Yeah. But the problem is that you (and presumably everyone else) is just using whatever tools are most convenient in the way that’s most convenient for them. The result is you don’t get any economies of scale.
We dealt with something like this on my current client at work. My team got pulled off our project to help another team to basically process documents. The various business entities had to put together 500 or so sets of standard documents (2 page Powerpoint and a matching Excel spreadsheet of up to around 20 rows) that more or less describe system requirements to be entered into a system where some other IT team would later work on them. Each set had to go through 3-4 layers of review and approval before they could be entered into the system.
Our team was about a dozen people responsible for managing the process and acting as the first layer of review.
There was also an unmovable deadline to get this done.
The problem was that the whole thing was managed and tracked in Outlook and manually updated Excel spreadsheets. Various upper managers would demand “real time updates” at various points, causing the whole team to stop what they are doing to scramble to update the Excel reports.
I spent most of my time with our team leader trying to figure out ways to make this process more efficient, or at the very least trackable.
We eventually got it done, but I know for a fact that much of the information entered into the system was ultimately incorrect and entered just so our larger group could check off that we completed it all by the deadline. But that just pushes it down the line to be corrected later.
In contrast, my last project we did something similar (the project itself building a system to automate a manual banking process), but they used Azure DevOps (similar to Jira). There were different issues, but because they tracked each level of approval as separate tasks 1) the information was all centralized where anyone could reference it as opposed to emailing around to figure out where and who has what they need and 2) I could track and measure the pace that work was happening and predict when it would finish.
What’s remarkable is that even seeing the data, people refuse (or are unable) to change the way they do things. Based on the rate of the business and IT approving requirements tickets, I predicted the project would extend months past the deadline using a simple burndown chart.
My boss was concerned that if we missed our deadline by that much we would all get fired from our company, so he had me put together a plan using a traditional Gantt chart that showed how we could meet our deadline. Fine. We can meet our deadline if the head of business approves 20 tickets a day (on top of whatever other work they normally do) instead of 1 ticket every 2 days. And that is going to compress every day for the next 3 months.
I was actually pulled off the project to save money (which kind of makes sense as I’m one of the most expensive members of the team and mostly produce bad news). But the project did ultimately fail in the exact manner I predicted it would.
Ultimately I tend to think like an engineer (specifically a civil engineer where you can’t just “will” a 40 ton beam to appear at the top of a skyscraper or concrete to cure faster than it does). Business people I tend to view as dummies who end up as either salespeople or clerks. The problem is there is too much information moving too quickly for people not to keep track of it with systems. But it’s just dummies passing paper back and forth (digitally) with no care about where it goes and that’s their job, so what incentive does anyone have to spend time and money to replace their job?