I have just moved to a company where the production team is 15 strong, and consists of a mixture of back end and front end developers, testers & creatives. The team are working on multiple projects at the same time. Its agency work, so projects are fairly small, a CMS corporate website, a basic e-commerce site, that sort of thing.
At the moment the Project Managers make weekly resource requests for greater than 6 hours to be added to a long term production schedule, which runs as far as 6 weeks ahead. This is then transferred on a Friday into a short term schedule for the coming week. Added to this are requests of less than 6 hrs. If we are short in resource, we get in freelancers which are costly.
There are a lot of changes that happen to this weekly plan. Work get's pulled on the day it happens due to a dependency not being met, or another priority project coming in. The client doesn't get creative to us in time etc.
Partly there is a lot of bad planning going on, so I can start there. Although, I've been researching into what the ideal pipeline/work schedule should look like, and can't find anything for agile that applies to this structure.
Does anyone know if there are agile theories for agency type work?