Jira is like a Milwaukee Tools Hole Hawg - A Cautionary Tale

Jira ain't a toy.

I'm reminded of the old essay by Neil Stephenson titled "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" wherein he compares the UNIX command line interface to a Milwaukee HOLE HAWG.

The jist of that part of the essay was that most consumer products have a lot of safety features built into them to prevent you from hurting yourself. A consumer level drill offers only enough power to get some basic things done around the house, but not so much power that it's likely to cause you life threatening injury. A HOLE HAWG, on the other hand, delivers absolutely massive power and torque that only a should be handled by an experienced professional.

If you found yourself drilling with a consumer level hand drill and ran into an unexpected piece of metal. The drill will stop. If you are using a HOLE HAWG however, and you are unprepared for the sudden increase in resistance, the HOLE HAWG will not stop and instead start flipping you around in circles like a bucking bronco until you let go. This situation could result in a broken arm or worse.

An operating system like Windows might alert you when you or prevent you from deleting important system files. UNIX will just do whatever you tell it to regardless of the damage that might result.

Jira is a bit like a HOLE HAWG in that respect. Jira, misused and/or underestimated, can result in a whirlwind of chaos and damage to your organization.

At the same time, Jira is sneaky because it offers a seemingly friendly User Interface and features that might lead you to believe you can do no harm. And unlike the HOLE HAWG, the disaster isn't sudden and obvious, rather it unfolds slowly like a frog in a pot of boiling water.

You're the frog.

The power of Jira is in it's adaptability and ability to abstract ideas and products into manageable tasks. But that inherent adaptability can be a double-edged sword. There are an infinite number of ways to organize your product work breakdowns in Jira, but only a few of them are actually helpful to those product teams and worse, the larger organization as a whole can find itself tangled in a sticky web of incompatible and unreconcilable Jira structures and schemas.

Jira, when carefully configured and maintained by experienced Agile professionals and administrators can help teams deliver on their objectives. However, when enthusiastic new users jump into the deep end of Jira without adequate training or a solid schema or experienced coaching staff, Jira will quickly become more hinderance than help.