Don’t get me wrong: Agile methods like Scrum, XP, and even Kanban (which, let’s be honest, is basically just visualized chaos) do work wonders for small, autonomous teams in small companies.

On the other end of the spectrum, enterprise methods are built for large-scale project and program management – essential for long-term planning and coordination between teams, subcontractors, marketing, and manufacturing partners. If you’re placing an order for a monthly build of 10,000 units (or even a one-off order), your EMS and procurement teams need to know weeks, sometimes months in advance, when the manufacturing documents will be ready and when deliveries will start.

Enterprise frameworks bring way too much overhead for a small company to handle.

One major gap in Scrum is that, at a higher level, product management needs to make critical decisions at specific project gates – months before the project can deliver any visible value. They have to decide whether to proceed or kill the project entirely.

Calibrate the backlog or cancel the project

Killing a project doesn’t mean deleting the codebase. But if you realize halfway through a €500M project that the customers have changed their priorities, making any meaningful change at the project goal level often means going back to square one.

From a company point of view, it is the equivalent of starting a new project – although with the cancelled project’s output as input.

The reason being, it inevitably involves non-trivial changes to requirements, priorities, team interdependencies, or even dependencies on deliverables that other projects expect from yours.

Small companies need to think bigger

With any decently sized project (even one as small as €2-3 M), multiple teams will be involved. Developers, Scrum Masters, or even individual teams’ product owners might not have direct contact with customers. Delivering a feature that a customer actually sees could require work packages from several teams, developed over multiple sprints.

While these challenges might seem like luxury problems for a small company, ignoring them when trying to grow beyond the “build it, ship it, move on to the next problem” cycle is a surefire way to stay stuck in that cycle forever – never truly leveling up.

Don’t focus all effort on looking at the current sprint. Look into the future.

Modelithe is a modern framework that not only provides a way bridge the needs of project management with the engineer’s need for issue tracking without the configuration overload plaguing some tools such as Jira. The Modelithe tool unlocks right amount of configuration for each organization, depending on the organization’s size and maturity. Not too little. Not too much. The right amount to grow.