I work as a software developer at a small non-IT company. One of the challenges we face is receiving timely feedback to questions and the testing of the programming assignments we handle. The root cause of this is that there is usually one project requestor per department who will review/test our software and this requestor will frequently have multiple projects they are involved in at any given time.
I am not sure if we have an employee resource allocation problem, or if a particular project management method might help the situation.
From the staffing side, we seem to have multiple programmers working on multiple projects for one requestor. At times, the requestor ends up very overwhelmed and feedback on a given project can take weeks to months to be received. Not a good situation for anyone. However, it seems there are plenty of times when it is possible for someone to handle the review/testing of multiple projects as not everything is ready for review simultaneously and things can progress forward.
On the project management side, we do not follow any true methodology, unless chaotic-waterfall is an approach. Would an agile/scrum methodology help this situation? I guess my confusion on the scrum approach is the allocation of someone to review/test the software produced and answer questions for the programmer.
I feel like my company could make some nice improvements to how we do things, but I am struggling with a direction for us to research/consider. Since we are a small company, and not software-focused, it is challenge to find the best improvements to make. If anyone can provide some direction, it would be greatly appreciated.