New formula for success: Deliver Today, Adapt tomorrow

I have been discussing Agile Marketing lately and recently came up on a blog post by Chris Brogan on “How We Make Businesses These Days” Chris stated in his post:

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise

To me, the new formula of business is this: think. sketch. execute. revise. It’s important to consider contingencies. It’s important to be prepared for what can go wrong. But the best way to find out what’s going to go wrong is to launch and find the flaws.

This is top of mind to me right now, as I’m about to launch a business in a marketplace that I don’t fully understand, with a product that I’m still developing, to a bunch of people who I don’t necessarily have neatly corralled. Am I afraid? Not at all. I’ve got smart collaborators. We’ll figure it out. Will we upset someone along the way? No question. Tell me one business that hasn’t made a mistake. The goal, I imagine, is not to make any fatal mistakes.

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise.

That looks very close to the iterative process of the five phases of Agile Project Management(book link below) and described by Jim Highsmith. I adapted the description to a marketing tone.

Envision. Speculate. Explore. Adapt. Close.

How closely it resembles it you need to have a definition of each term to see the similarities:

1. Envision: Determine your marketing vision and objectives and constraints, your community, and how your team will work together.
2. Speculate: develop the capability and/or feature based launch to deliver on the vision.
3. Explore: plan and deliver running tested stories in the short iteration, constantly seeking to reduce the risk and uncertainty of the launch.
4. Adapt: review the delivered results, the current situation, and the team's performance, and adapt as necessary.
5. Close: conclude the launch, pass along key learning, and celebrate.

But even more so the real key point is that we're not concentrating on the flow were concentrating on the cycle. Continuous short iterations are constantly happening to improve the value of the offering. No longer can we wait for the perfect scenario. We build the scenario as an ongoing process. Customer relationships need to be his collaborative as possible. Customers then can define the capabilities needed to provide value. When that scenario could no longer be adapted or improved upon the life of that marketing cycle is over or exhausted. This effort enables customers to define the value and judge your marketing cycle. Your marketing team must always be in contact with the customer and continuously asking: Is what we are doing providing value in your decision making process for our product or service?

Envision. Speculate. Explore. Adapt. Close.

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Start thinking Cycles, not Funnels in your marketing! 

Inspiration provided by Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition)

Technorati Tags: Agile Marketing,Agile Project Development,Lean,Marketing Cycle,Chris Brogan

Think Cycles, not Funnels in your marketing!

Marketing fails when it does not deliver the right message at the right time to the right person! Doing this prevents waste, minimizes cost and more importantly excites customers. Typical marketing practices are unable to do this when you think of marketing in a linear fashion. If you develop your marketing as a cycle in lieu of the typical Marketing funnel you will begin to understand how this can be accomplished.

Lean marketing systems are developed from the pull of the customer. If you review my blog post on Lean Marketing, The Toyota Way you will see how Toyota look at marketing as a cycle and as the “Radar” for Toyota. The radar meaning: Voice of the customer. This constant feedback shortens their marketing cycle by creating an intimate knowledge of the customer so that they can be at the right place at the right time and delivering that knowledge to the right person.

How does someone create and utilize a marketing cycle in the planning process. The typical Toyota solution is to gradually move on a solution as data becomes available. Very much like the iterative process in an Agile Project Management Project. In marketing, you must have a cadence much like the military established in your marketing practice. Think of the army, everything that can be is standardized: uniforms, weapons, training manuals, vehicles and so on. The reason why is so they can react to the huge variation presented itself in a combat mission.

You should note that we are not writing about a repeatable process. Repeatability means doing the same thing in the same way to produce the same results. Though repeatable will allow you to convert your inputs to outputs with little variation, it also implies that no new information can be generated and used. Repeatable processes are not effective because precise results are rarely predictable in the marketing process. Reliable processes focus on outputs, not inputs using a reliable process you can consistently achieve a given goal even though the inputs vary dramatically reliability is results driven.

Marketing cycles are not completely stable. They are subject to variation caused by new knowledge. They are constantly being improved, the emphasis of activities changes during projects from more emphasis on understanding the customer at the beginning to more constructing and testing marketing functions at the end. We are trying to eliminate variation caused by new knowledge. A marketing process that does exactly the same thing every time is useless but we are trying to eliminate variation that we cause for no good reason.

Cycles are small and fast so that they will continuously produce knowledge. The knowledge is used to determine trade-off and is the primary exchanges at schedule meetings. These changes will be introduced into the marketing process quickly so that customer’s knowledge can be evaluated through small incremental changes.

Conventional thinking produces large quantities of knowledge, for an example a direct mail piece. They schedule and make these mailings to large volumes of consumers for efficiency and cost reduction purposes. Conventional thinkers imagined marketers will have all the needed knowledge before they start designing. Lean marketing recognizes the cost of such a large batch and the waste that must be transported, stored, managed and delivered to the customer. Utilizing a marketing cycle process, small batches with several different messages would be sent out tested for effectiveness and improved upon as the data is obtained. The cost of using small batches is completely negated by the improved results.

Referenced Books:

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition)

Lean Product and Process Development

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Technorati Tags: Lean,Agile,Lean Marketing,Lean Sigma Marketing,Agile Marketing,Marketing Cycle

Can you have Agile Marketing?

Recently, I've become quite intrigued with agile project management. It was developed in the software arena in an effort to replace the traditional project management methods of define, design, and build to one based on adaption. They moved away from that linear thinking to a more adaptive culture allowing continuous innovation throughout the development process.

Jim Highsmith, the author of Agile Project Management states:

“The departure from which additional phase names such as initiate, plan, define, design, build, test is significant. First, Envision replaces the more traditional initiate phase to indicate the criticality of vision. Second, a Speculate phase replaces up plan face area words convey certain meanings and visual images that arise from systematic use over time. The work plan has become associated with prediction and relative certainty. Speculate indicates that the future is uncertain. Many traditional project managers faced with uncertainty try to plan that uncertainty away. We have to learn to speculate and adapt rather than plan and build.

Third, the actual project management model replaces the common design, build, test phases with explore. Explore, with its iterative delivery style, is explicitly a nonlinear, kind current, non-waterfall model. Questions developed in the speculate phase are explored. Speculating implies the need for flexibility based on the fact he cannot fully predict the results. The APM model emphasizes execution and his exploratory rather than deterministic. A team practicing EPM keeps his side of the vision, monitors information, and adapt to current conditions therefore the adapt phase. Finally, the APM mode ends with a close phase, in which the primary objectives are knowledgeable transfer and, of course, a celebration. To sum up, the five phases of agile project management are: envision, speculate, explore, adapt, and close.”

I think this style of thinking lends itself to the marketing process very well. Traditional marketing systems resist the linear thinking approach of a traditional project management process. Agile projects develop value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value like this early in the process can significantly improve buy-in and utilizing iterative principles then improve on the process during delivery.

I have constructed an agile marketing development diagram that probably goes against many of the agile principles since I am incorporating the DMADV process of Six Sigma. But this is actually my intermediate step in applying agile to marketing. Since my roots are in the Six Sigma process and in linear thinking that jump to collaboration and iterative principles is quite a chasm to cross. DMADV is my bridge for the present as I learn and apply Agile Project Management thinking to the marketing process. It is also interesting to note that many of the principles have developed from the Lean thinking process. It kind of reminds you of a U-shaped work cell doesn't?

Photo Credit: by rAmmoRRison

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Technorati Tags: Agile Project Development,Project Management,Lean,Lean Marketing,Six Sigma,Agile Marketing,Agile