I generally prefer to work at small to midsize companies. The reasoning is fairly simple, too. I like flexibility. Not a complete lack of defined policies, mind you. Policies are important. They give companies a road map for, if not efficiency, then at least predictable inefficiency. But smaller companies tend to have the flexibility to know when you need to stray off the beaten path. Large companies do not. And there's a certain logic behind that. The more you do, the more you rely on that predictability. Policies have saved my neck a time or two. Being able to say "I can't start this effort because our policies have not been followed" has forced projects to refine requirements and has gone a long way to prevent train wrecks. But there's a flip side, too.At larger companies, it's harder to change policies that either no longer fit, or need refinement from the original draft in order to produce the intended result. There's also more risk in proposing new policies, I think. There generally tend to be more people that need convincing, which tends to mean more people that don't want to "Change what has been working for us". It often comes to a point where it's easier to just live with the inefficiency than try to change it. Or worse, at least in some ways, ignore policy and try not to get caught.
Okay. So far, I haven't told anyone something they don't know. This is one of the factors that need to be weighed when deciding whether or not to accept an offer or to leave a company. It's, hopefully, one of the factors you investigate when interviewing a company. As an aside, please note that I didn't say "interviewing with a company." You're as much deciding whether or not to offer them your services as they are offering you a position. Never forget, you're a contractor.
The point is, while working for smaller companies, I've noticed a reoccurring phenomenon, which I've started calling The Tipping Point. As smaller companies grow, they start to take on more work and start to do more. At this point, I have observed two results.
If the company does not at least have some policies guiding their work, the company tends to collapse. There comes a time when it's simply too late to gain control of source code, whether because nothing is in source control or there's no structure. When it's simply too late to implement good project policies because stakeholders aren't interested in becoming properly involved in projects and that disinterest is too entrenched to change. When projects are dangerous to deploy because no one knows what anyone else is doing. At this point, while the company may struggle on, it's no longer possible to fix the problems, and the only smart move is to leave.
The second result I've observed usually happens when there are a modicum of policies in place, and is usually hastened by bringing in An Expert. Perhaps a new CIO, perhaps a contractor. The buildup, again in my observations, tends to start slowly. No deploying projects without communicating with other groups. Nothing terrible there. Common sense, in fact. Issues, bugs, and defects need to be logged. Again- why would you not? And we need to get a sense of how much we're spending on projects, so we need people to log time spend on projects. Not my favorite activity, but I can't deny the importance.
But then things grow. Communicating deployments becomes getting signoff from other groups before deploying. The bug tracking system becomes a full-on change management system designed to integrate with every step of any process. Except yours, inevitably. Rather than turning in time tracking spreadsheets, either a web app gets build, or you're to use a built-in feature of the change management system.
Finally, comes the tipping point. I wish I could say this is an exaggeration, but in one case, I was entering time into an application that had a database lookup for projects, yet my projects never seemed to show up. I also had to email the same to my manager. The time tracker was in half hour increments, but my manager wanted 15-minute increments. Every change, even to dev environments, needed to be entered into five different systems (again- not exaggerating) and cleared in a bi-weekly Change Control Board meeting.
And all this doesn't even take into account well-documented problems when you mix in an Expert Scrum Consultant. I think I've made my opinions on the subject pretty clear, but it's pointless to deny what often happens when Scrum policies get blindly applied. And that's the problem- policies getting blindly applied. The "Monkey See Monkey Do" style of "Best Practices".
It's a rare gem when you find an organization with the self-discipline to recognize a policy that needs refining or simply removed. Or temporarily ignored on a non-precedential basis. A good set of policies are a balancing act. Too many and you get buried under their weight. Too few and you get buried under your own weight. That's The Tipping Point.
