Agile methodology for small company; large projects + ticket maintenance

Question

I just joined an IT small company that was looking for a project manager. We produce one project at once; that is, we start something, we develop it, we test it, and once it's done, then we think of another one.

For this reason, I implanted Scrum, as projects usually take months. However (and fortunately) previous projects are working well, therefore receiving tickets and... "issues" that just come out.

Please, consider that we are a small team (8 people in total currently) and I cannot assign only one person for tickets (it depends on each one's skills). As far as I've seen in many books and articles, Scrumban would fit our needs; that is, Scrum and Kanban combined.

What do you guys think about it? Could you just give me small brief about how would it be in the day by day work?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It depends on what is going on in your company or more precisely with your team. If you have 'heavy' product development activity, then 'Scrum' is suitable. For production support, Kanban is better. If you would like to address your issue along with your regular Scrum activities, you could rotate your resources (probably on a daily basis) for production issues. Of course, your team velocity would be affected by the number of issues being received and their priority. And it is ok to have lower velocity in this situation, because it is the realistic velocity as your team addresses the production issues and the business need.

Answer 2

There are circumstances where Scrum is not well suited. One of those circumstances is where the team regularly get ad-hoc or emergency requests that have to be addressed quickly and the request cannot wait for the next Sprint. In these circumstances, I recommend Kanban.

One thing I never recommend is to try and smash two different approaches (Scrum and Kanban) together. For one thing, they address different problem domains and, for another, there are no extra 'brownie' points for saying that you're doing "Scrum AND Kanban (waggle eyebrows suggestively)"

I encourage you to look at Kanban more fully.