> no team member should be working in more than one thing at a time
How do you do that? My company has many small products/projects. Can't staff them all full time, and can't schedule them to be independent (project A is worked on Jan 1-15, B on 16-31, etc). It is inevitable that you will be working part time on several things at once.
> If your scrum board shows a bunch of small tasks less than half-day work
Some tasks are half day. Get Windows installed on this server. And so on. Oh, you can make a task "get windows installed on the server, and update the FooBar documentation" but that is just artificial.
Let me clarify: no team member should be working more than ONE TASK at a time.
You can manage multiple small projects just fine this way. I just left a place where the team was doing just that.
> Not everything fits into scrum.
You are absolutely right. SCRUM is great for processes which are empirical in nature (same inputs, different results).
Software development is empirical: give 2 teams of devs the same requirements and deadline, both teams might return code that essentially does the same but the code bases will be different.
IT support stuff such as installing Windows is better managed with a defined process (same inputs, identical output every time).
How do you do that? My company has many small products/projects. Can't staff them all full time, and can't schedule them to be independent (project A is worked on Jan 1-15, B on 16-31, etc). It is inevitable that you will be working part time on several things at once.
> If your scrum board shows a bunch of small tasks less than half-day work
Some tasks are half day. Get Windows installed on this server. And so on. Oh, you can make a task "get windows installed on the server, and update the FooBar documentation" but that is just artificial.
Not everything fits into scrum.