Inside the same Leicester company, the internal machine was Jira and Confluence. Jira held the backlog and the sprint. Confluence held the decisions, the specs and the things we would otherwise forget. As a project manager I lived in Jira most of the day.
Jira gets mocked for being complicated, and sometimes it is. But when you have developers, testers, designers and a release date, you need states, estimates and a history of what changed. A sticky note cannot tell you who moved a ticket and why.
Confluence was the quiet half of the pair. The standup told you what was happening today. The wiki told you why we decided it three months ago. Projects forget. Wikis do not, as long as someone writes the decision down.
The fifteen minutes that mattered
Every morning we stood up, literally, and answered three questions. What did you do, what will you do, what is in your way. Fifteen minutes, no sitting, no slides.
The standup was the real system. Jira just recorded what the standup surfaced. When the standup was honest, the board was honest. When people started performing for the board instead of talking to each other, the tool became theatre.
If you take one thing from the heavy tool world, take the daily rhythm. You can run it with any software, or none.
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