A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools

I guess at some point, its inevitable that any large professional organization will realize that if they want projects to be implemented properly, they had better choose a software tool that's somewhat more intuitive than Excel spreadsheets and email. That has happened at my company and lo and behold my organization is making the same mistakes that every company makes when choosing to take on this type of initiative. No project management software tool is perfect. What you get out of them, is what you put into them. If your process is crappy, a shiny new software tool won't magically make the process better. What it does, ironically, is further point out your team's deficiencies. So too with my team today.

We've been trying to implement CA's answer to project management prowess, a product called Clarity. The transition has been slow, so management decided to have everyone take a day and have every Project Manager painstakingly enter in the foundations of their respective projects. It was grueling and it took all day. The bad part, however, is what it did to morale. People all over the place were complaining about Clarity. "Clarity sucks" was the theme of the day. It was sad.

But I didn't buy the devastating attitude. I learned a long time ago that fighting against a manager's initiatives toward a new software project is an easy way to be put on the troublemaker list. So I wandered around with a smile on my face knowing that the only way to get by is to embrace the initiative. Nobody else has the same attitude.

Thanks to blogging, though, I have an outlet. I can vent all I want here and nobody will ever read it. So in the spirit of despising Clarity, I've come up with my top ten nicknames for the cumbersome nightmare of a product.

10. Non-Clarity
9. UnClear
8. No-Clarity
7. Sans Clarity
6. Opaque Clarity
5. Don't vote for Hillary
4. Un-Clarity
3. Clarityless
2. CA? Who the hell bought that shit? Think I don't know that CA was probably the cheapest piece of shit out there? All CA products are cheap pieces of shit. That's why they're products are cheap because their shit. That's why they're called cheap pieces of shit.

And the number one new nickname for Clarity is:

1. Parity

But according to everyone at my company, I'm championing the product. As far as I'm concerned:

"Don't vote for Hillary is the tool that will most likely save the world".