Software lead reaching out

I decided to create a new account because my peers might be watching this discussion, not bad persé but I'd like to keep my struggles under the radar for now.

I'm a software developer with 10+ who has exceeded in the Senior role. I have led developers and small teams and have participated in large development teams as well. Reaching out like this is new for me, I guess you can interpret that as lot of frustration coming out.

My current team consists of 5 developers working for a startup that does product development, tailoring, support and consulting. We have heated discussions about our project methodology and everybody agrees: something needs to change. It takes too long to get things done (e.g. weeks instead of hours). In terms of processes and tools we are on the right track, the real killer is quality and productivity. We have yet to deliver a project on time to satisfaction and budget.

The changes that I suggest however are particularly met with a lot of resistance. I've been patient but the situation is digressing.

I would like to lead this team by example but I need some help. My current objective is to produce a few simple artifacts for the team to debate.

They have already expressed their resentment to the topics I suggest and believe that agile is all about creatively developing a solution on loose specs and using iterations to gain feedback. This is exactly the reason why we needs hours and hours of congregation and we sometimes have more than 6 stakeholders that are part of the development process.

It is my personal and currently sole opinion that we can save a lot of overhead by effectively communicating in a better way: through standardized documentation.

I'm thinking about creating a piece of project reference documentation that contains things like:

• Functional, technical and user documentation
• Architecture design, technical design, api's
• diagrams: architecture, infrastructure, data model, entity relationship model, component model, workflow
• user stories, use cases, test cases
• End-user manual

What would you do in this situation? Can you help me in any way? Do you have alternative approaches or any other suggestions? Please help us, this company is falling apart.