Your Marketing Machine: Agile Marketing

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Agile Marketing – Maybe?

Software development teams have been using Agile Project Management for several years now; this process has assisted them in their planning, execution, and feedback cycles. Could your marketing learn from them? Answer these questions:

Is your marketing become more complex?
Have you added multiple new product lines?
Have you added different channels of distribution?
Have you added additional pricing structures?
Do you multiple external and internal stakeholders with competing priorities?
Do you need to have better communication?

Your marketing team may have a much more solid plan of attack for its work, and will be able to control their marketing agenda, getting input and feedback from stakeholders to help shape it along the way. Cross-group communication and transparency will increase and as a result productivity should rise and disgruntlement decrease! The above material was derived from an article by Matt Blumberg of Return Path, Inc. and was published on the OnlyOnceBlog.

How would Agile Marketing work?

Plan your marketing in releases,
Each release has 1-2 core themes
Planning session up front with the powers to be.
Each release has several iterations where corrections are completed
Track team members utilization on projects
Daily stand-up to review progress and identify roadblocks.
Build slack in the system that can handle a couple of last-minute opportunities

I have been implementing and using the agile process recently and have started to see positive results. What I like is of course, the “agility” of the process especially with long term projects. We are able to schedule iterations and planning sessions and develop future stories quickly! It also has reduced the ownership concept into more of a team function versus an individual and solved a few of these process. The story is still out on plus 90 day projects but I have already seen benefits. Whether they are sustaining and prove to be productive we will have to wait. Better yet, iterate one more time to make it better from what we have learned!!