… or, how to manage fast-paced development projects with a small (<5 people) team.

We’ve lately been in the market for software development project management nirvana but none of the solutions out there seem to fit, just right.

Management need transparency and measurable progress on the project while the developers need a framework within which they can prioritise their creativity and deliver on business targets.

So, when in doubt, steal from every and anyone to assemble what suits your needs best.

Our needs:

* Must be simple.
* Must be easy to follow.
* Must be easy to maintain.

What we’ve decided on is light and palatable. We all hate wasting time on meta-work and prefer to get less fluff and more stuff out the door. We’re results orientated so anything that can smooth the process getting there is a real boon.

We simply:

* Prioritise the list of features _with_ Management.
* Drop them into smaller buckets (we call them milestones) we can manage to turn around once or twice a week.
* Finish a milestone _before_ we allow any further changes or crazy^H^H^H^H good ideas that may have immediate effects on delivering the milestone currently under way.
* Provide regular feedback to the business on features in the milestone being produced.
* Back to step 1 - review the milestone once complete and decide on any new priorities that have come to light that can now be rolled into the following milestone (pushing anything that is of lesser business importance on to a future milestone).

Sounds simple? Absolutely!

This process gives the dev guys enough continuous work time to get features out while the business still has fine grained control to change the direction after each milestone (in our case we’re ready for it twice a week).

A fabulous side effect of this is that the business now also has regular, discrete, things they can see and play with which in itself provides a creative feedback loop into the next round of milestone decisions.

Charl - Developer