Who or what role is the owner of the agile workflow and the workflow tool (e.g. Jira)

Question

I have worked in different organizations an they all take a different approach to the roles that own the tools for agile delivery. Can you please tell me your opinions on what role would govern the tool for an agile product delivery and why?

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OK, I understand this, it makes a lot of sense.

Maybe it is better for me to elaborate on my predicament. Specifically the workflow administration is time consuming and I am receive a lot of reports of the workflow not being followed with negative impact on the project, however, there is no real ownership of reviewing the workflow, managing the tasks or the usage of the tool.

My own perspective is that this as a collaborative effort and not role specific but without a buy in on on the framework and ownership then it's a finger pointing exercise. Do any of you have any experiences where workflow, the tool and the comms around this have needed reviewing?

Answer 1

The team.

If the team is using the tool, they should be the ones making decisions about it. There may need to be conversations around budgets of course, but I would hope that the budget holders are supporting the team as much as possible.

The reason for this is that the team has the best insight in to how the tool is being used. There is an argument that consistent use of a tool across multiple teams is advantageous, but I would say that is a conversation to be had between the teams themselves.

Answer 2

By role I believe you are referring to a job title. Scrum is against having the Project Manager become the Scrum Master because directives from a higher authority may be detrimental for the team. Coming back to the question, the Scrum Master would be one of the owners for sure. And the Scrum master would be one of the team members. It is a time consuming process, so anyone with a weekly bandwidth for task allocation and having good sense of team collaboration and growth could become one. Product Owners are also owners because they raise issues and enhancement requests about their products.

Answer 3

I agree with Barnaby but want to be more specific.

Who owns the jira workflow?

Anyone who gets the direct benefits of a proper tool usage.

There are two main roles when talking about toolset usage: the administration and the users. Sometimes, they're the same, which makes things easier.

So, based on your comments, it seems you expect some benefits from proper tool usage. Are these expectations common across the users? If they are, then you should mention the expected benefits next time everyone gets together. If there aren't many opportunities or too many teams, you can contact reference people. They'll help you on moving your idea forward.

If the users have admin rights, go for it.

If administrators are rare, once you have the buy in of users, they should represent no resistance - after all, you already have all users aboard. Notice, however, you should consider "users" in the broader aspect possible of it. Do not consider only the development team. You have to consider other perspectives (such as users or product owners, for instance).

Anyway, remember that a tool is supposed to help your team on its goal (deliver value) rather than being a goal in itself. You should ensure everyone (including you) understands this.