Agility For Large R&D Team
Getting agile is probably the only (or best) way for large R&D organization in a software company to setup their workforce in front of their need. They usually are working over multiple products (legacy or not), and are market driven. In small software companies, the product management marketing function is endorsed by R&D management and they work usually on a small number of projects which are at least tightly integrated, which means R&D team is focusing on only 1 common goal.
Start-up have focused/sharp vision, excellent creativity. Large company are relying on strong market analysis and capacity to move on…most of the time as soon as a startup has demonstrated new markets. Vijay Challa talk about this in his post on Agility World 2.0.So, they have to invest (put development resources) on the products depending on the market trends, profits from each product,…etc. That’s why its important to be able to switch developers from a product to another to be reactive.
Some agile principles helps for this:
- iterations and time boxed releases to have reactivity when some resources are removed from a project,
- sharing knowledge instead of specialization to be allow reallocation,
- pair programming to reduce learning curve when new developers are working on a new project.
I tend to think that agility is maybe not always that relevant for small company, but its certainly a must have for large software company to be reactive.