I’m about to enter my 11th year in the business of web design, development and strategy. It boggles my mind to think about it. What is even more perplexing, is that with the exception of the last 2-3 months, the process I (and most of the industry) have employed is in need of dramatic overhaul. In the last few months I’ve been introduced to Agile, which has lessened the suck to a degree.
The Agile movement has some dedicated supporters. Hell, they even have a manifesto. So, I’m likely to get some opposition over this next statement: Agile doesn’t work for small creative agencies.
It’s not Agile’s fault either. Agile is a great concept. There are some fundamental principles, which I love. However, my perception is that it’s best suited for a select set of working environments, chiefly software development. I’m generalizing, but in software companies, release dates tend to be several months apart, team members often have the benefit of focusing on one project at a time, and the role of the client is often played by an internal body. Agile is a perfect fit for that scenario.
Life in a web development studio is a little different — it is in ours anyway.
- We do lots of small projects, we do some medium-sized projects and every once in a while we land a big project. Size is relative of course, so let’s say anywhere from a couple weeks for a little project, all the way up to several months for a big project.
- A smaller project typically means a short term client engagement.
- The varying sizes of these projects means that we’re prone to overlap to some degree, which means at any given time our team has several projects in motion.
- Our clients live all around the world. We’re often separated by geography, culture, time zones and expectations.
- We work predominantly with small businesses, often directly with the owner. People who are involved in most, if not all aspects of their business. They tend to be working over capacity and have little room for additional concerns outside of executing their day-to-day business activities.
Agile really struggles in this environment. It simply isn’t designed for it.
At The Blog Studio, we have found that Agile introduces a non-trivial degree of process overhead to each project. This overhead is most easily recognized as client education and meetings, meetings, meetings. On large projects, this overhead is amortized over a long period of time. However, on short term projects it’s very hard to justify the upfront process costs. I’ll go into more detail on this overhead in a future post.
So, we need something new. We need to borrow several of the key benefits of Agile, such as transparency, client participation and the capacity for rapid course correction, and we need to minimize the perceived stumbling points it introduces in our small agency scenario.
This will be a learning process. I don’t believe there is a universal solution. But I do think we can do better, and I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts on the subject over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, I leave you with a question: What hurts most about your process?
1 Comment to “Our Process is Broken.”
Interesting post. You bring up a good point on the additional overhead the agile process brings to smaller projects. For small 2 week projects I almost think that the agile process shouldn’t even begin until after the initial launch. 2 weeks is almost too little time.