The company bought a new project management tool because teams weren't communicating well.
The theory was simple: if everyone used the same system, visibility would improve. Managers could see what engineers were working on. Engineers could see what other teams were doing. Dependencies would be tracked. Nothing would fall through the cracks.
Six months later, the tool was full of outdated tickets, and teams still weren't communicating well.
This surprised no one who was paying attention.
The problem had never been the tool. The problem was that teams didn't trust each other. They didn't share information because sharing information felt risky. It invited questions, scrutiny, interference. Staying quiet was safer.
The new tool didn't change that. It just gave the distrust a new venue.
People learned to game the system. They'd update tickets with just enough detail to look busy, but not enough to invite criticism. They'd mark things complete that weren't quite complete. They'd create dependencies that didn't exist, to buy themselves buffer time.
The tool became a performance, not a reflection of reality.
I've seen this pattern with every category of tool. Communication tools don't fix communication. Documentation tools don't fix documentation. Monitoring tools don't fix reliability.
Tools amplify what's already there. If a team communicates well, a good tool makes it easier. If a team doesn't communicate well, a good tool makes the dysfunction more visible — and sometimes more entrenched.
The instinct to buy a tool is understandable. Tools are concrete. You can purchase them, deploy them, point at them. "We're addressing the problem — look, we bought a tool."
But the problems that matter are rarely tool-shaped. They're about incentives, relationships, fear, power. They're about whether people feel safe being honest. They're about whether failure is punished or learned from.
No tool fixes those things. At best, a tool can make them slightly easier to navigate. At worst, it can make them harder by adding a layer of bureaucracy that everyone has to maintain.
The company eventually abandoned the project management tool. Not officially — it's probably still running somewhere — but in practice. Teams went back to whatever they'd been doing before, which wasn't great, but at least wasn't pretending to be something it wasn't.
The trust problem remained. It always does, until someone decides to actually address it.