I’d like to share with you some tips and tricks of setting a scrum board I usually share with my clients. The bottom line is that too many tools have too many features that support old ways of thinking. Let’s look at the various items one by one
A common phenomenon happening in organizations implementing scrum is that something is missing – the big picture. People are saying “We used to have High-Level Designs – where are they?”, “We used to have an architecture before developing – where is it?”. The answer will usually be that as we are working with small batches we need to focus on what’s immediately coming up and so other things are getting neglected.
But this is a confusion. Nothing should be neglected. For sure we cannot neglect long-term thinking and planning.
In this article we will try to define the approach known as “Agile Marketing” – The application of ideas from the world of “Lean/Agile Software Development” to the world of marketing with the aim of achieving marketing agility.
What ISN’T Agile Marketing
First, a couple of clarifications and myth-busting. Agile Marketing isn’t reactive marketing. Agile Marketing isn’t about how you react in a Marketing/PR crisis (ask United about those) or real-time opportunity (you can ask Oreo about those). I don’t mean that you can not/shouldn’t deal with those when you’re doing Agile Marketing, but it isn’t what Agile Marketing is about.
It took us some time, but the slides from our (Steve Wolfe from CA and myself) December talk in the Boston Agile Marketing meetup are finally publicly available.
This ISN’T Agile Marketing
First, a couple of clarifications and myth-busting. Agile Marketing isn’t reactive marketing. Agile Marketing isn’t about how you react in a Marketing/PR crisis (ask United about those) or real-time opportunity (you can ask Oreo about those). I don’t mean that you can not/shouldn’t deal with those when you’re doing Agile Marketing, but it isn’t what Agile Marketing is about.
Agile Marketing also isn’t “We just get things done without any real process.” Being super-responsive and saying “yes we can” all the time isn’t Agile Marketing. (Especially if it means unsustainable pace).
Finally, Agile Marketing also isn’t Scrum, Daily Scrums/Standups, Sprints, Scrum Masters, Kanban Boards. It
In earlier posts in our Scaled Agile Marketing, we looked at whether you even need Agile Marketing and then what typically triggers a serious discussion about Agile Marketing. In this post, we move to the next step – figuring out if you need Scaled Agile Marketing.
So – Do you need Scaled Agile Marketing?
Scaling isn’t just a function of the number of people in the marketing organization. It’s more a function of how many marketers need to work together as part of one customer journey/experience.
Let’s look at an example. In the diagram below you can see a typical marketing organization that would possibly have a need for some scaling approach. They have agile teams that cross-cut the different marketing functions – focusing on delivering marketing value/impact for a specific product/customer journey rather than focusing on a specific marketing function/task.
The Need For An Agile Marketing Transformation
Marketers or junior marketing leaders can implement Agile Marketing at the team level bottom up or in islands in the organization. This approach can achieve some improvement but typically stalls at some point.
Real marketing agility requires a transformative change in processes, policies, mindset, and maybe even the type of leaders. This is a bigger lift obviously.
While most of the marketing organizations we see score pretty high on the “do they need Agile Marketing?” scale, Only some of them would agree that that’s indeed what they need, and even a smaller set goes and does something about it.
While many marketing leaders agree with Agile Marketing at the concept level, They need a strong trigger before they take action on it. (To use “customer journey” language – most marketing leaders aren’t even in the awareness stage, but even those that are, need a trigger to move towards acquisition and activation…)
Why Agile Marketing
Making any sort of change is non-trivial. Implementing Agile Marketing, especially at scale, is hard. There should be a real need for it. These are some common change drivers we hear from Marketing leaders (more at “State of Agile Marketing” by Andrea Fryrear):
Over the years we at AgileSparks have been leading the charge when it comes to creating mashups and hybrids of approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and whatever. Mashups and hybrids can be very attractive as they can be an excuse for taking what you like from each approach and leaving behind the hard stuff. In mashing up approaches you need to make sure whatever set of practices you end up with is cohesive and effective. Coming up with the smallest set of practices that is still cohesive and comprehensive and brings in the best of the Scrum iterative world and the Kanban flow-oriented world is a result of years of work in the trenches.
I recently started working with Steve Porter, Dave West, and others at Scrum.org as well as Daniel Vacanti of Actionable Agile (And a long-time friend and AgileSparks partner) on bridging the Scrum and Kanban worlds. We believe the time is right to put behind the arguments around which approach is better and help both Kanban and Scrum practitioners realize that actually they are stronger together.
In his book, “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” Scott Berkun tells us that when speaking, once the lights go out, you have everyone’s attention. Then you need to fight to avoid attrition.
In a similar fashion, at the end of the SAFe PI Planning event you have the entire organization’s attention (read more about it in a small post I published some time ago called “PI Planning Magic!”), and as time passes you start losing it.
The question is how do you keep this attention and energy, climaxed at the final confidence vote where everyone raises their hands to indicate their belief in the plan, throughout the Program Increment (PI).
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