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Agile Marketing

Scaled Agile Marketing Flow with Kanban

In the previous article, I mapped out the essentials of applying SAFe™ (The Scaled Agile Framework) to a marketing context and ended with a cliffhanger. As you can guess from the title of this article, what I feel is missing from the list of essential SAFe elements is Flow and Kanban, which IS an important part of SAFe. In this article, I will focus on the key Flow/Kanban elements that are essential to succeeding with Agile Marketing at scale in my view. These elements don’t have to be implemented as part of SAFe by the way. Some organizations implement them on their own. 

What do we mean when we say effective marketing flow

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Agile Tools

Seeing The Big Picture With Scrum

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.

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Kanban

Scrum and Kanban – Stronger Together

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.

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Kanban

Ba – A sense of togetherness – Amplified by Music

When teaching SAFe (The Scaled Agile Framework) we talk about “Ba” – the sense of togetherness and connectedness that amplifies the performance of teams and larger groups (e.g. Agile Release Trains).

This week when visiting Leankit (To teach an Implementing SAFe 4.0 SPC4 class to their Customer Success coaching team) I had the opportunity to see their Sweep ceremonies (Sweep ~= Program Increment) – a Demo and Business Context event for the whole company.

The sense of “Ba” – people having fun together, enjoying their week together, and working towards the company’s mission, was in the air.

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Agile Marketing

Kanban for Marketing Kick-start Example

It is a slightly modified version of Henrik Kniberg’s Kanban Kick-Start Example that he graciously shared using a creative commons license. Why do we need a marketing version you ask? Because we find that people connect better to examples in their own domain so talking about code and development doesn’t really work well with marketers… Feel free to take this one and adapt it for your use and share alike! (Here’s a PowerPoint version you can edit)

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Agile Mindset

The Critical Difference Between Backlog and To Do (Kanban, Scrum)

When we build a kanban board to manage our work (either practicing Kanban or Scrum) we usually create a Backlog list (usually the first column) and a To Do list (following the Backlog). I’ve noticed that many times the separation between the two is artificial and people don’t always understand the critical difference between the two. I’d like to discuss it here.

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Getting Started

Kanban Basics Reading List

Kanban 101 2014 02 kanbans not-so-hidden agendas 2 Kanban: Is it in the cards? – SD Times: Software Development News Crisp’s Blog » Kanban kick-start

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What Is Kanban?

Want to go Agile in an Agile way?Learn how Kanban is helping pragmatic organizations successfully achieve sustainable and sticky Agility without risky revolutions. What is

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Case Studies

Kanban at Pelephone – Case Study

I will be talking about:

* The problems that we wanted to solve (some are still with us) and how the Kanban mindset helped us define the change and then implement it

* what challenges we encountered along the way

* what’s important (in my opinion) in this process

* what did we gain (so far) from implementing the change at Pelephone

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