How can I get my team to use our tools and follow a (any) workflow?

Question

I am a Software Engineer at a startup ( 16 employees ), and we are still working like we have 3 employees. The buy in for our tools is very minimal and renders them almost useless.I know we are going through some growing pains, but we need to start fixing things. I was hoping for some advice on picking a workflow and sticking to it, or maybe recommendations on new tools. Any help / advice would be much appreciated.A few observations I have noticed and consider problematic :We are very "knee jerk" in the sense that if an important customer asks for something, we immediately work to push it into a release. We have never stuck to our release plan, and I believe it is causing a lot of the team stress.A lot of the prioritization of our work comes from our CTO and CEO, but that prioritization of work is not transparent. The general workforce, me included, struggle to keep up with what is important. Often times we run into scenarios where we are working on things that we shouldn't be.I think the usage of our current tools (Pivotal Tracker, Bitbucket, Google Hangouts) is poor because no one believes in the value of tracking what we do. I have tried being a pest to people about using the tools, but verbal communication seems to be the primary method of assigning, managing, and sorting work. It's hard to adjust resources, and nearly impossible to be aware of what people are working on. If you look at our Pivotal Tracker velocity, we are probably one of the least efficient teams in the world because 50+% of our work never makes it in there. It causes problems with releasing, testing, and code management.We struggle a lot with Pivotal Tracker because we have a lot of projects that are related, but you can't do any kind of relationship with stories across projects. Most of us work on 6-7 projects at once and Pivotal Tracker becomes a bit of a bottleneck for us. The ones who deal with one project love it, but the people stretched across a few are not doing a good job.Scrum is very popular and we "try" to do it, but our daily scrums last 35+ minutes and we generally don't have any other kind of meetings or planning activities. Thanks for sticking with that long winded description.

Answer 1

Honestly, the problem is not using the tools. When people feel pushed, stressed, and constantly changing priorities they retreat to only doing what they need to get others off of their back. When you try to push them even more to use the tools they do not see that as important. The bottom line is that your company has to manage the portfolio of projects and the pipeline. Having the discipline to make all projects transparent and not starting a new project until one is finished or removed from the pipeline is what really needs to happen. Your problem is not unique to software or start ups- all companies start too many projects and never seem to finish some of them. I will tell you that the best approach is to determine how many projects can be handled by the current resources and the company needs to stick to that number. There is more to this. Your company needs to determine what percentage of resources get applied to Maintenance projects, platform updates, and new projects. My best analogy is that projects are like time value of money- the sooner you complete one you can start receiving value from it. When you try to do multiple projects and nothings gets done you are not receiving any value. So over a period of time you are making more money by managing the pipeline. I have worked with teams to do this and the results were better than anyone expected. So its hard for companies to make this shift but the upside is so worth it.