This year, I had the opportunity to work in an Agile group with two other marketing students to create social media content in two-week sprints. This process revolutionizes the framework through which we collaborate and work toward our end goals. This process is responsive to new challenges, makes media production easy to quickly whip through, and builds marketing teams that are more resilient.
What is Agile?
For those unfamiliar, Agile is a project management methodology that allows marketers to be responsive and flexible to change throughout various phases of projects.
There are five basic tenants to the Agile Marketing Manifesto:
- Focusing on customer value and business over activity and outputs
- Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
- Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
- Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
- Responding to change over following a static plan
But what does this look like in practice?
The key to running a successful Agile campaign is to have methods of communication that are clear and transparent for all team members. A sprint is the time-period allocated toward completing a deliverable. These three core elements of a sprint helped our team achieve our objectives: the Kanban, daily standups, and retrospectives.
The Kanban
Kanban is a method to organize work-to-be-done to achieve the desired outcome. Teams can build a physical Kanban of post-it notes on a wall, or can use free online tools like Trello to build a digital Kanban board. Kanbans may be edited and made to fit your team’s particular needs, but to begin, the Kanban should be broken into five different columns, including:
- Deliverables: the list of all final products to be delivered or created
- Backlog: the list of all tasks required to achieve each deliverable
- Work in Progress: tasks team members are currently working on
- Pending: tasks that are on hold or have a blocker that prohibits completion
- Done: the completed tasks/deliverables
Team members work together to build the Kanban, first creating the list of deliverables and then separately listing out all individual tasks required to complete the deliverables. The team members add their initials to tasks they are currently working on and set due dates for completion. To me, there are few things that feel more satisfying than seeing the Done column fill up!
This way of visualizing all the things that need to be done breaks down the deliverable into a way that is transparent for all to see and makes sure that everyone is on the same page about what needs done next without cluttering communication channels that should be used for other announcements or concerns.
Kanban – Push vs. Pull Management Style
Agile involves a “pull” management style. In other words, team members can choose the work they are going to work on from a list of tasks and the manager’s job is to remove barriers blocking the team member’s success. This allows individuals to self-delegate based on the time they have available and the skills they currently have or can acquire easily.
So why is agile superior?
It allows team members to manage their own workload that matches their abilities and availability rather than being delegated tasks by a manager that may not understand the time constraints, current workload, or talents of the team member. The ownership of taking on tasks rather than having them delegated gives autonomy back to the team and provides them with ownership over their successes.
Daily Standups
Daily Standups are an integral part of keeping team members informed of what is going on within the entire team. The dialogue goes as follows:
- Mention what you have recently completed
- Mention what you are currently working on or plan to work on next
- Mention what blockers you may have or questions you want to pose to the group
While this exercise can be practiced on a meeting-to-meeting basis, holding a short meeting daily at the beginning of your workday can help frame the day’s tasks and set the team up for success. This practice helps people feel more included, productive, and supported by the group and the manager.
Retrospectives
Retrospectives help you look back on how the sprint in order to optimize future performance. These ‘retros’ open the floor for the group to share their thoughts about what went well, what didn’t work as they had hoped, and what the team and team members can do go forward to improve. This not only allows the team to address any frustrations that might arise, but also allows the team to bond over the shared struggles. It promotes empathy and understanding as well as helps others understand where they can step up or step down next time in order to allow the team as a whole to succeed.
But Agile does also have its own challenges.
Issues to Address within Agile
- Poor Understanding of Priorities: In the Kanban system where team members “pull” tasks that they choose to work on, there may be times when items that need to be completed early are left to the end. Addressing priorities ahead of time with the team can help keep them on-track.
- Fragmented Output: The incremental completion of tasks by multiple team members may leave the deliverable feeling disjointed instead of like one cohesive unit. Addressing clear expectations for each task can help reduce this fragmentation.
- Underperforming Team Members: The “pull” system highlights high-achievers and under-performers but does not address task difficulty or lack of knowledge. Addressing issues mid-sprint about roles, responsibilities, and what they need to succeed can help mitigate underperformance by team members.
- Lack of Buy-in: If team members do not buy into the Agile process, it can completely disrupt the workflow of the entire team. Addressing the importance of the system and keeping team members accountable for working within the system can help mitigate disruption.
Kaitlin Simpson 