Making agile work for marketing

MINDJET PERSPECTIVES

Making Agile Work For Marketing

2MINDJET PERSPECTIVES

In a world that’s moving at a faster pace than ever, businesses everywhere are attempting to keep up by adjusting their processes in most every department. As a result, getting work done today is less about long term project planning and more about short bursts of hyper-focused productivity.

Think of it like running a mile on a treadmill vs. running a mile on a treadmill in intervals of varying intensity. The calorie loss might be the same in the end, but periodically raising the resistance will also make you stronger.

When it comes to marketing departments, the new framework for work is looser. Freer. It’s more alert. It’s Agile.

In this collection of articles, the first in a series of Mindjet perspectives, we present our thoughts on the Agile movement as well as tips for effectively adopting it into your own organization:

1. What is Agile Marketing? A breakdown of the most basic Agile elements, including scrums, sprints and burndown charts.

2. Agile Begins with Culture We can define the facets of Agile all day, but without the right culture, it won’t do us any good.

3. Four Common Mistakes Hiccups are going to happen — that’s part of what Agile is all about, learning from our mistakes — but at least you don’t have to get tripped up by the most common offenders.

Every organization has a different set of needs, of course, but I hope you’ll use the following as a springboard to building your own narratives of success. Try different things, use what works for you and throw out the rest. At the end of the day, that’s what Agile is all about: quick testing, iterations, learning and improvement.

Jascha Kaykas-WolffChief Marketing Officer, Mindjet

JASCHA KAYKAS-WOLFF

Intro


Agile marketing means taking small steps and not being afraid to fail. It also means never failing the same way twice. Very practically, it’s about putting a fixed timeframe around a specific set of work goals and keep an orderly cadence to new work being produced by your team.

To be Agile means testing ideas and using data to follow up on what’s working and stop doing what’s not working to improve the profit of your business. Sounds like what marketing was supposed to be in the first place, doesn’t it?

Software of the Fittest

Agile marketing springs from the world of software development, where the emphasis falls, as fast as possible, on the customer and feature functionality, with the ability to change direction when new opportunities present themselves, or when the wind changes.

Throughout the last decade, software development firms realized that old, hierarchical/waterfall product cycles did not work in the new digital world. There wasn’t enough time or money to have everything charted out and solidly planned to hand off for testing, branding and legal approval. It all took too much time and too much money, ultimately creating a relevancy gap with customers. Software companies fell by the dozens to abandoned funding, changing platforms, and the chronic threat of obsolescence.

But Agile survived. Agile companies used short release cycles, constant review, small teams, and remained able to follow the opportunity wherever it led them.

What is Agile Marketing?


What follows, in the parlance of software development, are the main elements of an Agile work environment.

Scrums These daily fifteen-minute meetings not only encourage camaraderie and communication, but also uncover potential problems before they get off track. Whether you call it a scrum or not isn’t what is important. It’s the physical act of meeting and communicating with each other on a daily basis that is key.

Pretend you are painting. You need to study the subject, back and forth with small marks in the beginning, to make sure proportions are correct. The work is on the canvas; meeting in the scrum is like stepping back to take a look at the overall subject, again and again.

Agile software teams typically meet every day and keep an explicit agenda. They answer three basic questions:

1. What have you done? 2. What are you doing? 3. What roadblocks do you have?

That may or may not work for your marketing team but the idea behind it is gold. Learning how often to meet and the set agenda will be the most important thing scrums teach you — because you’ll know when it’s too often by the groans.

Key: Make every minute of the scrum matter.

Sprints The sprint is an execution session where the team breaks a large project into smaller chunks so that smaller groups can deliver and get feedback earlier and more often. Bring someone to represent sales and engineering and finance to the sprint. Bring in anyone who is an immediate stakeholder and reviewer. Decide on the user stories together. Marketing is more horizontal than development within an organization and it’s important to include all the relevant stakeholders upfront.

In his 2012 Forbes.com article “The Best-Kept Management Secret on The Planet: Agile” Steve Denning dates this sort of “pull” approach to the kanban and lean manufacturing systems that software development teams adopted from manufacturing to replace traditional, high-inventory, high-sunk-costs methods.


In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why [more Agile methods] solved the problem. In the 1990s, huge sums of money were being lost because the work of software development was always late, over budget, and plagued by quality problems.



Clients were upset, and firms lost money. The developers were seen as culprits and were punished. They worked harder and harder. They labored evenings and weekends. They got divorced. It made no difference. The software was still late, over budget, and full of bugs. They were fired, but their replacements did no better.

The standard prescriptions of management didn’t work with software development. Something different had to be found.

Key: Agile Marketing creates an interdependent network “pulling” together, not an assembly line “pushing” through.

User Stories Creating good software requires you know how your customers are using it, and the same applies to all goods and services. Getting those kinds of inside stories from customers requires you have a candid and open feedback loop. What has social media done for companies if not provide just that?

Jim Ewel of AgileMarketing.net advises you to document user stories in one of two ways:

1. The need for new functionality 2. The roles and stages in the buying process

These stories aren’t case studies. Instead, they are stories for you to invent and use inside your business to help understand — even dramatize — what’s going on in the market and who your customers are. And, like all inventions, stories evolve as you collect more information and more data.

With Agile marketing, you don’t have to have a magic bullet and hit the target against impossible odds. When your teams respond quickly to change, you can throw out the big bets and the big blame about who was right or wrong. Save the drama for the stories.

Key: Take little shots, all the way, constantly tuning and honing in.



Burndown Charts Burndown charts show progress as hours or percent completion of all the tasks your team is working on. Updated before every scrum meeting, these visualizations help everyone see what’s going on, as the fuse burns closer and closer to the BOOM of completion! Chart it on a whiteboard. Use some green and red magnets. Experiment with different Sharpies. Or use a platform like Mindjet. Key: A picture answers, “What do we need to work on today?” without the need for words.

Scrum, Sprint, Stories, Charts

The critical success factor is to develop a taste and trust for the Agile process. Work, refresh. Work, refresh. Let go now of the notion that a person can go off by himself and comes back with a big idea. That’s a myth of a bygone era. Besides, you can’t plan for it any more than you can plan for winning the lottery. Daily investment makes much more sense.

Key: It doesn’t matter what you call all this stuff. Just start doing it.


In today’s volatile work environments uncertainty tends to be our only certainty and change our only constant. Coalition building and the ability to connect become even more crucial under such circumstances, providing teams with a distinct edge when buttressed by community.

Can We Predict the Unpredictable?

Of course we can’t–we’re not mind readers. But what we can be is better prepared. Most organizations understand the need for agility in the likely event of a shake-up, but what they tend to overlook is the starting point, a.k.a. the structural support system, a.k.a. the people. There’s no process that can save you from having to rebuild; it’s up to the people in your organization to align and move forward. So give them their best chance at doing that without too many hiccups. Adrian Cho of IBM puts it like this:

The top is a great place to start. If management makes the first move, then employees are less likely to experience anxiety, or an unraveling of their confidence in the company’s direction. So heads-up, all you leaders! Be forthright and direct with your employees, and communicate with them frequently–especially in the face of change.

Technology is just as important. Information is the currency of the digital age, and just like cash money, we all need a constant flow of it to survive. So check out internal tools that meet your communication needs andallow employees to temper information consumption, not drown in it.

Agile Begins with Culture


Don’t Be Afraid Stefan Kohn, head of innovation management at Fuji lm Europe, believes that the reason most people have a problem with hopping on the agility train is the fear of change itself. “Companies sometimes choose to neglect change. Those that are truly Agile embrace it, even when it risks cannibalizing an existing product,” he says.

Agility is risky business by nature, but without it we’d be static. So inject your company’s guts with agility. It’ll make achieving it on the outside way less frightening.

Agile Begins with Culture

Organizational agility is difficult, especially for large organizations, but it begins with Agile individuals and teams. Put together teams of talented people who can react promptly to change and improvise solutions, and you’ll enable an Agile organization that can respond readily to challenges.


Agile marketing is still a new concept for a lot of teams, making hiccups easy to come by. But don’t let yourself get bogged down by the usual--here are four easily identifiable Agile marketing mistakes to be on the lookout for.

1. Assuming you can always do more with less

One of the largest draws of Agile marketing is how much more productive small teams can be than traditional marketing teams. But beware, this doesn’t mean cutting back too far. One common mistake on the upper management end is the assumption that Agile marketing allows for understaffed or under-resourced teams to produce more. Agile marketing isn’t pulling a rabbit out of a hat; don’t expect an increase in efficiency and speed to double what you’re doing now — particularly if your organization is already small.

2. Lacking an executive sponsor

People are creatures of habit, making pushing them out of their routine particularly challenging —and without an executive sponsor to back the whole operation, nearly impossible.

An executive sponsor brings the authority required to manage differences in disciplines and work styles, as well as navigate resourcing issues. Additionally, having some buy-in at the top never hurts, especially when it comes to making sure change is actually enacted and not just paid lip service.

Four Common Agile Marketing Mistakes


3. Unintentionally ignoring all other marketing activities

When switching to Agile marketing, it’s important to not get too myopic and forget other activities. For example, you still have important core marketing functions that need to be performed, such as web development and database maintenance.

Much of Agile is, of course, straying from the beaten path, but getting completely lost is never ideal. Creating visuals for how to transfer old responsibilities into a new format will help prevent tasks from getting lost in translation.

4. Forgetting to celebrate success

As a system that stresses working in very intense, short cycles, the hyper-focus of Agile marketing makes it easy to forget to set aside time to celebrate successes.

Managers should make a conscious effort to avoid quickly moving from one project to the next without taking time to reflect on and celebrate a job well done. Promoting the results of your sprints to the rest of the company and providing recognition for team members will solidify the organization’s overarching faith in Agile as well as maintain morale.

Four Common Agile Marketing Mistakes


Once you’ve got the right people and processes down, it’s time to turn to technology for that final boost.

There are plenty of options out there, but Mindjet’s software promotes a different approach to getting things done by injecting ideation and task management with a visual component. In providing a holistic view of projects and making the sum of its parts easier to digest, we believe our platform complements the speed in which Agile processes typically run.

To find out more about how Mindjet can help you move quickly from ideas to action, check us out here. To learn more about the Agile movement, head on over to Agilemarketingmanifesto.org.

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Making agile work for marketing

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