Part 2 - Agile & Marketing - Do They Mix?

Last week, I explored the question of Agile and Marketing - do they mix? Introducing the idea of it being DONE TO versus being DONE BY Marketing, and supporting the hypothesis that Agile being a team based discipline, DONE BY was preferred.

Then came the excellent Mi3 article covering Telstra's Jeremy Nicholas and Brent Smart and their views on a range of topics including Agile in Marketing.  

Telstra has applied Agile at an enterprise level that includes Marketing, with marketers embedded across various x-functional teams. So, I'd place Telstra Marketing in the DONE TO camp. 

However, Nicholas is a fan. To quote, "We're 3.5 years in and I think it's been really good for us..It puts marketers in a conversation around the commercial realities of what's actually going on. They get a great perspective on the business."

This is an excellent insight and one of the chief issues I come across in my own client work on business alignment and operations for Marketing functions - how to better align marketing efforts to the commercial needs of the business?

It is a challenge echoed by Smart who observes, "Sometimes you find marketers who are actually quite disconnected - the business is something that happens over there."

So, it seems there are compelling arguments for the DONE TO camp. Yet, we still have this unease amongst senior marketers, as mi3 notes, "...there are mixed signals on the benefits of agile practices applied to marketing - some CMOs privately are frustrated...".

So, how do I reconcile the two? DONE TO vs DONE BY 

I think it comes down to the concept of maturity. 

To start, let's assume three things:

1. Operating models serve to address business need, providing the blueprint for how strategy is translated into action. 

2. Operating models evolve to solve barriers to progress on the way to meeting that need

• Centralised, Hybrid (e.g. Centres of Excellence), and Decentralised (e.g. Agile) being examples.

3. There is a natural path to achieving excellence / mastery.

• Whether it be personal or professional, its rate of progress is governed by the circular relationship between; investment > capability > competency > confidence (giving rise to further investment)

Now against the present goal of becoming more (digitally) adaptive and customer experience focused, organisations and their Marketing functions find themselves at different stages of maturity. This is reflected through their operating model, the challenges they are dealing with, and their relative level of investment, capability, competency and confidence. 

I believe there is a relationship between where you are on the path to achieving operational excellence and your operating model, i.e. your ideal operating model shifts from centralised through hybrid (CoE) to decentralised as maturity improves - with Agile being the present iteration of operational excellence / mastery / best practice. 

What does this mean for my DONE TO vs DONE BY argument? Well, both may be true.

• For those operationally mature Marketing functions looking to drive change and push boundaries of productivity and responsiveness (possibly ahead of their organisation) then DONE BY. 
• For those mature Marketing functions in already operationally dynamic organisations, then DONE TO. It seems that Telstra is an example of this.  

Therefor, I think the negative issues we're seeing stem from a mis-match of operating model and level of functional / organisational maturity. 

If true, what does this mean for us?

First > Realistically appraise your business need, barriers to resolve, and present level (rate of) maturity. Read - Fit for Purpose. 

Second > To drive operational maturity, pay attention to the relationship between investment > capability > competency > confidence.

Third > If you find yourself in the position of being DONE TO ahead of your time, or by an organisation you don't see as mature enough, make sure to exert sufficient functional influence to shape and achieve a DONE BY outcome that you can control.