u/BuffaloJealous2958

I have a couple really strong engineers on the infra/platform side who are honestly great technically. Fast problem solvers, reliable during incidents, know the systems deeply, people trust them. But they absolutely hate anything that looks like process maintenance. No ticket updates, no documenting changes properly, no ownership notes, no updating runbooks after incidents, no cleanup of monitoring alerts, barely any visibility into what is changing unless you directly ask them.

Their mindset is basically the systems work, thats what matters. The problem is everything becomes tribal knowledge very fast. During incidents half the context lives inside specific people’s heads. If somebody is out, suddenly simple operational things become detective work because nobody knows why something was configured a certain way 8 months ago.

And I get their side too honestly. A lot of devops work already feels overloaded with tooling, alerts, dashboards, pipelines, permissions, reporting, tickets etc. I understand why engineers want to spend time fixing systems instead of updating 4 different platforms explaining that they fixed the systems. But at the same time the operational overhead for the rest of the team becomes huge when basic visibility is missing.

I tried lighter processes, simpler templates, reducing required updates to almost nothing, explaining the bus factor issue but eventually everybody slowly drifts back into just message me directly if you need context.

How other people handle this balance without turning good engineers into full time administrators?

A few months ago we decided to standardize project management across teams because leadership wanted better visibility, reporting, workload tracking, timelines, all the usual stuff. On paper it made complete sense. We rolled out a pretty advanced setup with automations, custom workflows, dashboards, dependencies, multiple views, detailed statuses, the whole thing. The problem is the people actually doing the work slowly stopped engaging with it.

Engineers update tasks only when someone reminds them. Ops keeps side notes outside the system. Team leads still ask for updates in Slack because nobody fully trusts what they see on the board anymore. And somehow I became the person constantly fixing statuses, reconnecting broken dependencies, cleaning views and trying to keep the data believable enough for management reports.

The weird part is that technically the system works. It can do almost everything. But day to day it feels too heavy for normal usage and people interact with it like they’re scared of breaking something.

I’m starting to think a lot of PM tools are optimized more for executive visibility than actual team flow. Leadership loves the dashboards while the teams quietly route around the tool to get work done faster. Curious if other IT managers hit the same wall?