Problems we’ve had

We cannot predict the future.

This is what makes our lives exciting, but it could be also very annoying when you’re forced to make a decision without sufficient information.

As an average-sized web-development agency, we strongly depend on our customers and their needs, both of which we cannot control.

How many new projects will we have next month? How many new people should we hire to work on them and what sort of experience should they have? What if we don’t have new projects? What if we have the perfect project for us, but we don’t have enough people to work on it? Every new sale influences our development process because each new project requires additional resources, thus generating an infinite number of questions and ad-hoc solutions.

Another problem that we struggle with is our ability to rotate people between projects painlessly and as needed (another element that is hard to predict) - including an introduction period before leaving current work and dive into a new project. In order to make this happen, we would need to free-up some resources to fill the intermediary time gap - the period between the developer’s transfer of knowledge to his replacement and the moment he’s fully committed and working efficiently in a new team. Where we can find these resources without causing harm to our other projects?

This leads us to the next question: if we hire a new person to work at Monterail, how do we make sure that they would feel comfortable with our work processes, guidelines and communication rules before we put them into teams? How do we make sure that we won’t lose our spirit and atmosphere at some point?

With all of these questions in our heads and no answers ready, we thought:

We cannot predict the future, but we can try to be prepared for it.

#agile #project management