Hi everyone!
I'm not gonna lie, I long for some structure in my company. This big (BIG) company I work for, is so stuck in the past. We do here lots of telco installations, but, guess what? everything with the workflow belongs to 1998. Sometimes I wonder how this is still alive.
Requests come in into personal emails. Casted in stone.
Details are written in Excel sheets with uncountable columns. Unreadable.
The tool where everything gathers seems to be modelled á la Netscape Navigator (no offense Netscape Navigator, we loved you). Infinite non-editable fields unless you know someone in hell. (only one team of three or four people can change these). Most of the times, to change anything (as simple as a field value) you need to clone everything once again, with different link, reference, oh my.
Communication relies on mails and chats, but with no structure at all. Go out for your holiday and you'll come back to a pool of unstructured requests, incidents, escalations.
As everyone can imagine, the information gaps are part of the daily routine: Where's that mail? Who sent that confirmation? Anyone had seen these pictures of the installation setup?
So, having worked for years with Atlassian's tools, I started dreaming.
What if customer sent its requests through Jira?
And what if we communicated with them there?
What if every requirement would be easily updated, changed, removed?
What if every piece of info was kept in a tool, available for every stakeholder to see it? Clear dates on a calendar for everyone, pics, links, code snippets...
What if any team was reachable through the tool to check progress or assign tasks?
What if anybody (selected anybodys) could move the tasks and issues through the workflow.
With all of this in mind, I booted a Jira at home, and modelled the aforementioned scenario. I started to fly through the tickets, clarifying all the fictional doubts from a fictional team to myself. Getting stuff done. I documented the potential recurrent problems in Confluence. I prefectioned the workflows.
Then... I realized, when Atlassian announced its System of Work, there... I saw it. They put the Goals above all, and there it was! Hey! This is what I have been looking for!! A unified platform! A single vision! A truth for all!
So, count me with the dreamers! Maybe not in my current company, but one day, I'll set up that vision for someone. I'll make someone's life better. And someone's job easier. Until then, I'll keep opening and resolving issues on my own behalf, until this System of Work becomes the System of Work.
