Almost everywhere I have worked, there has been some kind of issue tracking software in use. And almost as often, it was disliked by most, if not all, users, due to missing or lacking functionality and awkward imposed workflows. But I will never take that position again, as I’ve recently experienced something worse: working with no tracking whatsoever.
I am pragmatic (who isn’t?). I adapt to the circumstances and make the best of the situation. That’s why I didn’t react negatively at first when I started at a recent assignment where no tracking software was used. I was taking over after a previous employee left and I inherited the grand title of Technical Team Lead. This meant keeping track of what needed to be done, how it should be done, and who should do it. My predecessor left me a Word document, named Backlog.doc. It contained a list of all issues in the project. There were seven columns: Task Number, Task Description, Priority, Assignee, Status, Domain, and Comments. I was less than thrilled by this and my first point of action, after verifying that there really was no tracking software in use, was to convert this Word document to an Excel spreadsheet. Not that much better, but at least I now could sort tasks by priority and status without too much trouble. Had this been a long term assignment, I probably would have tried to influence the organization to change their ways, but this was short term and I knew that I would never get anything up and running before I was leaving. This was a rather small project so we managed to get by using the Excel solution but it got me thinking about why we use tracking software.
I realized after a couple of weeks in the project that the centralized task list put a lot of pressure on me and that it made me a single point of failure – if I called in sick or went on vacation, I either needed to e-mail the task list to someone else in the team or simply hope that everybody knew what to do anyway.
It made day-to-day harder – I needed to personally check who was doing what and check their progress.
It also made accountability harder – who’s done what?
The tasks themselves became rather unclear and not concise enough to use them as single tasks. Many tasks grew over time and commenting was limited.
Duplicate tracking was cumbersome.
All of the above are things that wouldn’t necessary be solved by having some tracking software, but it sure would have made it easier.
I would have the option to create a task, assigning it to a team member, and follow up after a certain amount of time to make sure that they were making progress. I could have delegated creation of tasks to team members with domain knowledge, thereby minimizing the risk of factual errors in a task due to misunderstandings. I could probably have looked at statistics to determine our progress. And most important, instead of spending time updating an Excel spreadsheet that was out of date at about the same time I clicked “Save”, I could have used that time to ensure we were building a better product.
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