hallihax
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, this is it.
Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.
If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!
However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.
For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.
If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.
You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.
What Excel won't do, without significant work (which will almost certainly fall to the developer and not the PM):
Track issue history / comments / activity against a repository. Wouldn't it be better for your PM to be able to identify, at a glance, exactly which branch & commit a particular fix or change is in?
Integrate with your CI / build system: Wouldn't it be better for your PM if issues were automatically marked as 'ready to test' when the relevant build is completed?
Provide a workflow against the list of active issues. Wouldn't it better for your PM to rest assured that any incoming issues are easily triaged & assigned within a well-defined workflow that tracks an issue from first-report to completion & sign-off?
Don't fight them - sell to them. Explain why a different solution will be better for them and you.
Here in the UK the same problems exist regarding general ease-of-use, scams, and ability to navigate tech in general: and we also have a signficiant (and growing) problem where government services and support are all being moved online, with seemingly little support for those who find modern tech difficult to engage with.
Though my gut feeling says you may struggle to build a viable long-term business around this: I really do hope you succeed!
Personally I think governments and institutions need to radically improve things for the non-techies amongst us and those who find it difficult, whether cognitively or physically, to engage with tech in the first place. Right now it seems that the default assumption is that everybody is perfectly fine using a website or app, and if you're not, you're out of luck!