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we are a small web development company that has till now been working on client projects. we employed little to no project management and that has cost us a lot. we've used only the barest of tools (wireframing, prototyping etc) but no formal project management process has been put into place.

we've learnt from our mistakes and want to prevent them from happening in the future. also, we are looking to develop our own products and we understand that putting in a proper project management paradigm will help.

after a lot of research, we've sort of settled on agile for a few reasons:

  1. agile seems to scale well with team size. our team is small right now and we hope to grow and agile seems to be a process that we can put in place now and grow with.

  2. agile will help us with customers who just can't seem to make up their minds and keep changing requirements.

we'd appreciate the community's thoughts on this. is this a correct way to think? will agile be a good system to put into place, where there has been none till now? are there any resources that may help us in our position?

pretty much all of the resources that we've found start by comparing agile to x (where x = any management methodology) and why its better than x and how agile can be implemented in place of x. we're looking for resources that can help us out in our particular situation.

thanks for all your help!

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Are you talking about Scrum, XP, Crystal, or something else? "Agile" isn't actually a methodology. – Matthew Flynn Mar 19 '12 at 21:30
How about fixing the capitalization in your question? Also, it would be nice if you could ask a more focused question, as your current question merely seems to ask "What do you think?" – Robert Harvey Mar 19 '12 at 21:51
In addition to what @MatthewFlynn mentioned about "agile" being a family of methodologies, the choice of a methodology requires knowing a lot more about the characteristics of the project. For example, I need information about the understanding and stability of requirements and architecture, desired reliability, amount of risk, schedule and budget, needed visibility to management and/or the customer, and so on. Saying that you "want to do agile" isn't helpful. If you clean up your question and add more information, flag it for moderator review and we can see if it can be reopened. – Thomas Owens♦ Mar 20 '12 at 0:40

closed as not a real question by Robert Harvey, ChrisF♦ Mar 19 '12 at 22:03

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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agile seems to scale well with team size

Changing the workload to accomodate work team size comes from the art and science of work break down. This is not because of Agile.

agile will help us with customers who just can't seem to make up their minds and keep changing requirements.

Nothing can help you in such situation. Don't begin the project under the assumption: "I will overcome regardless of how many times the requirements change. I can do it." - This is a recipe for failure. Again, Agile or not, this won't help at least in a non-trivial project.

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