How to handle multiple projects in a small team [closed]

Question

We just started to use scrum for our project management. We are a very small team (2 developers, 1 UI/Web-deisgner ) and we have a lot of running projects at once.

How do you handle having multiple projects running at once in the scrum model? Most of the time we have a main projects and some small ones. How do you combine multiple sprints efficiently?

edit: Don't be fixed on scrum. we are a small structure and very flexible with that. Scrum was just my starting point. If you have others systems that worked good for a or your small team i am totally open to any kind of input.

Answer 1

AFAIK the foundation of Scrum is that the team is involved in a single project at a time. Regardless of methodologies, task switching overhead makes it very inefficient to work on multiple projects "in parallel".

What you could do is to try to schedule the different projects into separate sprints, i.e. do a sprint dedicated entirely to project1, then the next sprint entirely on project2 etc. If the projects are of very different scope, you could consider varying the length of sprints, e.g. do a 3-week sprint on a large project, then maybe a 1 week sprint on a small one.

In pure Scrum the length of sprints is carved in stone indeed, but then again, IMO the point is not to get the "pure Scrum implementor" badge, rather a working real-life process for your team.

(disclaimer: I am not a Scrum master :-)

Update based on comment: I see your problem. You need to respond fast to small support (improvement / bug fix) requests from customers of other products, while still need to work on a bigger project in a predictable fashion.

One possibility would be to plan the sprints of the big project in Scrum, but "timebox" some of your time for incoming support tasks. E.g. if on the average you spend 5 days in each monthly sprint supporting other projects, you allocate 5 days' worth of resources (however you count time) for support in each sprint.

Another option may be to consider other methods, like Kanban, where there is no sprint or planning, instead the team works solely (or mainly) based on demand from customers.