Project Management: Beneficial Even for Small Startups?

Short answer: Absolutely!

Project Management can be applied to teams of different sizes, with different levels of rigor. At the most basic level, any team or individual building a product can benefit from chaos reduction. While a team putting a rocket into space may have very rigorous processes with a lot of overhead to ensure hundreds of millions of $ aren't wasted and lives are not put into jeopardy, an effective startup may instead have some organizational tools and apply agile methods to be able to prototype and innovate quickly.

Taken to the limit, applying agile methods can even super charge a 1-person startup. One of my favorite scrum articles is Scrum Of One: How to Bring Scrum into your One-Person Operation by Alex Andrews. Key benefits of agile and scrum for any sized team, including a 1-person operation are:

• Prioritization

• Focus

• Not being in a state of constant broken-ness

• Frequent feedback

• Self-reflection and continuous improvement

You don't need to invest in a lot of tooling to get started. For my own coding, setting up a basic Kanban board or GitHub Project helped me to ensure I was not losing new ideas and that I was always picking off the next piece of work in a sensible sequence. Even a simple spreadsheet can take you a long way to seeing both the big picture and the details in one place, so that you can make better decisions.

A small startup team often doesn't need to have a full-time project manager. Having someone who enjoys keeping things organized play the role of scrum master could take just a few hours a week.

Kestrel Omnitech Inc. can either help to get some basic processes and infrastructure in place and coach one of the startup team members who is inclined to project manage part-time, or fill the role of part-time project manager. To discuss how Kestrel Omnitech Inc. could help your development team to rein in chaos, contact info@kestrel-omnitech.com.