only way to do compliant change management?).

Why do we want complexity?

Complexity is hidden behind the veil of being called “features.” More features is more better right? Well more functionality means a more complex system. We often think that more functionality solves problems, but because more functionality means more complexity more often than not it leads to more problems.

Exercise for the reader:
Next time you look at a product, replace the word "feature" with the words "functionality your colleagues will use in annoying ways" and see how it makes you feel (see figure 1).

Hopefully this is forcing you to really think about whether the pros outweigh the cons. Using Jira as an example, Bob from accounting will absolutely abuse the absolute fuck out of the links and start adding documentation in a google doc instead of the description, which uh… defeats the point. So is it worth it?

Why do we want to pay for another tool?

There’s a lot of reason to lean toward buying a product. If you’re a smaller company, maybe you don’t have the know-how to build some advanced functionality like indexing, search etc. If you’re an enterprise, maybe you want to de-risk yourself and shunt the damages liability away from your org. Maybe you do actually need to build something, have the team capabilities to do it, but it would take away from development of your core business. Whatever the reason it can make a lot of sense to buy.

However!

In the case the problem is organization, I think you really need to emphasize the thing you actually need vs what is being bought. If you wanted a better project management tool, what is the reason you feel you need to fork out money for it? It better have some killer features you use because I’m going to be honest: most of us can organize tasks using sticky notes much better than project management software can with 100$/user product offerings. Hell, the most popular way of doing software project management started with Toyota using a wire rack with clipboards. You probably don’t need to pay that much for a glorified bulletin board.

Alternatives

Great, now that we got the basics out of the way, time to dive into some alternatives that honestly get the job done and with less friction than any software out there.

Spreadsheets

Holy Jesus of all that is holy YES! it always comes to spreadsheets! Everything can and will be a spreadsheet as the meme goes, but hang on because seriously spreadsheets are FANTASTIC project management tools.

Specifically I want to call out google sheets because of the online collaboration you get for free. Yes, I am aware Microsoft has co-authoring, but Google was first so they get the callout. Seriously though for most project management setups you will only need the following fields to track unless you’re crazy:

• What you’re doing
• How important it is
• Who’s responsible
• Status
• Deadline

That’s literally it. Below is an image of how this actually looks.

You might be asking, “but you can’t see when it was updated or moved statuses.” To which I say two things:

1. that wasn’t a question
2. who in the history of project management or auditing has ever actually cared about that? (the answer is no one)

Speaking of auditing, Google sheets (and excel co-authoring) track versions. So really you can actually track changes if you want, but the whole point of auditing is ensuring that you can always go back and see an unbroken record of changes. Guess what, you can edit Jira tickets after they’re done, just like sheets. So yeah, just look at the version history and you’re fine.

You could most likely switch off of Jira to spreadsheets TODAY and yes while there would be complaints, but it would work. The actual caveats are the lack of standardization, but to be honest this was already a problem in Jira, so just add a shared drive and make everyone put their project sheets there (one per team is probably good enough) and enjoy inner peace.

This also comes with search in the form of the find feature. Plus you can choose how to manage things that are done. Want to delete them? go nuts. Want to keep them? Just move them to a separate sheet. Your rules go, not some random project manager that has never worked in your industry yet has convinced your boss to force you to use their setup.

Calendar event tasks

Every calendar now has integration with some form of “tasks” that you can remind yourself about. This can be a good thing if you harness it, and a great way to ensure your work is coupled to time management. Google Calendar especially has nailed the flow for creating tasks that you can review and update later on.

The same applies from before, the main thing you usually track are:

• What you’re doing
• How important it is
• Who’s responsible
• Status
• Deadline

There is an obvious caveat in that usually calendar tasks need to be coupled to a team/group calendar, but with most calendar software used already across collaborative models it’s going to be doable.

I personally don’t think this is the most ideal, but I know some colleagues that think this is perfect! It has everything needed to keep things tight. The only caveat is that you need to remind your team to look at their calendar. The great thing about calendar tasks though is that they also usually have a remind functionality and that’s awesome. Nothing better to motivate people than emails that will annoy them until they get shit done!

Literally anything else

This is left now to you as a reader. For the love of god don’t buy Jira, just go out and organize your shit. Find a system using the tools you have, I promise the ROI is much better than wasting your time managing a contract for some software that will be absolutely abused to the point of being unusable. Furthermore, actually think about what things you really need to track, and just start tracking that. You don’t need analytics on velocity or sprint points or pogo boards, or whatever other BS the industry is tossing at you to try and get you to buy into their crap.

All else fails, here’s a non-exhaustive list that can organize tasks for your team better than software as long as you put in some minor effort:

• Notebooks
• Your kitchen refrigerator door + sticky notes
• White boards
• Emails
• A napkin from last Friday’s lunch meeting
• Group chats
• A corkboard from 2007
• That one coworker who remembers everything and secretly hates you for it
• Post-it notes on your monitor (bonus points if color-coded)
• A Google Doc that no one reads after day two
• The “to-do” list app you downloaded and never opened again
• A family-sized bag of M&M’s used as a progress tracking system (green = done, red = panic)
• Random Slack messages sent at midnight with “just a thought”
• The back of your hand (if you can read your own handwriting)
• A whiteboard photo saved in 14 different chat threads
• PowerPoint slides labeled “strategy” that are 98% clip art
• And finally, nothing

Doing nothing is better than buying Jira.