Back in the 1990’s, version control wasn’t very common and I recall working with one of the first teams I’d been on, that was using it. The company had chosen to only buy a single license for one person on the team, which meant that any time we wanted to check something into version control, we would email our changes to this one guy and he would do the merge and then email back a copy of the latest code.
Looking back, I’m sure we’re all horrified at how inefficient this was. For the price of a few more version control licenses, we could have eliminated a significant amount of process waste. The one gatekeeper would have been able to do much more of his own work, and nobody would be sitting around waiting for that person to finish.
Yet, we see similar patterns with workflow systems (ie Jira) today. Although everyone might have a license, it’s common for only one person to ever update the tickets. During our daily meeting, people will provide updates and one person will then laboriously type them into the system. Just like with that version control, we’ve chosen to have one person be the bottleneck.
Even worse, when it’s all down to one person, they often feel pressured to add some comment like “still in progress”, even when it doesn’t add any value. So not only are we slower, but we’ve added all kinds of noise to the tickets.
Consider how much more efficient we’d be if everyone updated their own tickets and had done so before the meeting even started. Then we could spend our time together talking about the things that actually need our attention, rather than watching one person type, or drag tickets around.