Making the Plays for Agile Marketing Transformation

Golden Nuggets, Honest, Unbiased Thinking, Opinion, Entertaining Long Reads and Mini Guides of Practical, Pragmatic and Shared Know How from me as an Agile Practitioner to help you Accelerate your Journey towards Enterprise Agility.

Agile Marketing Manifesto | MarketingOps | Enterprise Agility | Roadmap | Playbook

Software’s eating the world, your organisation has made the pivot from projects to products and your development teams have been shouting at you to go Agile for ages and your marketing teams are feeling more like a functional silo than part of the cross functional multi-disciplinary teams you keep hearing about.

In this article, I am going to explore through my ramblings, Agile Marketing and how you can make the transition via 14 Plays in my Adoption Roadmap.

Yes, Lean and Agile Marketing is a thing.

It has been for a while now before you act surprised. It’s at least a decade old concept. I'll prove in here when I introduce you to the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

You lot also have the 3rd State of Agile Marketing Report now published, so that shows some maturity around Agile Marketing in the fact the movement has got mobilised and organised enough do this as a community of practice.

Isn’t Marketing already Agile.

I guess it depends on your Point of View or Lens.

I’ve done more than few SAFe, LeSS, Scaled Scrum Adoptions and Agile and Digital Transformations over the years, and while there is a lot of talk about the new roles of Product/Solution Management and Ownership, there is little on how Marketeers can join in and it’s something I’ve tackled as an Enterprise Agility Coach.

I have had the conversations on how to add marketeers into the product, service, experience, or platform team.

I have even created new team typologies and org structures/redesigns.

But marketing bosses just can’t get over their egos and the hierarchal pyramid or delta organisation model for fear of loss of control and command with a flatter structure.

Running ad hoc tactical or planed strategic campaigns with short led times and bigger cycles, to running the annual marketing calendar responding to seasonal events, religious, state ceremonies etc or that new feature added to the smart watch, app store, new model of car etc all takes some agility or responsiveness as sometimes, marketing aren’t the first to know, so it’s all about the lens, the perspective and the amount of collaboration that exists, is perceived or doesn't, some humility, reflection, EI and some MI are called for.

Looking at what marketing Teams are doing in the Agile space, the latest 2020 report says that:

• 42% of our respondents labelled themselves Agile
• 58% are already using Daily Stand Ups
• 43% of non-Agile respondents tell us they have plans to start going Agile
• 95% of this group say it’ll happen within a year 

This is great stuff indeed, and shows there is commitment to inspect, learn and adopt Agile practices, values, principles, and culture to help achieve overall, business, not just development agility.

Myth Busting

I really liked that Show – Myth Busters. Yes I am a nerd, part of the geek squad.

Lean, Agile and even DevOps isn’t just for software development – that’s just the Scrum Master Drill Sergeants speaking.

I am going on a tangent for a second here to make a point and side with Marketers for a little bit so its not all one sided that marketing isn’t all that Agile, or doesn’t have the traits of Agility.

If you’ve got the blinkers on, are a bit short sighted or a constrained in your thinking, then this maybe the answer in your mind, its not for me, the Drill Sergeants or Hype evangelists may say so, but well, they are wrong, miles off infact.

Unshackle yourself from Scrum and IT only points of view, and the cultures, techniques, concepts, values, principles, and practices can be applied well beyond the IT department

We seem to be stuck with this PoV as most Agile, Digital Transformations just focus on this one area of the business at the expense of others. This is why the current topic is Business Agility not Agile or Scrum.

Marketing Teams are already using Kanban Boards and Roadmaps in tools like Aha! and Monday which do more than just this. They are already looking at Flow, getting past the days of taking long lead and cycle times to seed data, to warm up IP addresses and SPAM traps, cleanse email lists etc.

DevOps – is mostly often only thought of as an automation tool chain or CI/CD pipes to the rudimental looking for cost savings over Flow and Value Stream Management or Optimisation.

However, the Mobius Loop, a part of the Continuous Everything Culture has been applied in marketing for a while, they have already been doing A/B or Split Testing, Canary, Smoke or Blue Green Testing to audience segments, monitoring marketing analytics in real time and getting fast feedback to tweak and adapt set campaigns or plays and micro campaigns for tactical uplift around the time of the year for examples sake.

I really wanted to draw attention to this for a second as SAFe’s whitepaper on Agile Marketing will have you thinking differently as though this agile thing never existed until they came along. I know its not the norm, but Marketing isn’t the laggard when it comes to Agile Adoption or Transformation either.

In my expereince, getting Marketing to be more Lean or Agile isn’t that hard as they are mostly already there and with more acceptance, empathy and a little coaching, collaboration, it really isn’t to far away to affect gains in business agility between product, development, and marketing and overcome the complacency and other blocks to adoption.

So, I have bought a few friends, made some alliances, surfaced some truths, debunked a myth, let’s move on.

Why go Agile then?

Improved Retention

Engagement levels in marketing departments are up and down and disengagement is on the rise. This is probably no different to other functional silos.

However, Digital Marketing has greatly impacted traditional marketeers who practiced the trade around traditional print media, publications, radio and TV – these channels have changed with the arrival of social media, social media platforms, DAB, Internet or pirate radio, programmatic advertising, smart phones, IoT or connected devices i.e. Digital Set Top Boxes for Pay TV etc and ML and AI used in MarTech and AdTech that has taken over the mundane jobs and tasks, leaving only the higher value thinking, creative and strategic tasks to the people.

Applying Agile practices, values, principles, and culture, as proven over the reports 3-year history, that increasing engagement, with development and other business teams, stopping further isolation of the marketing silo by becoming part of Agile’s flatter structures, cross functional and multi – disciplined teams boosts retention and job satisfaction.

Better Quality

We no longer compete on price alone anymore, fast, low cost and debatable quality isn’t an option – a high quality expereince of the product, service, platform or if its an expereince that is the product, then quality matters over price as one of the buying decisions factors.

Greater Productivity and Innovation

As Development and Business Teams adopt agile and go on their Shu Ha Rai journeys, they are:

• Speeding up their time to market
• Delivering priorities faster
• Changing gear quickly (pivoting)
• Responding to change from feedback over following plans
• Having less blocks and barriers in their development paths
• Having more visibility, openness and transparency into development and delivery streams and are
• Producing less defects and bugs in software and manufacturing

The report shows that Marketing Teams who have adopted Agile Ways of Working have increased the same results to by over 10 -15 percentage points too since last year!

Less Firefighting, Fire Drills or Hot Potatoes

Yep, its as common in Marketing as it is to an undisciplined Agile team where the PO and Scrum Master doesn’t shield the team, the HIPPOS win out or don’t share priorities with the teams. Agile principles -Increasing Openness, Transparency, Accountability. Trust, Collaboration and Communication addresses this pain point.

Less Duplication

Both Agile, Product and Marketing Teams all use Roadmaps – let’s bring them all together, stop duplication of efforts and make all the work visible so the HIPPOs can start asking questions rather than making demands, and making them as Epic Owners

Less Start Stopping

Lean and Agile practices manage the amount of work not done. That’s a very different to most managers, who focus on activity, to look busy, to justify their existence, by just doing work for the sake of it or vanity projects. Agile helps manage flow, task completion, rework or technical debt and is aligned to the Portfolio and the Business, so its not a silo.

Increased Coordination or Alignment

Agile works on a heart beats or cadence, sync up to sprint, iteration, release, quarterly, half year and annual planning, feel together, united, rather than doing your head in with annual pre-planned marketing planning Gantt charts. Set an enterprise cadence for work by business week, financial week or whatever aligns your organisation so it makes everyone’s planning efforts exponentially easier.

Better end to end Ownership

Add HIPPOs as Business Owners, Epic Owners, Sponsors, get them to focus and own one thing from start to finish and they will appreciate how hard it is, how much effort it takes by being better engaged, actively consulted, listened to and feedback to. It will improve them, be painful at first, but over time, it will be better for the teams morale as alot of HIPPOs don’t have an appreciation of the operational side of things, they just expect magic to happen as they are thrust into roles based on ther last job title, MBA rather than their abilities.

More Balanced and Aligned Priorities

We all try to manage within our spans of controls, spheres of influence to keep a handle on things and get that work life balance. However, often we don’t achieve this, trying to do too much or too much of the wrong thing at the wrong time, the wrong way.

Using a Business Agility Framework and participating in one say like the Scaled Agile Framework exponentially improve Flow across functions, departments, silos etc.

It will also introduce Value Streams, Portfolios, and other mechanisms to help the system as a whole and prioritise, pivot and preserve, to stop a sprint, a cycle, iteration, work, putting it on hold, shit happens in the VUCA, but having the decision shared, is better than the weight on alone or a few shoulders.

Better Integration of Marketing Planning into overall Value Delivery

There is no point to have a marketing strategy, a content strategy, an advertising plan if it doesn’t support the growth and development of the product, service, expereince or platform.

Like many pints about being isolated, operating in a silo, Agile and Value Streams and Value Stream Management will allow OKRs to be combined, reducing, duplication, increasing cohesion, collaboration, and alignment – making marketing part the mix.

To improve and Automate Quality and Adherence to Guardrails

Marketeers don’t do anything like Agile Practices says the Developer.

Again, I want to bust some myths, surprise folks, and help join the dots.

Jargon, language, acronyms…they matter to culture and aligning culture and practices.

I see friction all the time in traditionally run projects and Agile product, programmes and service development and delivery because of a clash of understanding and commonality.

I can easily write Epics, Stories and Features for adhering to Brand Standards and Guidelines, meeting Editorial Standards – Tone, Language etc

Marketeers do Peer Review too…they casting more than one set of eyes over things for typos or inaccuracies, fact checking, image checking, ensuring Calls to Action (CTAs), GDPR, Trust, Privacy Requirements and Advertising Standards are meet.

Marketeers do Exploratory, QA or UAT Testing, what happens when I click here or there, on that broken link to ensure a cohesive brand expereince, customer journey, to address pain points and check that the impact mapping or features match what they are about to exploit and leverage through social, content, email, direct marketing etc etc.

Marketeers use tools like Aha or Monday that have collaboration and planning features like JIRA.

Understanding each other and each other complimentary practices will uncover we are often close than we thing to being more Agile, if we can just get over the naming conversions, jargon and crap and align on intent.

To Apply More DevOps Concepts

Lean Marketing uses a cycle of:

• Analyse the data
• Optimize the campaigns
• Scale/repeat the winners

It is like the Plan Do See Act Model or Deeming Cycle.

The DevOps Mobius Loop: Continuous Planning, Continuous Build/Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Monitoring, Auditing and Logging, Continuous Everything!

Marketeers monitor data, improve process, and automate tests…to optimise campaign delivery, results and impacts, this is the marketing version of Value Stream management or Pipeline Optimisation.

DevOps One Team philosophy, is the same goal of marketing, to integrate, do away with large, convoluted, complex hierarchical teams, and own, build, maintain/support and improve a product, service, expereince or platform, so again there is communality in DevOps, Product, Agile, Lean and Marketing Folks – we need to just join up, join in the game and its called Business Agility.

To support Product Owners and Product Management

PO is a Scrum centric role. It’s a proxy that represents the customers, the stakeholders, and the business.

POs evangelise what the customers wants, needs, feels and sees to the Development Team.

Markeeters do this too and they can offer the PO and PM a lot of insight, support and guidance.

Product Managers have some skills akin to Lean Portfolio Managers.

In aiming for both Business Agility and Marketing Agility – aligning on a Business Agility, Flow or Scaled Agile Framework, Marketing Teams, Structures and Skills e.g. the talent/people, process and practices can be aligned, redeployed, uplifted, reused and organised around value streams i.e. products, services, experiences and platforms as opposed to sitting in a functional silo and make Marketing part of the mix in delivering value.

This way you become part of the game of offering solutions to things we didn’t know we needed a solve for.

To get the CMO Agile.

I read somewhere, the tenancy of a CxO level person is less than 36 months.

Lots of CMO are of the age, that they are and could well be dinosaurs and haven’t kept up with Digital, Agile and all the changes in the markets, well that’s what they have a team for, but if the CMO is part of the Agile Leadership, spreading Agile Marketing culture, then its goig to be a rough ride to Agility.

So, if you’re not the Agile CMO, and you’re the Change Agent, Manager the Manager or Leader, give or get them a seat at the table, teach them new trick and adapt them to Agile Cultures and Ways of Working.

Why?

Companies that have adopted Agile, Agile marketing and have CMOs that promote, engage, govern with Agile Leadership, Values and Principles, result in higher company performance, higher job satisfaction and become driving forces in creating the Responsive Learning Organisation or Agile Business.

What’s holding Marketing back from Adopting Agile

1. Knowledge and understanding of Agile
2. Complacency – we don’t need to be Agile!
3. Lack of talent to transform/transition to Agile
4. Lack of tools to support Agile Ways of Working
5. Lack of Management support
6. Lack of time to try something new

No surprises in there really from the last 3 years of data except points 3 and 4.

There is a lot of talent, I am right here, who will help Marketing Departments and Functions transition and transform to Agile Marketing. There is more out there too besides me.

The problem with Agile has been Scrum and the focus of Scrum has ben on software development.

Scrum alone is pretty poor choice for software development too as its such an incomplete approach.

Scrums USPs are fixing the lack of project leadership and the lack of project communication.

That’s was its initial solve to two problems that plagued traditional waterfall project management.

Scrum is also good for Product Management, - read the New New Product Development Game - however, Marketeers do not see themselves in this space, so that’s a bit of a challenge to overcome as you lot tend to work in specialisms, not as generalists and the world of work has moved from I to T, Y, X and Pi shaped people.

Lean, especially Kanban is great place for Marketers to start their Lean Agile journeys.

There is certainly not a lack of tools to support Agile Ways of Marketing. That’s complacency coming into play for sure, so pull your heads out of the sand marketeers and stop using that as an excuse.

JIRA, Trello, Rally, Azure Boards, Monday, Wrike, Aha to AdTech and MarTech platforms from Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, and others, it’s all there.

They cover market planning, roadmaps, release planning, product planning, work/task visualisation, dependency mapping, digital asset, resource, product information management, creative, approval workflows, marketing analytics, end to end campaign management, data management and more.

Citing a lack of tools, I think from my expereince is more complacency and marketing departments tendency to supervise or project manage work by outsourcing to agencies and contractors that’s more the problematic pattern or anti-pattern to building inhouse capabilities or competencies that attract, retain and engage talent and promote agile ways of working.

Having worked in consultancies and agencies, they always try to put everyone on 100% utilisation rates, its impossible and the worst affect is – there is no time to learn, to experiment to play as you always have to be billable 100% of the time.

This is coming from organisations that tell everyone else they are Lean, Agile, masters of Business Agility, well they could do with eating their own dog food!

You have to create the space and place for learning by saying NO, assertively and positively pushing back, otherwise you will for ever be the “Factory Model” and that’s something the software industry has/is learning to do better. Take note. Take atleast 10% of your working week and make it for learning.

The Adoption Lifecyle

Agilists talk about this in terms of the Shu Ha Rai, The Journeys, Mastery or the Crawling, Walking and Running or Thinking Agile, Doing Agile and Being Agile using the Conscious Competence Model.

As teams optimise and improve their team level mastery or maturity, what often happens in enterprise agile change, adoption or transformation is that transformation journeys starts in small localised test or pilot pockets in order to scale it.

The strategy then lacks a Systems Thinking philosophy, so the larger end to end big picture of how value is created and delivered and how the flow of value works across the supply chain suffers at the expense of a small team. We’ve got to start somewhere right and nothing is perfect.

I’ve seen enterprises adopt SAFe or anchor themselves in SAFe. I am a fan of the Scaled Agile Framework, its holistic and applies to Business Agility rather than just Agile, however, when ARTS, STs or Trains are launched, they are not part of the value stream as they doing Essential SAFe only and marketing is still left out because they think SAFe only applies to the IT function as Marketing is one of the Shared Services and operate still in a silo off their own backlog.

So, the points here, is that get everyone singed up the Agile manifesto, gt everyone working to a corporate heart beat/synced sprints and Business Agility is not just Scrum and Rome wasn’t built in a day and London evolved into a maze of straights, curves, triangles because it had no Master Plan, it grew organically on demand.

Shifting to MarketingOps – the first place to make a real difference

This is a major play for Marketing Agility.

It comes off the back of DevOps, which eradicates functional silos and reduces the need for large siloed teams and in the process, functions like data, security, support felt left out, so they joined the bandwagon and used terms like DevSecOps, DataOps, SysOps, InfraOps etc, basically MarComms is the same and sexier is MarketingOps.

The point being, it’s a move towards agility, integrated teams and collaborative working over silos.

Inhouse Capabilities

At Unilever, I helped create the inhouse creative studios called U- Studios. Unilever only sits behind Coca Cola and a few others as the best marketing and largest advertising and marketing company by spend and performance globally.

These U Studios provided significant cost advantages over external agencies for marketing requests. When I say significant, I am talking MILLIONS.

These were scaled across all categories, serving all 150+ brands on the brand wall and for over 120 operating markets/countries. You do the math for Year on Year savings.

Another thing we did was create inhouse Data Science and Data Management capability for Global Media, Marketing and Insights function called Social and Business Analytics or SBA.

I applied data warehousing, data lakes, data mining, data wrangling, real time sentiment analysis, command centres using consultancies to augment, then slowly uplift/upskill inhouse talent, swapping it out, bring paid, owned, earned and all data needs in house from super expensive agencies and consultants and contractors.

Net result, MILLIONS saved.

Another bit was about bringing the AdTech and MarTech inhouse as a Platform as a Service. Millions were spent renting the gear of others, on email marketing, advertising campaigns, bidding for ad space on social via third parties, getting analytics reports and doing SEO etc.

So after some Test and Learn Activities, the Pilot and a global Rollout, Teams are able to control, manage, prepare and do this themselves as part of Digital Marketing Services – building an inhouse marketing agency – again net affect – MILLIONS in saving across the brad wall, categories and markets operated in.

This agility, not only saved billions, but retained, attracted, and moved talent around, but I wove it into the wider Digital, Agile and DevOps adoptions strategies at play unknowingly to create Business Agility in the worlds biggest start up and 7th most valued company.

Inhouse Creative Reviews

I’ve seen how marketing depts. outsource, it’s not cool enough for us to do, hand it over, chuck it over the fence, fob it off to an agency approaches used in multiple small, medium and big sized organisations that are in the top percentage of marketeers in the world. They spend loads getting someone else to check compliance to brand guidelines, style guides, checking pixels or ppx spacing, fonts, image licensing if it’s not an owned stock image etc.

Then there is the approvals process – the backwards and forwarding of emails to cover backsides.

This is so inefficient, boring, uninspiring, demotivating and mundane, no wonder people are leaving.

I’ve made marketing teams learn how to use mark up tools or features. Most I worked with use the Adobe Creative Suite, so in here, here is HTML mark up or even simpler, in PDF maker/reader – there are mark up tools that allow comments, tags, circling of issues etc. You can do this in Word too, but usually marketing stuff is zipped up in CS file formats.

These save you time, effort, energy, and your agency staff will than you for it and sig Adobe Sign, you can do digital approval instead of putting in thought the internal post and in/out trays of paper based marketing managers.

I reckon you can save 2 -5 days per campaign using mark up tools and features over emails and not picking up the phone or talking face to face – facetime, Duo, Teams, Zoom make this so easy.

Risk and Compliance Awareness and Training

I am no expert in the advertising and marketing standards and regs space, but I have seen a few campaigns go pear shaped and not just get a hammering on social media channels, but the public sentiment has reached advertising regulators and standards bodies causing retraction, fines, and penalties to be imposed from so called edgy marketing.

Now if you use an Agile Tool that promotes collaboration, task assignment and types of tasks, its really easy to add these sorts of activities in as automated gateways or approval steps as part of the overall workflow process to meet compliance needs. I’ve doe this in Pharma and FinServices as well.

But before you add it to the tooling though, make sure you do your awareness training as part of onboarding and embed suitable training to staff, as it not sexy, so it’s much overlooked.

Lean, Scrum, Hybrid, SAFe…Which one will take my Team towards Agility

The first thing you will want to do is take a Gemba Walk and go see what Agile practices are already going on in your other teams. Perhaps run a poll or survey using Microsoft Teams, Mintee, Polly, Survey Monkey or on an intranet portal even.

Your goal is to integrate over invent.

Take a look at what tools are being used – taking note of the things/features you need that they don’t have or don’t seem to have as features that meet your Marketing needs.

The 2020 State of Agile Marketing Report shows that Hybrid Frameworks are working best for Agile Marketing Teams- this is largely true also for other business areas.

Scrum, Pure Scrum alone isn’t the answer, however, like Kanban – which is usually practiced in the form of Scrumban, people just don’t know it, is a great start.

The report also showed that Scrum isn’t the way forward, however, most Agile and Scaled Agile practices are built of Lean, Agile, DevOps and Scrum, so there will be some relevance and learning to be transferred/applied later.

The idea of using task visualisation, improving collaboration and communication via daily stand ups aka a Scrum, and integrating your work as a work, value stream or swim lane on the shared JIRA Board is awesome, you will feel involved straight away.

Resist the urge to invent, you don’t need to, trust me I am the guru, I am you API, your middleware to integrate you.

Agnostic Agile is different to reinventing the wheel with creating your own hybrid approach.

What people really mean by this, it they have looked at say Kanban and Scrum and neither quite offer what they need.

Now the reason for this bad habit is – we are changing the way you’re going and need to work, so its natural it will feel like its not going to work, so you hack it, but really you hack it badly, it called resistance to change.

So, you need an Agile Coach – not a ScrumMaster – two very different roles/jobs to help out.

In Agile – we practice inspection, adaption, learning and experimentation.

The Agile Manifesto and it values and principles as loosely put together to allow for integration, its not a strict you must do it like this or else like the Scrum Master Drill Sergeants will tell you.

Getting to Agility is a journey – its not going to happen next week, month or year, it will progress over time and also your level of agility will be different to the development teams and the production team in the manufacturing plant or the operations department – so its ot one size fits all, it about synchronisation of practices and philosophy, like in martial arts, I can still attack or defend and put down a larger person despite my smaller statue, brains and technique over pure braun.

So get aligned on the philosophy, culture, and mindset behind Agile Ways of Working to make it happen.

The Agile Roadmap for Agile Marketing Adoption

Let’s start the transition then assuming your new new to this Agile and Agile Marketing thing or if your already on the journey, you might pick up something.

I’ll do it playbook style, as I know marketeers love a play book!

Following on from the points above about philosophy, culture, and mindset, and not reinventing new approaches to call it Company X Agile Marketing Way, lets introduce you all to the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

Play 1: The Agile Marketing Manifesto

In 2012, the 2001 Agile Manifesto for Software Development was hacked and adapted to form the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

This isn’t the first time either, there is a Product Manifesto as well as others too make it more domain specific outside of just IT.

The Agile Marketing Manifesto has 7 values:

Validated learning over opinions and conventions

Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy

Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns

The process of customer discovery over static prediction

Flexible vs. rigid planning

Responding to change over following a plan

 Many small experiments over a few large bets

This is real eye opener for IT folks and perhaps yourself as you didn’t know it existed.

Its also part of my original argument/lens/perspective that we don’t need to tell Marketing to become more Lean or Agile, they are already on that journey, they just need to be respected and included more, as a shared service on the ART, or a Team within the Meta Scrum or Scrum or Scrums.  So if you’re part of IT, or a Scrum junkie preaching Scrum is the only way and best thing ever, then tread carefully to stop risking alienation by preaching to the converted.

Understanding the Agile Marketing Manifestos values means deep diving into the 10 Principles:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems
2. We welcome and plan for change. We believe that our ability to quickly respond to change is a source of competitive advantage
3. Deliver marketing programs frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale
4. Great marketing requires close alignment with the business people, sales and development
5. Build marketing programs around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done
6. Learning, through the build-measure-learn feedback loop, is the primary measure of progress
7. Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and pipeline
8. Don’t be afraid to fail; just don’t fail the same way twice
9. Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design enhances agility
10. Simplicity is essential

This is your first step to adoption and alignment to other agile teams as well as toward Business Agility.

Play 2: Start Daily Stand Ups

A DSU, Stand Up, Scrum is a fast paced, max 15min coordination event held daily.

In Scrum or Kanban the Scrum/Kanban Master is the facilitator of this event and process, but don’t worry, the team can cope without one for now to get into the habit/pattern of doing it.

Form a huddle, a circle so everyone is able to look at one another in the eye – this is really important for building trust, openness and transparency and accountability and responsibility or ownership.

Each person has a few minutes to tell the team 3 things:

1. What they achieved/completed yesterday
2. What they are working on today
3. And anything that’s is blocking progress and they need help resolving from the team

People can ask questions to clarify, but don’t solve it during the 15mins, take it offline and discuss it there.

Now keeping track of all of this is going to be hard, so see Play 3.

Play 3: The Workboard

I’ve not called it Kanban Board or Scrum Board for a reason. To impart what is so important about it rather than its name.

Visualising work is the name of the game, giving everyone in the team a collective view of the workload.

Kanban, literally means billboard or sign post in Japanese – fun fact.

So, on your wall, whiteboard or even a free tool if you have it, are allowed to use it, (check InfoSec or with your CTO) and can project it or use a 40 inch+TV to view or SurfaceHub…

Add 4 vertical columns.

Title them - Team Backlog, Up Next, WIP, (Work in Progress) and Done.

Add horizontal swim lanes for each person’s name.

From the DSU, use Sticky Notes/Post Its to add the tasks in – using a meaningful title is all that’s needed, not details or user stories for now.

Next you are going to combine your DSU with the Work Board.

Each person talks to their items or tasks on the Board that are associated with their names in the Work in Progress Column, the stuff you’re doing now.

The aim is to move them to Done and add then pull the next piece of work from the UpNext Column for each person, maintaining a sustainable flow based on free capacity.

This will get you into the habit/pattern and practice of using a Kanban Pull System of work, the basis for a later move to Scrum, Scaled Scrum or other Agile or Flow Frameworks.

Play 4: Learning to work in small batches or cycles

Large jobs require breaking them down into small parts, we’ll tackle than later, we want to get you going first.

Now in Lean or Agile, we call these time boxed cycles Sprints or Iterations.

The idea, is we fully complete the work inside these timeboxes to move things forward, in small steps, batches.

2 weeks is the better length for a cycle, 1 month is too long, people lose focus, there is not a sense of urgency or accomplishment, 2 weeks creates enough pressure to be exciting, yet make progress achievable.

So using your Team Backlogs, Work in Progress and Workboard, see how much you can move from left to right over 2 weeks, from Monday to Friday, or Sunday to Thursday for Middle East, whichever represents your working week best.

Try this for a month so 2 sprints or iterations in your marketing team/s. This is the basics of flow, cumulative flow and team velocity – how much work you can say yes or no to in a period to manage predictability or Say Do metric.

So, you see I am doing a bit of an Agile Bootcamp, 101 with you as a primer for formal training or to join in with other Agile teams in the business so you look like you’re an Agile person too. Fake it to make it they say! Some truth, I’m to principled and honest sadly.

Play 5: Applying Learning

Now your team and you have probably got lots of questions, how will this work, what do I do hear, this didn’t work very well, if we done this, it might be better.

This is what we call a Retrospective in Agile.

It’s a timeboxed event, once per sprint/iteration to look at how the team can improve the way it works through inspection, adapting and learning from doing. Action or Experiential Learning.

Set aside an hour for this meeting.

Don’t worry about how it goes, it’s always a bit of an awkward meeting for most people now matter how good you get at it.

The goal is to cover off 3 things:

1. What worked well
2. What didn’t work so well
3. How can we do it better next time

This sets the tone for what we call Continuous Improvement in our Agile culture.

See, I am priming you up again for the lesson on Kaizen!

Draw a 3x3 table on a whiteboard.

First columns – add the above 3 things vertically, top to bottom.

Horizontally, add a box for “smily” faces a visual way to rate/temperature check how much each things was good or bad from 1 smily, bit rubbish, to 5 awesome, or flip it if you prefer the inverse.

Last column, title action items, here you add comments, ideas, suggestion of how to do it better – improve it. Aha, hear this before in a Lean video, the Deeming cycle, Plan – Do - See - Act.

The last activity of the meeting is to select 1- 2 things to work on over the next 2 sprints/iteration to get better at being Agile. Kaizen my friend, …thank you Sensei!

Banter aside, now this about team process, not about individuals.

Use we, not I or names, take the sting out, and focus on building a HiPo team, and not attacking individuals, we are all learning and adapting here. We. Us, Group, Team, Squad, Pod.

Making the next Plays

So far in these 5 Plays of the Agile Bootcamp, we have got you moving towards thinking and doing Agile – aka – adopting the fundamentals of both Agile and Agile Marketing.

Hopefully you want more, so this is where we now need to get a bit more seriousness to increase our maturity, grow our abilities and so forth.

We will also need to blend your marketing domain knowledge and practices in with those of Agile – otherwise we’ll still be just project managers, maybe at least agile project managers, but we don’t have that role anymore as we are all about Products, Services, Experiences or Platforms.

So here are the next and more demanding Plays to transform towards Agile Marketing:

Play 6: Appoint an Agile Team Coach or Marketing Dept Agile Coach

Agile or Enterprise Agile Coaches are responsible for implementing the Agile Principles, Practices, Patterns, Behaviours and Culture for a team or a company’s Transformation Journey.

Unlike a Scrum Master, they are more method and framework agnostic and encourage the use of complimentary practices in a more contextually relevant way.

Another key role they will do, is help you measure and grow during your Agile Marketing transition and align you into the wider quest for Business Agility in your enterprise organisation.

This mission critical role is your next step for making a real impact and real difference over your next 2 - 18 months unitl your Agile Marketing and Agile Communities of Practice are strong enough to take over.

Play 7: Do a Dojo or Lab on what Value means

Dojo’s are the cool way Agilists practice things in a safe place, with the safety of colleagues who wont judge and where actions wont impact the actual business.

Labs take things to the next level, were you start like you mean to end, a bit like a pilot, but to test and learn before full on scaling.

Value isn’t just ROI, TCO or CoD.

Value to a marketeers might mean the number of new acquisitions, rise in NPS score, increased campaign recall or results, LTV or customer loyalty index.

Using a Triple Bottom Line approach e.g. measuring your financial, social, and environmental performance over time might be how you show value to your stakeholders and shareholders/investors. It might show consumers that you are mission and purpose driven and balance people, planet and profit.

Value might be market share, company growth, share price index, cost of an item, so understand what value is in your company and how you align and support value creation, delivery, and realisation in what we call the Flow of Value.

I’ve also got a 2-part article On Lean Agile, Adaptive Portfolio Management were I look more at the Flow and Meaning of Value.

Play 8: Moving from Physical to Digital Work Board

There are few approaches to this.

The selfish one – get you own Agile Marketing tools, costly, your budget takes a big hit, you manage it and all the problems, issues, training etc

The stupid one – build you own custom solution, so old skool, 2000s…

Do an on-prem install of a vendor’s product and be stuck with it for 5 years on a long term locked in contract Procurement and the Vendor hooked you into, as silly as the stupid option.

Share and take up the same tools others are using in the business, paying for your consumption under a centralised cloud subscription model, where all the issues, problems, training resources and updates are managed for us and we can change our minds and use a better tool next year. Great choice.

There is only so long a physical introductory Post It note work board will work.

Marketing teams will want to allocate resources into value streams, ARTs, ST or Trains, into product teams under a matrix style structure, work with Portfolio Management and other functions, departments and lines of business to coordinate/sync up.

Individuals and groups may need to do the work, so all this collaboration, visualisation, dashboarding and communication happening remotely, virtually, and distributed needs digital help.

I could write pages on this alone, but seriously look at what you’ve got and at tools like JIRA Align, Aha, Marketing Clouds, DAMS, DSPs, CMS with the help of your Enterprise or Solution Architecture Team as most Enterprise Agile Planning and Agile Product and Portfolio Management tools have the features you need, or the add on and plug ins a a Platform to extend to your needs.

Play 9: Learn About User Stories, User Impact Mapping and Customer Journey Analysis

We know you marketeers love a good spray and pray campaign, just hit everyone in the database.

We also know that you know about Personalisation, Frequency, Relevancy and Channels.

Agile works better than traditional project management because of User Stories. User Stories are a format that makes everything customer focused, nit HIPPO focused.

Impact Mapping and Journey Analysis will also allow you t stop spamming us despite GDPR and Privacy Shield doing naff all and those annoying ads you follow me around with.

The point is, to align with other Agile teams, you will need use these things to help agile estimation, planning and prioritisation for events, ceremonies, and artefacts.

They will also make you a more empathic marketeer.

So this is about cross pollinisation of cross functional, multi-disciplinary and complementary domain skills too.

I don’t find these things to hard ti impart/embed in marketing people as you generally has some sort of exposure level to them from your agencies and consultancies who work in an Agile way.

Play 10: Learn about Roadmaps and Release Plans

Yup, chuck your Gannt charts in the bin, hide them wear us Agilists can never find them and if we catch using one, then its going to be more than 100 push ups or crunches for you.

Goal, Feature, Product and Portfolio Roadmaps are constantly changing artefacts of Agile practitioners based on fast feedback loops, internal and external morning of environments, data, surveys, polls, trends etc.

They provide a loose direction of travel not a set plan.

Learning how to read and work with them for your own marketing planning, but also for your Marketing Ops with other Teams will align you.

Release Plans also forecast feature releases, so nice if you want to do a little bit of tactical stuff or pump everyone up for that big annual disappointing upgrade, Apple style, well, that’s why the competition is better, half the price and not hooking you into an ecosystem of ever increasing cost.

So using the Agile Marketing manifesto – practice:

• Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
• Teach Development and Business Teams how to work with Marketing
• The process of customer discovery over static prediction
• Flexible vs. rigid planning and
• Responding to change over following a plan Gannt chart

Play 11: Learn and Practice Agile Marketing Leadership

Becoming Agile or increasing Business Agility is not down to one function, department, or team. It’s a collective whole system effort.

Moving from Traditional Leadership and Management Theory, Techniques, Culture and Practice to Lean Agile Leadership is your role/part in both gaining Business Agility and Adopting Agile Marketing.

Join Agile Marketing forums, groups, conferences, events, do training, formal and informal.

Do a Product Management, Product Owner, or a Scrum Master course, learn, inspect, and adapt key take ways outside of your marketing domain and bring the outside into your space and your space into theirs – be X or Pi shaped!

Basically, help shape, build, influence and inspire Agile culture in your organization using adaptive leadership styles – see my article on Lean Agile Leadership.

Play 12: Master this stuff before Scaling

Apply this Check List before Scaling to avoid anti patterns and for maximum sustainability:

• Build the underpinning foundations - Agile Mindset
• Kickstart Agile Culture Transition with HR using Agile Personas, X or Pi Shaped Skills and Persona Canvas
• Implement Agile Boot camp 101
• Conquer Agile Planning, Prioritisation and Road mapping – daily, fortnightly, quarterly, yearly, year, half years following the Cone of Uncertainty pattern
• Conquered Agile User Stories, Estimating, Forecasting
• Combine with complimentary practices from other domains ie Design Thinking, Customer Journey/Experience Planning
• Inspect, Adapt and Learn – understand the theory to purposefully apply in practice
• Appoint an Agile or Enterprise Agile Coach
• Test and Evolve Agile Practices from immature towards maturity
• Test and Evolve Tooling support
•  Audit for goth and development, key Agile Artefacts, events, ceremonies
•  Explore Agile Workplace and Spaces
•  Explore Organisational Design and Structures for Agility
• Draft a Scaling Plan using 3 teams: MarketingOps, Marketing Strategy and Marketing Leadership so you can add Agile Marketeeers over time and support other teams with the 3 key areas
• Scale Intelligently - following Agile principles of Inspect, Adapt and Learn
• Apply and Use Fast Feedback Loops - OLAs, NPS, Engagement Surveys, Metrics that Matter and Sentiment metrics to know your Agile Marketing Org/Function is working

Play 13: Restructure your Teams for Agility and Scale

Remember, remember, we don’t do short term temporary projects any more, in November or any other time of the year!

If your brave enough, you can do this first if you want to send a out a serious message about going Agile - but be warned, it will sting - but it can be worth it - a lot of staged and phased, organic, slowly slowly transformations are mostly the ones that come unstuck. Go for it, put in the chocks, don't go back ! Agile, for the Brave! (ha an ad for Diesel Aftershaves)

Focus!

After 9, 12, 15 months you’re going to hit a plateau, the other side of the J -Curve, Kubler and Ross Curve or the Honey moon period is going to be over.

At the moment – with your 3 Team Structure, (Marketing Ops, Marketing Strategy and Marketing Leadership), you still a bit of a Functional Silo, so you are going to want to move closer and closer to a Matrix Structure under the Agile Leadership and Lightweight Governance of the Value Management, Agile PMO or Lean Agile, Adaptive Portfolio Office, which ever you have.

This is so that your resources – your people can support Portfolio Managers, Product Owners and Value Stream Delivery and Management as your team plays a key part in Value Realisation.

So you need to hatch a plan, (Points 1 - 7 above in the checklist or the Plays 1 -5) to move your marketeers from being I and T shaped to X and Pi Shaped to become cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, customer-centric team collaborators to drive performance back upwards again.

How to do this is tricky, it largely depends on how the rest of the Agile Organisational Structure is being Designed and Orchestrated away from a Delta or Pyramid to a flatter matrix, socio, meritocracy or holacracy.

To get the idea of matrix org – many people in the Agile space use the Spotify Model of Squads, (Execution Teams), Tribes, (Specialists i.e. Marketeers), Chapters, (Communities of Practice e.g. Digital Marketing) and Guilds, (Centres of Excellence – Lean Agile Centre of Excellence, PMO, VMO or Portfolio Office)

Please note: it is only a typology, a blueprint an ideology for the perfect agile team structure – event Spotify themselves didn’t implement it, rather used it as a model to evolve, inspect, learn, and adopt their Lean, Agile and DevOps capabilities to improve Flow and Business Agility.

For Business Agility and to integrate teams – you want to eb aiming for a sociocracy, meritocracy or holacracy style design to create networks of networks of teams, destroy cronyism, HIPPOs and command and control to become triple bottom line focused and managing the flow of value.

Play 14: Learn to Improve Performance and Mastery through Measures and Metrics

Measure what Matters. Read the book or investigate the website.

I’ve see an obsession with metrics by managers and leaders who are so called data driven, but really they are just using this as an excuse to attempt to align themselves with the hype of the Big Data movement to amplify their management by numbers or management by evidence approaches.

Same goes for ScrumMasters, some Agile Coaches and PMOs – they have the most complicated Qlik, Tableau, PowerBi Data Viz’s and Dashboarding going on to satisfy these data junkies because it s on trend.

When I ask them, what does this metric mean, this graphic show, that chart represent, they can’t explain.

So , reframing it, I ask, how do you use these data sets to improve the performance of individuals, teams and the business.

The answer is they don’t know, but it looks good.

So, simplify, apply the MtM practices.

Know to sort the wheat from the chaff, here is a list to become familiar with that you are most likely to encounter on your early stages of your journey to get to grips with around flow, productivity and progress measures that you’ll find in most tools.

OKRs (Agile Planning)

Aka, Objectives and Key Results or KRAs – Key Result Areas. Better than SMART, OKRs set goals and measurable results across the entire organization and not just for an individual. Remember, we optimise the whole, not the individual. They are set per quarter, by half year and annually and fit the Continuous Near-Term Agile Road mapping approach and VSM – Value Stream Management approaches perfectly to respond to change over a plan.

Burndown/up Chart (Lean and Agile techniques)

A visual chart, shows daily progress of tasks during a sprint or iteration. Its used to determine team velocity, the rate or pace you can eat up and spit out story points over 2 week intervals. Be warned, most tools restart is when you/the tools end the sprints based on the dates you enter.

Cumulative Flow Diagram (Lean or Kanban only)

CFD is an analytical view showing the lifetime progress. It can and is broken down into timeboxes, iterations, counts of Backlog items, Work in Progress, and Done items. You want to see a nice upward trend/flow without any spikes in the colours in the CFD, that’s shows a sustained healthy pace of progress, spikes mean things aren’t going well, but you need to investigate why it could have been because a P1 swarm or huddle on a live issues was needed as a priority over other work.

Cycle Time, (Lean, also used in VSM and DevOps)

The average time for task completion. Some tools measure this on the WIP status only, other take a proper average starting at the product backlog across the entire left to right flow to done/completed status – so check your tooling interpretation.

Led and Lag time are the measures inside of cycle time used in DevOps and VSM and are considered wastes, Muda and Muri in Lean terms.

Efficiency (Flow)

The ratio of actual working time vs. total wait time from the customer’s perspective. In DevOps this is the Speed to Market we talk about and help to optimise by automating as much of the supply chain as possible to smooth out the stop/starts of traditional ITIL and Waterfall project management.

Throughput

The number of work items completed in a timeframe – a sprint iteration, versioned release, timebox.

Story Point/s

Agile estimation metric using the Fibonacci Sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 were each point is exponentially larger than the other by adding the last two number together eg 1=1 =2, 5+8 =13.

Stories are usually considered as 2 -8 points e.g. they can be achieved in a sprint/iteration.

Tasks are 0 – 1, Epics are 21 and Features and Capabilities sit around 13 -21.

They are more accurate than T-Shirt sizing but are still not the equivalents of work days or hours – do not make this mistake – we are not transactional or traditional project managers cursed with time tracking and micromanagement – we are collaborative team workers over individual contributors!

Velocity

In Agile, velocity is a metric that predicts how much work can be successfully completed by the team within one sprint – some ties call Say Do score, e.g. how much work you pull as a team into your sprint backlog vs. how much your left uncompleted as technical debt or rework, both are bad news.

Enough of the pure Agile Metric and MtMs for a minute.

Let’s go back to our role as a Agile Marketing Change Leader.

I have two favourite growth and measurement tools - AgilityHealth and Comparative Agility. One uses Radars, the other more traditional Surveys.

Comparative Agility has an Agile Marketing Survey that covers 7 areas: Management, Traditional Marketing, Sales, Customer Engagement, Systems and Tracking, Team work and Delivery Cadence. These give insights and feeback and use the benchmarking approach agasint others to see how Agile you are in comparison. I don’t always like this approach but, it does promote progression, maturity, transition.

AgilityHealth doen quite have an Agile Marketing Radar yet as its very aligned to SAFe or the Scaled Agile Framework and Agile Marketing isn’t a strong point of the Framework yet, but its growing and improving all the time and is largely embedded in Product Management and Solution Management. They have two Radars of use: Agile Product Delivery Health Radar and the Agile Team and Technical Agility Radar.

Now if your org ha adopted or is anchored in SAFe, these are really great tools to align yourself to SAFe operating model for Business Agility.

There are others out there, but avoid vendor lock to consultancies bespoke offerings, do not link them to pay and reward, otherwise they will be gamed, and the goal is to use them as punishment, but a spart of your Agile Marketing Transformation and Coaching Support to grow, develop and sustain new Agile Ways of Working.

Summary

The future is here, it’s the new new, new normal, whatever, it just called the VUCA.

Hopefully here I have outlined why you should transform your approach and make or execute the Plays for Agile Marketing.

Don’t be siloed anymore, increase levels of engagement in your Marketing teams and functions, become integrated, cross functional, multi- disciplinary X and Pi Shaped, product, service, experience, or platform team members rather than a specialist in a corner of the room.

In doing so, you will embrace Digital Marketing, Agile Marketing, Adaptive Cultures and Ad and MarTech on top of Enterprise Agile Planning, Agile Product and Portfolio Management and DevOps tooling.

Live and Breathe the Agile Marketing Manifesto and surprise and delight customers, but your Development and Product Teams who think they have the run on you.

Good luck, Agile Marketeers!