Jira is my Romeo. Confluence, Juliet. But MarketPlace is the dagger in this tragic LOVE story

[#1]

Love Apptually** 📱💝

I love using JIRA. 💻💖

I love using Confluence. 📃💘

But MarketPlace, like a dagger, is deceitful, sinful, corrupt, and makes me frail and a fraud. 💀⚔ [Sorry, went a bit too far in the Shakespearean metaphors on that one]. 

Right now the February Monthly Challenge theme is LOVE and as such budding MarketPlace enthusiasts are sharing their App Love Stories… and it makes me bitter. I cannot be thankful like my peers, “beggar that I am, even in thanks”… (more Shakespeare: sorry!) for I am without Apps: like Romeo and Juliette, I am doomed to never experience a life-time of (App) love.

Basically, my company is not using MarketPlace Apps. 😵

The Great Tragedy 💔😪

I mentioned in some older articles of mine that TWNKLS is a small company and as such one that must be frugal and not frivolous, as such using budget on cool and value-adding MarketPlace Apps is a luxury we cannot afford.

Not that we haven’t considered it… believe me! Using Jira & Confluence day-in day-out it is only natural that at some point we come across a challenge whereby an App would be most useful. So we check it out, look into the benefits, weigh up the costs / ROI, aaaaand….. say no.

We came really close once though, with a great App for Confluence. Alas, our CTO was concerned about the data privacy clauses of the vendor and didn’t want to take the risk. In addition, and quite ironically, some free-from-purchase apps aren’t of use to us.

Luckily for us it isn’t too much of a big deal, it just means that our overall experience with our most important Atlassian tools is in want for some greater efficiency and effectiveness.

“Woe Are We, The Appless Lovers” 📳💞

That above quote isn’t Shakespeare; it’s just me being a raging ponce. But Shakespeare aside, it sometimes is a heavy burden. What I wouldn’t give for a great workflow app, or a Confluence Spaces template app…. maybe a nice App to help me monitoring issues that are becoming high risk too quickly, or an app for Gantt chart planning in JIRA. Alas it is not meant to be and so my life is half project managing, half unnecessary administration and FULL on crying.

So, I am wondering about the experiences of other Community buddies who also suffer the same fate. How are you coping without apps? Is it impacting your efficiency and effectiveness? What is the daily work life like without apps? Do you even miss them?

Please post your thoughts and experiences here. It would be nice to know I am not the only one 😇

**This cool wordplay is 100% stolen from @Laura and her article – I have neither guilt nor shame for stealing it. “All the perfumes of ‘MarketPlace’ will not sweeten this little hand! Oh, oh, oh!” [Yup… more Shakespeare. Sorry!].

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey Andy,

While I understand the need to be frugal, I’m surprised that you’ve not used ANY paid apps. While there is a cost involved, if the ROI isn’t there, I see two possible scenarios:

1 - there actually isn’t a need for them, you’ve been able to overcome the requests by user training (in that case, amazing work!!)

2 - the full ROI hasn’t been realized or conveyed to the team responsible for financial sign off. What’s the cost to the business in lost efficiency/QA/agility by NOT making the investment?

Apps can absolutely add up - in direct cost let alone indirect (training, configuration and support etc), but starting by really digging in to the core of the business benefit is where we always start. 

CCM

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Craig Castle-Mead: This is brilliant feedback and I am so pleased that you gave it so that I can reflect on what we're doing wrong. Thank you kindly!
There's lots of maturing and growth still to be done here (not just with Atlassian products). Hopefully with in such great input from the community we can achieve it!
"really digging in to the core of the business benefit" I take most to heart. Wise words! 

[Kat Warner]

This article is great!

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Thanks @Kat Warner ! 🙏😇

[James Bullock]

I heard a similar, "Not sure we can afford that" from a start-up I was talking with last week. (V. early stage, based on a distinctive optical technology, in Luminate, a competitive techstars-style incubator.) So, I told them The Fundamental IT Paradox: IT is an enabler. ROI as a cost saving is doing it wrong.

We get tangled up in IT as cost savings because that's a big part of the industry, in big, established activities. Yes, shave 15% off your cost of automating that thing you have already automated. Faster PO processing! Cheaper servers if you farm them to the service folks. Whatever.

BUT, what was the payoff of automating that in the first place?

-- We can collaborate wherever we are, getting more collaboration and more being where we need to be, dodging that trade-off. What's that worth? If only there were some tools for doing that...

--  We can invent and extend processes and information, so we can wrangle a company bigger than an "Entrepreneur with helper." to borrow Drucker's formulation. What's that worth? If only there were some tools for doing that...

-- We can process a huge, changing, deeply interwingled pile of source code, into something that executes, way faster than one guy hand-assembling each bit. What's that worth? If only there were some tools for doing that...

Cost savings and efficiency are worthy results. But the big gains are stuff IT enables. We're all cyborgs, just typing at screens until they get the implant tech right. (BTW, yes, those are all impacts of items in the Atlassian tool suite. These tools were invented for the up-side of what they enable.)

Right now, for my personal use of collab tools, I'm playing with CRM suite apps, because I can't fathom dong that without supporting automation. I'l mess it up. Team calandars lets me track my time "just enough." I know where my effort is going, and how much, which I wouldn't without that tool. And I have Capture, which first is brilliantly useful for sys admin / config issues when I hit them. Immediate recording and some discipline characterizing what's going on: huge ROI from stuff it enables. Backlogged, I have learning exercises for a couple dev tools. The notion is to track those in Capture. The formalism, and durable record helps again. One target is OpenSource, so, the notion is to learn by exercising it vs. the doco, generating dings to feed back into the project. Invaluable, and enabled by having Capture.

If you don't have a slam-dunk ROI "justification" for something you want a marketplace app to help with, doing that thing is probably not very important to you. You may think it is. Good to know.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

That's awesome!

[Michelle Rau HP]

I used to drive a manual transmission, 1970 Chevy Suburban that didn't have any interior paneling or cladding, and no brakes to speak of, so I can relate to the pain of driving a "stripper model." A good navigation app would have great ROI I believe as I hear about user confusion over search and navigation. Saving time finding something has an obvious benefit especially when the people searching are highly paid. :-) 

Fortunately, the few apps we have invested in accomplish several different tasks or can be used in different ways which has allowed me to work around almost anything I needed to accomplish on a page. 

There are some advantages to driving out-of-the box Confluence,

• No annoying error messages when a plugin needs to be renewed
• No surprise shift of a free plugin to a paid plugin
• No trying to decide if it's the plugin or Confluence creating an issue (easier troubleshooting)
• No vendor doing a disappearing act on you.