tech-company, mobile-apps, agile, project-managementAt my small business, the developers have been a using scrum-like, agile development strategy. Since most of us in the company are developers, we’ve started adding general business tasks to the project board in addition to coding tasks.
We’d like to start using a new board just for these business tasks, so we can better include everyone in the company and separate the business tasks from the coding tasks. Some of the scrum roles such as product-owner don’t really fit into this model easily though. Are there any scrum adaptations or other agile methodologies that work well for running a startup or small business?
At my business, we've been using an all-inclusive scrum-styled board, with 5 columns for different "item states", but also rows for the different categories of items across our entire business. I want to note, this is in addition to the plethora of software we use for bug tracking, Google Docs (I said it -- used for international communication), and trello which we use for the product development.
Our scrum board is based off of the legendary Silicon Valley (TV Series), and includes columns labeled "Ice Box," "Emergency," "In Progress," "Testing," and "Complete." We use this board for major items of our board, and we consider it an in-office supplement to our other tools, be it marketing lead gens or various business spreads (and obviously the above mentioned software tracking tools). The visual nature of the board is extremely beneficial for staying on task.
Different from some companies, since we're small, we have nametags that we put on items when they're being worked on, so we can see who is tackling what. Once it goes into Complete, we take the nametag off and place it around (that way, one person 'carries' an item into a new category, and may or may not continue working on it in that section).
The biggest thing with scrum to remember is the assigning of epochs and stories. This allows us to categorize and quantify the size and grouping of each item into the scope of our project.
We only have a few developers that are domestic (I switch between project/product manager, full stack developer, etc.), but we hold meetings every morning and basically try to optimize our time by only including those relevant for each category. We really don't spend too much time on this, since so many of us are multi-tasking many areas.
The whole point of scrum is to maintain communication, prevent blocks, and organize the development experience. You can read more about scrum here.
To provide a direct answer to your question, if you think you're at the point where your business is large enough to have two direct verticals - (software and business) - particularly, that people on one side don't need to see everything on the other, then by all means split the two boards. The reality is that you can only use so much space for two things before each has grown to a point where you are forced to split them.
I just want to say, we have about a 8-to-1 ratio between our "software stuff" (design to dev to admin) and "business stuff" (Marketing, Clients, Financials, Investors etc.).
Just remember that scrum is a system made for development. It doesn't necessarily apply so well to business tasks, particularly when working with burn-downs (too many loose estimates and often moving parts, hard to estimate).
There are other tools to use for business tracking, like mentioned on this site. But I would definitely recommend Trello if you're looking at building a fairly simple to-do list, and sharing those lists with other people.
We use kanban for both our development tasks and general business activities. Some boards combine both, while others are strictly business or deve stuff. It seems to be working perfectly. Also, we don’t have a dedicated board manager - as in just one man doing all task creation. All jobs are addded to the backlog and if the manager or anyone else feels there are issues with a task from the backlog - they make a comment on it and the task creator addresses this. This often helps to reduce unnecessary work and to avoid doubled tasks. I’ve just seen an article on agile adoptions for small companies - take a look, it may also help: https://kanbantool.com/blog/agile-for-a-small-business My personal opinion is that it’s best to try all approaches you think may work and choose a combo of methods and tools that suit your unique business.
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