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 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
Sometimes you need to pack a suitcase.
One way of doing it would be to have a list of how many socks, shirts etc. can the suitcase hold, then prepare these items and pack them into the suitcase. This should work, I think, but there are a few problems. First, you need to have this list ready for each suitcase. Second, well, it would be difficult to prepare such a list due to the unstable nature of clothes: wrinkling, moving, and in general the tendency of not having a steady shape.
However, the main problem with this method is that it takes a lot of time. You need to constantly check the number of items against the list, write down how many you have etc.
Sometimes it is right there before us and all we need to do is to reach out and take it. Improvement opportunities are there – all we need to do is learn how to identify them and invest the minimal time to turn the opportunity into something real.
A good indication of an improvement opportunity hanging around is when something really good or really bad happens.
For example, I am working with a client where seven development teams are struggling for some time to better work together. One of the problems we were having was that features didn’t complete – didn’t move to Done. This week we had a deadline and the teams worked very hard and managed to get the important things done. They worked hard but you saw the spark in their eyes – They were very happy and proud about it.
Tools for Agile Marketing seem to be a hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well.
For co-located marketing teams the best approach would probably be to start without an electronic tool and just use a physical board/wall with sticky notes at least until they get the hang of it and learn what they really need. Many marketing teams are distributed and therefore don’t have this luxury. While moving to a co-located setup is definitely a recommended option it isn’t always realistic… So those teams do need to have some electronic tool to support their move to agile marketing.
Earlier this month I was helping a software organization in an Israeli defense organization (that’s why there are no pictures) run their first PI Planning event. The day after I told my colleagues at Agilesparks that this is one event I will try to remember whenever I get into difficult times doing coaching, something that happens from time to time, coaching being what it is. I will try to remember that day because of the magic that happened somewhere around noon. And I want to tell you all about it.
Being mindful of the teaching mindset
I wear many hats at AgileSparks – what you might call a T-Shaped sparkie… Every week I can find myself wearing the consultant hat, the marketer hat, the thought leader hat, the trainer hat, the conference speaker hat, the head of business in the United States hat and probably a few more that I’m forgetting. Switching hats requires a context switch which we know is tough but also requires a mindset switch.
Specifically, what I found over the years is that going into a teaching mindset is something I need to pay some extra attention to. This goes beyond making sure I’m comfortable with the materials I’m going to deliver, reviewing the facilitator’s guide, etc.
As a coach, I’ve had several opportunities to be involved in the process of big organizations moving from waterfall to agile. You usually start with frowning faces, people coming to meetings reluctantly, armed with a load of cynicism and skepticism. Then after some time, something magical happens – things change to the better. Spring has arrived!
During those first months, at the beginning of the implementation, times are hard. People are struggling. And very soon you start to hear complaints and people telling you how great it was before all this. Before all this agile. When design documents were design documents. When they had time to work. Suddenly the past becomes a lost haven. In training, in coaching sessions, you hear people reminiscing about some glorious past.
The key to addressing these issues is to find out how exactly was it at those times.
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)
You can find a lot of praise for the Marshmallow Challenge. It is a good warm-up for workshops and training sessions and you can learn
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