rowyn

My day job scheduled a Learning Day today, where most of the folks who don't work the front line would take courses of one sort or another. Mostly online classes from the online course provider my workplace pays for.

I feel like it's somewhat ridiculous to pay me, a semi-retired person working one day a week, to spend a day in training. But I was scheduled to work today and my manager emailed me to ask what my Learning Day plan was, so sure, I will spend a day taking online courses. I told her I'd do the mandatory training and then take a Jira class, and when I finished that I'd look for something promising on SQL and Big Query. Decent introductory courses are easy to find but trying to spot something that is the right level of 'advanced' is much trickier. Now and again someone asks me how good I am at something and unless it's a subject I have no experience in, I'm like "I have no idea how I would know."

The mandatory training was quick and then I started a Jira course that looked promising. My workplace decided to switch to Agile methodology a few years ago, and then got Jira as the tracking tool. I know many tech people hate Agile, but it's never bothered me. More than anything else, it feels intuitive to me. I've rarely worked on big long-term projects: most of my career was people saying, "I need to know [various bits of information from a database], please give this to me" and then I figure out how to extract the correct info and give it to them. Much of the time the user needs it for some one-off task and doesn't care how it looks. Whenever the request is a little bit complicated or difficult, I've always considered it a collaborative process, where I show the requester what I have so far and they tell me if it's about right and then I get some more stuff or different stuff based on feedback. So that whole part of Agile that's about 'minimum viable product' and 'collaborating with customers'? Like, why would you do it any other way? Every project I've been on that tried to pin down exactly what requesters wanted before we started did not go great. No one ever knows what they want until they see something kind of like what they asked for and they can tell if it's on track to be what they need. And sure, you can feel smugly superior for giving them exactly what they asked for and be annoyed at them for now saying that it's not what they need. But the non-dysfunctional goal is "get folks what they need" not "make sure you don't take the blame when they don't get it."

My workplace has not really figured out how to make Agile work as a whole. My department uses Jira to track what people are doing and have done, rather than a workflow or a project management system. We've been using it for a year or so now, and it's fine. I end up spending a chunk of time on this system in order to say "I did thing", which seems silly because, like, getting the thing done was the important part. But it is nice to have a record of the things I've done. I don't mind it.

The course talked about Jira being Not Just for Software and how you could use the same system as a workflow for pretty much anything. "Do you want to write a book? Jira can do project management for that!"

Which made me giggle and then go 'yeah, fair, I can see it.'

Then it threw up an example of using Jira to manage your activities in general and I went: "..."

"..."

"Now I kind of want to?"

I feel like the Drake meme, turning away from to-do list programs and bullet journals and basically any NORMAL software an individual would use to stay on task, and then going "Oooooh" at enterprise project management software.

And Jira offers free sites to anyone who wants one, so I actually could use enterprise project management software to track my activities on everything and then spit out fancy reports at me and other nonsense. It'd be like my month in review posts but So Much Fancier.

And more time-consuming and ridiculous. But it amuses me that the thought process underlying it -- break everything into discrete chunks of work, estimate how long they'll take, plot out when you'll do what, all that stuff -- meshes well with what I do anyway. But spreadsheets work nicely for my purposes. Getting anything more specialized always feels like it's more about playing with a tracking toy than it is about being productive.

The first two sections of the Jira class were mostly "here's all the cool reasons for Agile", which I didn't really need. Although it talked about the reasons for waterfall ("waterfall" is totally a name made up by Agile proponents, no one ever called it that before, it was just the default approach to projects) as a project management style. Because like its predecessors with just-in-time inventory and "Lean", Agile benefits from a bunch of conditions that didn't exist a century ago. And there are still situations where you've got massive setup costs and economies of scale that make it much more practical to commit to a plan well in advance and stick with it. There were some bits about how to use Jira, but it was stuff I didn't need or already knew.

In the third section, the course got into filters and JQL, the SQL-like Jira Query Language. Which is what Jira uses for all its filters: it lets you use the GUI to pick filters and then builds and executes a JQL query from it. And after all these years I am gigantic query nerd and was Very Excited. Particular to set up some queries aka filters that would check for the things I'm always forgetting to do in Jira (setting a sprint, setting story points, marking things done when I finish them, setting some other fields they want set, etc.) Anyway, I was excited about this part. This part was why I'd picked the course, actually -- Coursera had lured me in by offering the video on JQL and then I went "well, I'll just take the whole course, how long could it be?"

I am not done with the course yet. Oops. But at least I learned some fun things!