Scaling Agile Archives

Agile Marketing

Scaled Agile Marketing using SAFe – The Essentials

Focusing on SAFe™

In the previous article in the Scaled Agile Marketing series, I provided an overview of how Scaled Agile Marketing looks like. This time around I want to provide some more details on one of the approaches I mentioned for implementing Scaled Agile Marketing – the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™).

Why SAFe? First of all, it is the most popular scaling approach these days and so many marketers will find themselves in organizations where SAFe is actually used in IT/Technology and the option of using it in Marketing as well will come up. As a result of that, it is also the scaling framework I’ve actually had a chance to use in a marketing context with good results.

Agile Marketing

Scaled Agile Marketing – An Overview

What does Scaled Agile Marketing mean?

So, assuming you’re thinking Agile Marketing can help you with some of your marketing challenges and there’s a good opportunity to do something about it right now, and there are some reasons you think you need to consider some scaling aspects, let’s try to see what scaled agile marketing looks like.

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.

Agile Marketing

Defining Agile Marketing

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.

Agile Marketing

Better late than never

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.

Agile Marketing

Do you NEED to Scale Agile Marketing? (Scaled Agile Marketing Series – Part 3)

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.

Agile Marketing

Why Agile Marketing?

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):

Agile Mindset

Keeping The PI Planning Momentum

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).

Agile Marketing

To Infinity and Beyond – Achieving Organizational Agility

Agile Development – Just A Starting Point Towards Organizational Agility

For many people Agile is “Agile Development”. They use agile to improve the effectiveness and agility of software organizations. For these people scaling agile typically means developing even larger programs/products with an agile development approach.

Scaling Sideways Towards Business Agility

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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