Here’s a thought experiment… Lets say there are two projects. The first has a beautiful backlog of tickets, they get moved across the board over several sprints, and are all marked done at the end. In this project nobody actually writes any code, they just move the tickets. You report the progress to the customer but never ship them anything. Despite your project tracker being perfect no work got done and nobody is happy.

The second project starts with the same definition as the first. The developers all get the specification but there are no tickets, people are just asked to build part of the solution. After several sprints worth of work they all come back with their code and try to integrate it. It’s unlikely it will work though at least there’s a chance you could make something workable for the customer.

Having good process to define and track the work is important. It gets people on the same page and allows for discussion and learning to happen earlier when it’s cheaper to make changes. The larger the organisation the easier it is to lose sight of the fact the process exists to serve the work. It doesn’t produce anything useful by itself.

What have you done recently just because it’s part of a process that you think could be better? How hard would it be for you to get that change made?