DAILY STANDUP FORMAT #1: THREE QUESTIONS
What did you do yesterday?
What do you plan to do today?
What impediments are keeping you from moving forward?
DAILY STANDUP FORMAT #2: WALK THE BOARD
The idea here is for a facilitator to start at the Done end of a board and move towards the Backlog end, talking about new and noteworthy things that the cards show. This works for digital boards as well as physical ones, though with digital boards the “walk” may happen virtually unless you can project it onto a large screen.

3 COMMON STANDUP PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
1) PROBLEM: DAILY STANDUP TAKES TOO LONG
2) PROBLEM: TEAM MEMBERS REPORTING TO
FACILITATOR
3) PROBLEM: STANDUP ISN’T HELPING COLLABORATION

The Scrum framework is made up of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules. While it can be tempting to pick and choose parts of this framework, you’re best served to stick as closely as you can as this framework has withstood the test of time in many applications.

Successful use of the framework does depend on a certain level of maturity and alignment around a few core values:

People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum team.
Team members have the courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems.
Everyone focuses on the work of the Sprint and the goals of the Scrum team.
The Scrum team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.
Scrum team members respect each other to be capable, independent people.

Scrum takes an incremental and iterative approach to development as a way to ensure the frequent delivery of working parts of the final product.

To put it even more simply, as Gartner research director Nathan Wilson presented at the 2017 Gartner PPM Summit, “Scrum is a way of organizing work to promote agility.”

Gartner defines Scrum as “a well-known agile development method that provides a simple project management framework for organizing teams and their approach to system development.”

"So to repurpose content in a more Agile way, we want to release smaller chunks over time rather than wait until we accumulate a huge amount of content.

For example, we could release a single blog post and video as soon as they are done, rather than wait for the completion all seven interviews. Each blog post/video combo could have its own iteration.

Releasing these smaller pieces creates learning opportunities that can help the team produce better results over time.

They might find out the four-minute video they released first had far lower conversions than the two-minute version they put out later. Now they can apply that lesson to future content, as well as return and reiterate their past work to make it more effective."

Some of the most vital takeaways from this year’s report include:

• First-mover advantage for marketing teams who adopt Agile is still available
• The benefits of agility remain stable, and they apply to all kinds of teams
• Software and marketing teams face similar challenges as they pursue agility

1. Sprint Tracking
Gantt charts are a simple, visual way to track tasks across the lifecycle of a project. In Agile PM, teams are doing sprints, which are basically short clusters of related tasks. A Gantt chart is a helpful way to capture and plan this work.

2. Gantt Chart as a Collaboration Tool
After you build this Gantt chart to track sprints, you can also use it to plan and organize work with your team. Some Gantt charts are in and of themselves a powerful collaboration tool.

3. Integrated Timesheets
Gantt charts as part of a project management software tool can be integrated with timesheets to help monitor the time your team is putting into the work. You can then determine if they are over-tasked or if the project needs more resources.

Aprimo and Forbes reported the following areas of improvement for Agile marketers:

• Faster speed to market: 27%
• Increased customer response: 22%
• Marketing projects completed on time: 28%
• Marketing projects completed on budget: 26%
• Flexible approach to changing customer needs 26%
• Increased accountability across the marketing function 20%
• Increased marketing collaboration 20%
• Faster shifts of marketing spend 9%
• More efficient marketing iterations 21%
• Increased real-time customer experience 18%
• Higher marketing metrics and KPIs 23%
• Fewer layers of marketing approval 16%
• Transparency of marketing spend 11%

6 Values of Agile Marketing

Value number one: Responding to change over following a plan.
Value number two: Rapid iterations over "big bang" campaigns.
Value number three: Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Value number four: Many small experiments over a few big bets
Value number five: Individuals and interactions over one-size-fits-all
Value number six: Collaboration over hierarchy and silos


4 Benefits of Agile Marketing

I. The first is that you can get more done
II. Getting the right things done
III. Adapting to change
IV. Improved communications

Agile marketing may currently be in the fad state, which Moore calls “something with no known market value or purpose but with ‘great properties’ that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an ‘in crowd’ of early adopters. That’s the early market.”

Agile is a change sensitive “product”; adopting it requires a change in marketers’ behavior. That means our primary competitors aren’t other work management systems. Our hurdles will be similar to the ones Moore outlines, where “Resistance has been a function of inertia growing out of commitment to the status quo, fear of risk, or lack of a compelling reason to buy.”

Fans and friends of Agile, then, need to start attacking the status quo, calming fears of risk, and articulating some very compelling reasons for marketers to “buy” Agile.

The events, also referred to as ceremonies, create a regular, predictable cadence for Scrum teams. They include:

• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum (also known as Daily Standup)
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective

Scrum events translate fairly easily from a software team to a marketing department. The second half of Scrum — the roles of the people who occupy the framework — doesn’t adapt nearly as well. Typical software Scrum roles are:

• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Developers

How to Create Nimble Marketing Processes that Can Adapt & Change On-the-Fly

• Step #1. Reverse-Engineer a Step-by-Step Process You Intuitively Already Do on a Daily Basis
• Step #2. Visually Map the ‘Transitions’ that Need to Take Place After Completing One Action Before Starting Another
• Step #3. Make Processes Actionable & Accountable with Intuitive Tools that Reinforce the Actions You Want
• Step #4. Processes Can Make Good People Better; Empowering Novices to Perform like Experts

FIVE CORE PROPERTIES OF KANBAN

• Visualize Workflow
• Limit Work-in-Progress
• Measure and Manage Flow
• Make Process Policies Explicit
• Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities

Unlike Scrum, Kanban doesn’t prescribe a way of managing work; it doesn’t dictate regular meetings or create unique roles within the team.

Kanban assumes that you already have some form of work-management process in place, and that you want to continuously improve it. This makes Kanban easier than Scrum for marketing teams to implement, because you can start Kanban with little educational overhead.

Kanban also adapts readily to changing contexts. No two teams — even within the same department — implement it in exactly the same way. This makes sense: the bottlenecks in each team’s workflow are distinct, so each team’s improvement strategy is distinct.

Agile marketing is a calculated approach to the traditional marketing process. Agile marketing values flexibility, transparency, visibility, predictability, and adaptability over set marketing processes. The agile approach to marketing was created out of the values and principles of agile software development:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Contrary to popular belief, agile marketing is not a tool, a methodology, a strategy, or an action. It’s a principle that leads to agile results. The more marketing teams adopt agile values and principles, the more agile they become.

I’ve grouped the questions into categories.

• Agile-marketing basics
• Agile marketing for small teams
• Backlog setup
• Non-Agile teams in your Agile workflow
• Sprint setup: projects, recurring tasks, and estimating
• Addition of Agile skills

Scrum is only one Agile methodology, and I don’t want to suggest it’s the only way to run an Agile content team, but it does provide protection for content creators through its focus on timeboxed iterations (a.k.a. Sprints).

Each Sprint consists of the same five components:

• The Backlog: Essentially a prioritized to-do list. It must be regularly maintained and the order of priority agreed on by stakeholders and content creators.
• Sprint Planning/Kickoff: The team chooses what work to do in the next Sprint and, if needed, breaks the projects in the backlog into smaller tasks. Generally the longest meeting of the Sprint.
• Daily Standup: The team meets for 15 minutes to discuss what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and if anything is holding them back (blockers to be resolved).
• Sprint Review: A bragging session at the conclusion of a Sprint where the team demonstrates all their completed work to stakeholders and any other interested parties.
• Retrospective: A discussion of the Scrum process, the team, and what improvements can be made for the next iteration. Only content creators attend this meeting.

Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week. 

The truth is, many marketing organizations think they’re working in an agile way because they’ve adopted some agility principles, such as test and learn or reliance on cross-functional teams. But when you look below the surface, you quickly find they’re only partly agile, and they therefore only reap partial benefits. For example, marketing often doesn’t have the support of the legal department, IT, or finance, so approvals, back-end dependencies, or spend allocations are slow. Or their agency and technology partners aren’t aligned on the need for speed and can’t move quickly enough. Simply put: if you’re not agile all the way, then you’re not agile.