I’m in marketing. I recognized that Scrum is not only for software development project managers. I’m also using it. Do you have a similar experience?
I’m a coordinator of a small marketing and business development team. Initially, when I first heard about the Scrum methodology, I was pretty sure I was reading about a software development methodology. The approach and its terminology were so 'techie', and everything about the method seemed to have been devised for software development.
That said, having learned that it was a very efficient tool to manage small teams located at different countries, I started wondering if I could use it to increase the efficiency of the marketing and business development teams I was managing. I got more insight into this method by testing its use on our teams. Now, I would like to share my experience and impressions after the first month!
Collaboration & communication in marketing
As the first step, I analyzed how we work together. I came to the conclusion that there are no real differences between how my colleagues in software development work together, and how we work in marketing. We have a small group (not more than 5 people) and we have to be very responsive, write marketing content very quickly, since on the tech market, our MarCom activities and content always have to be up-to-date.
In our communication, we take input from management, sales, and development to understand what's 'hot', what to publish to capture the attention of our targeted audience. We defined short sprints with priorities, and use stor ypoints to estimate each task's complexity (with one month timeframes, our sprints may be longer than those of software developers, but we work the same way by adding all our tasks to sprints).
Being Agile in Marketing
After my analysis, I set up a framework for being Agile in marketing. I defined sprints, requirements, and backlogs (tasks that are not attached to the sprint) as well as priorities and story points. All the elements are visible on an Agile planning (and Kanban) board. We started one month ago, and have achieved a great improvement in efficiency by having strong visibility on to-dos, in progress, and completed tasks.
We also use the practice of daily stand up meetings, which helps us manage our day-to-day activites. We use trackers to follow the status of work items within codeBeamer ALM itself. I now have a great overview of the workload of my team members, and can follow the completeness of the monthly sprint with just one click.
Having the right Agile management tool in place helps a great deal. codeBeamer ALM supports my ’Agile’ style of management, and lets me apply the Agile approach in marketing to achieve better visibility, transparency, and collaboration.
