We are doing something very interesting at work.  We make supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that measure anything from temperature & humidity to particle counts in clean rooms.   We design software for Windows and embedded processors. We also design and build hardware devices.  We typically provide a turnkey system to our clients, to meet their particular needs.

As we are a small company with limited resources, it is always a constant challenge to manage the software, hardware and ongoing customer installations projects.  What are we to do? Use agile for everything of course!

We had our first planning session last weeek.  Considering that the entire cross-functional team is new to agile, I would say it went very well.  The approach is foreign to most people in the organization, but all were excited about the project visibility and accountability the daily stand-up brings. The instant visibility the task board affords into the project status was also welcome.

The major issue I believe we will face is simply the sheer number of projects we have to manage.  We curently have over 12 projects, most of them customer focused, the rest software development.  We have decided on using scrum with a 2 week sprint.  I am certain we will make changes as we come to grip with the specifics of applying scrum to a non software development area.  I’ll post from time to time about our experience using Scrum for everything.
Exciting changes are afoot!