Enterprise education and training play a pivotal role in bridging workforce skills and improving the performance of small businesses. Considering the significant role of small businesses, this study attempts to investigate how small manufacturing units improve their performance using training methods. Therefore, for this study mixed-method approach was adopted to find the relationship between both variables. In the first part of the methodology, face to face, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with business owners and managers. Furthermore, survey questionnaires were carried out to find the relationship between both variables. For a mixed-method approach, 26 owners/managers were interviewed, and 136 respondents were identified from food and furniture manufacturing units with several employees who comes on the definition of small firms. The results of the study confirm in small firms positively impacted the individual performance and overall non-financial turnover of employees. The study concludes with future recommendations for academicians and policymakers.

The paper will explore whether Scrum is suitable to be extended to non-IT small business projects in the United States. The researchers conducted a longitudinal action research with 24-month follow-up on 142 small businesses in manufacturing, retail, professional service and healthcare sectors. The results indicated that the custom Scrum had a great positive impact on the project completion rate, the satisfaction of clients, and the productivity of a team. The main modifications were the reduction of the time spent at meetings, the integration of the responsibilities of the Product Owner and Scrum Master, and documentation simplification. Study discovered that the long-term adoption was possible when the management had a commitment at the outset and where teams would continuously perfect the framework as the implementation progressed.Overall,the study can indicate that Scrum could be effective in much more than software development provided that it is adjusted to a non-IT small project environment.