In 2000 at Oregon’s Rogue River Lodge and again in 2001 in Snowbird, Utah, a very frustrated aerospace engineer named Jon Kern and a band of 11 other equally frustrated software development leaders gathered to discuss the challenge that was killing their industries:
Application delivery lag.
The problem? The time between requesting a software solution and actually having the solution in hand was three years. In aerospace and defense, the lag time was as long as 20 years.
It took so long that by the time the solution was delivered, the systems, requirements, and sometimes even the team that had made the original request had changed.
Something had to be done. Enter Agile Software Development – a methodology that enables teams to respond and adapt to quickly changing conditions by working incrementally and iteratively, allowing for real-world, real-time feedback during the process and, thus, ending application delivery lag.
Fast forward to 2012.
A different band of thought leaders – this time from the marketing industry – gathered at an event called Sprint Zero with the goal of creating the future of modern marketing.
The challenge was similar. Marketers had learned that their carefully staged approach to creating and executing plans was resulting in too many missed opportunities in today’s fast-moving digital world. Marketers painstakingly planned campaign strategies for months only to find their work irrelevant by the time it made its way through the rounds of feedback and layers of approvals.
Marketers realized they needed to become Agile, and the Agile Marketing Manifesto was born.
“We are discovering better ways of creating value for our customers and for our organizations through new approaches to marketing.” (Agile Marketing Manifesto)
Agile marketing uses an iterative process to develop and test marketing campaigns, working in short increments rather than lengthy periods of time. By capturing data that provides real-time feedback, teams are able to evaluate, adjust and iterate to the next step very quickly.
High-performing Agile marketing teams are able to run multiple campaigns simultaneously while continuously launching and testing new ideas – all without the typical chaos associated with most marketing operations.
To enable this type of speed and efficiency, Agile marketing follows a disciplined and intentional process for prioritizing what to work on and preventing inevitable fire drills from derailing projects in progress. Agile marketing dismantles outdated systems and practices that make it unnecessarily difficult and frustrating for marketers to keep up, achieve their goals and deliver results for their companies.
Rapid changes in technology continue to push companies to rethink the way they do business. The greater number of opportunities and significantly more competition for a customer’s attention call for more flexibility and a faster, more effective decision-making process.
In other words, it requires a drastic change in how companies approach marketing. Agile offers a solution for managing marketing in the age of constant change.
Gaining clarity around the value of this approach will be a critical first step in championing change within your organization. What benefits can you expect from going Agile?
Shifting from a traditional to Agile mindset – becoming Agile – will require making significant changes in operational structure and company culture.
However, simply adopting Agile techniques – doing Agile – can still make a big difference in the efficiency of your daily operations and the overall effectiveness of your company marketing.
Doing Agile requires deeply understanding the underlining methodology of Agile and adopting Agile-specific management processes and tools.
Agile processes and practices, once committed to, will organically change a company’s culture. So in addition to being a required tool for doing Agile, they also provide the structure for more easily and quickly becoming Agile.
It’s important to realize that Agile marketing is a model and has its own language (e.g., chickens and pigs, burndown charts, user stories and other Agile marketing terms). So to strictly follow the Agile practice, you’ll need to learn the language and all the steps and processes involved.
However, no “Agile police” will show up in your lobby if you don’t use the language or follow the model exactly. So feel free to ditch the terms, coin your own, try out various aspects or simply incorporate the general philosophy. The idea is to generally get a feel for what it means to do Agile.
Here are just a few Agile marketing practices that will help you pave the way to executing the approach (whether you use the language or not):
A great time to start adopting Agile practices is during annual marketing planning where you can apply the principle of flexible over rigid planning during the process.
You can also test run Agile on a specific project and see what unfolds. For example, using growth-driven web design, which shares many of the same philosophies and covenants as Agile, for revamping the company website offers a very contained way to see if your team is ready for Agile.
However, we often find that taking even smaller steps, such as developing a task board, staying firm on priorities, and getting into a habit of holding morning scrum meetings, can bring much-needed sanity to your daily routine – even if you are a marketing team of one.
Being Agile is a mindset that requires a very specific company culture – one that includes and supports cross-functional teams. In these teams, all members are engaged in the Agile approach and follow its processes; embrace customer centricity and user feedback; and are committed to experimenting in a disciplined manner.
All successful Agile organizations have these characteristics in common:
Being Agile will require the marketing team to evolve, embracing new skills, behaviors and mindsets.
The Agile project management framework allows marketing teams to make better and more informed decisions faster, which results in overall increased productivity and increased effectiveness of marketing deliverables.
A marketing department is tasked with creating a lead generation and nurturing campaign to assist the executive leadership and sales teams in meeting their annual goals. The campaign will require a substantial investment of time and resources.
The marketing team will:
Of course, the campaign better work or the company will have wasted time and money and missed many opportunities that presented themselves while the marketing team was too busy to pursue them.
With Agile marketing, the scenario is very different. This time the marketing team will:
This means that the campaign is generating results in just a few weeks, not eight months, and producing data that can be used to refine the message and communications.
Because leadership and sales were involved from the inception and the campaign was developed using data, not guesswork, the review and approval process is significantly truncated.
Additionally, the mindset of experimentation, the decreased initial investment of resources and the data-driven approach enable the marketing team to test multiple ideas and adjust on the go for improved results, while reacting quickly to new opportunities.
Whether your company formally adopts the Agile approach or not, it’s important to consider that more and more of your competitors will likely continue to find ways to decrease the time and resources it takes to get their message to market.
So at the very least, examine any systems, processes and practices that may be restricting your marketing team’s ability to gain insight, be proactive and respond quickly, and then knock down as many barriers as you can.
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