The modern agile low-overhead method for small team growth to enterprise scale
Agile methods as Scrum, XP or Kanban (chaos visualized) works wonders for small, autonomous teams in small companies and open source projects.
Enterprise methods such as PMBOK, PRINCE2 and even waterfall (dead in the water since the ’70s) are focused on large-scale project and program management that requires long-term planning and coordination.
But none of the methods – not even scrum@scale or SAFe – are able to combine the path growing FROM a small team TO a world-wide enterprise. They break down once the company needs to face the facts: They can’t do every project they want, because the money is limited. Or, they provide way too much overhead for a small team to manage.
Modelithe is the bridge between the agility required by the highly productive small team in a startup and the cross-team coordination required by large enterprise companies, allowing small companies and even open source projects grow to multi-country enterprises.
This is the purpose of Modelithe:
- Simple enough for a free, private issue tracking of a personal backlog
- Provide the bare minimum issue tracking required to run a successful Kanban in a team of unlimited users.
- Enable Scrum through the support of Iterations and Complexity Points similar to Story Points.
- Add Workpackages and Epics once team matures, need to prioritize work spanning more than a set of Task can describe – but not before.
- Once the company grows and several teams need to coordinate their deliverables, Versionable Modules and cross-team Features are added.
- But not until there is a need for formal Project management, in order to provide formal go-no-go decisions, Gates and Milestones need to be added. The correlation between Lines and Teams no longer match the need of a project, so Users can be part of both line, project and cross-functional teams.
- Eventually, the company grows large enough to face the dreaded multi-project Program management with inter-project dependencies.
But nothing is added until absolutely needed.
Starting with the bare minimum to run a Kanban process for a single team, Modelithe gives issue-tracking on task level in a simple flow based on
Todo -> In Progress -> Pending Test -> Under Test -> Done
allowing modules to be implemented and tracked,
Without providing the mess and lack of coordination given by enterprise “customize the flow endlessly” systems, Modelithe gently aids the teams to use tried-and-tested workflows on all levels without sacrificing the unique challenges posed by already-established enterprise processes
As the need arise, additional teams are created, review flows are can added.
Eventually, the company has grown to the stage where Workpackages, Epics and Task require the teams and owners to accept them before adding them to iterations, allowing a known baseline to be defined. Instead of the anonymous “add task” or “edit”, the process highlights what it is all about: “Increase scope”, “Refine scope” or “Split scope”. No more surprise feature creep.