Hello: First post in the project management section.
I've been with company "X" for 3 years. During year one, I was a developer along with one other gentleman, and we developed two applications for a single business unit and I often had to support the other gentleman because he was behind schedule. We had a small project management team at the time who helped gather requirements and created documentation using a traditional, waterfall approach. Soon, other business units needed to use our products and we added a few more applications. Because of my early success, I was promoted to head up the newly growing development team and the other guy was (mutually) let go. During year two we grew our development team significiantally, had a good project management team to support us and implemented an Agile Scrum approach which helped us address customer needs with much faster releases. This proved successful to meeting our deadlines for a while until it became clear that we were still somewhat understaffed as people resigned and we weren't allowed to replace due to budget constraints.
Fast-forward to now. Company "X" has recently minimized staff to two developers who have to do all of their own project management. They need to continue to support all of these business units and the six enterprise applications which are functional, but still not complete with all of the features needed. No one wants to eliminate any of the projects, and they are not in a position to finance additional resources to work on them at this time (or into the foreseeable future).
I wanted any anecdotal advice others' may have in this area. While some of the tennets of the scrum approach may continue to work for us, we don't even have enough personnel anymore to constitute a traditional scrum team, and it's clear that we won't be able to dedicate a developer for new development anymore as production support issues swell without resources. I'm trying to think of a scenario where requirements management, communication, programming, production support, qa testing, and documentation with two "programmers" will have any sort of possible positive outcome.
I've been with company "X" for 3 years. During year one, I was a developer along with one other gentleman, and we developed two applications for a single business unit and I often had to support the other gentleman because he was behind schedule. We had a small project management team at the time who helped gather requirements and created documentation using a traditional, waterfall approach. Soon, other business units needed to use our products and we added a few more applications. Because of my early success, I was promoted to head up the newly growing development team and the other guy was (mutually) let go. During year two we grew our development team significiantally, had a good project management team to support us and implemented an Agile Scrum approach which helped us address customer needs with much faster releases. This proved successful to meeting our deadlines for a while until it became clear that we were still somewhat understaffed as people resigned and we weren't allowed to replace due to budget constraints.
Fast-forward to now. Company "X" has recently minimized staff to two developers who have to do all of their own project management. They need to continue to support all of these business units and the six enterprise applications which are functional, but still not complete with all of the features needed. No one wants to eliminate any of the projects, and they are not in a position to finance additional resources to work on them at this time (or into the foreseeable future).
I wanted any anecdotal advice others' may have in this area. While some of the tennets of the scrum approach may continue to work for us, we don't even have enough personnel anymore to constitute a traditional scrum team, and it's clear that we won't be able to dedicate a developer for new development anymore as production support issues swell without resources. I'm trying to think of a scenario where requirements management, communication, programming, production support, qa testing, and documentation with two "programmers" will have any sort of possible positive outcome.