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SAFe for Agile Marketing Guidance Article

Scaling Agile Marketing With SAFe – Overview

More and more Marketing organizations are realizing today that they need to be faster, more flexible/responsive, and more collaborative, in order to have a real impact on the business they’re supporting. More and more CMOs are looking at Agile Marketing as the way to modernize their organization.

Inspired by Agile Development, Agile Marketing describes a mindset of continuous learning and validation, customer-focused collaboration across functional silos, adaptive and iterative campaigns, and more responsive/continuous planning. Similar to development organizations, Agile Marketing teams use techniques such as Scrum to work in an iterative cadence, and such as Kanban to visualize and improve the flow of work.

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Kanban Service Level Expectations and how to use them in Scrum

One of the new concepts we introduce in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams is the Service Level Expectation, defined as:

An SLE forecasts how long it should take a given item to flow from start to finish within your workflow. The SLE itself has two parts: a period of elapsed days and a probability associated with that period (e.g., “85% of work items will be finished in 8 days or less” which can also be stated as “8 days with 85% confidence/probability”).

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Understanding the Kanban for Scrum Teams Guide

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban for Scrum Teams guide and the accompanying Professional Scrum with Kanban class. Creating the class and guide together with Daniel (Vacanti) & Steve (Porter) and then working on getting it to market in a professional way (how else? ) with the Scrum.org staff has been a great experience and a major focus area for me in the last couple of months.

As you might imagine, together with the interest come some questions about some choices we made in the design of the guide and the class. Several are emerging as the frequently asked ones. I wanted to tackle a couple of those in this post.

Where are some of the core Kanban practices?

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Getting Real About Your Values – The Values Retrospective

Bringing values down to earth
Values and principles can often seem lofty and intangible so many agile practitioners prefer to focus on tools and practices. That’s understandable but unfortunate. Because values and principles have the potential to provide us with clarity and guidance that transcends what practices and frameworks can achieve. Ideally – part of your empiric inspection and adaptation process should explore whether you are living according to your values/principles. To achieve that you can try a value-based retrospective.

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Scrum Board Setup Tips and Tricks

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

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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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What Is Agile Marketing

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

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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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