He didn't say it was sufficient; he said they could do it for a short while. I consider myself in the same situation: we depend on Jira, but for a week or so it's not a big deal to use a bunch of Post-It notes.

Same reason I use oil lamps when the power is out, even though electric bulbs are my normal lighting.

A spreadsheet may be sufficient, but it's not as good as a system designed for development workflows.

(This comment sounds like I have a speck of love for JIRA. I don't! :)

I don't see this as a valid comparison. There is information loss. This has happened to my team which had about 50 people and it was very chaotic. It took us several days to just create the state our features were in.

Today it would even be more troublesome as we have a lot of integration rules dependent upon the workflow. I'd probably just recommend everyone uses a few weeks for self improvement and only address critical production issues.

It allows some simple links like story X depends on story Y, and displays it in a visually pleasent way.