Looking for someone who would be willing to chat one on one on how they are using agile in a Creative workflow. | Community
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Level 3
April 23, 2021
Question

Looking for someone who would be willing to chat one on one on how they are using agile in a Creative workflow.

  • April 23, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 1484 views

I am a Project Manager managing Creative resources/projects within a Marketing org. We are looking at aligning Marketing to our companies Product lifecycle and they are agile. I am trying to wrap my head around how this works for creative. I know it happens, I know it can work it's just so foreign to me right now I need more than what I am finding here in WF One. I would love it if there was someone who would be willing to let me bounce some questions off you on how you are working with agile in a creative world. Maybe even peak at how it is working within your instance.

I am in Chicago, so if someone is in Chicago doing this I can promise to buy you dinner whenever things open up more. Or, at the very least, wherever you live, you will have a WF partner for life in me. I am happy to share any and all of my WF knowledge or anything back to you.

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3 replies

Level 3
April 26, 2021

Hi @Andrea DiMauro-Walton‚ Andrea! Sorry, I was out on Friday. I love this question. Would you be comfortable if we do the chatting here in the group, so that others can see the same things, and maybe some will jump in? This is a very new group, so we're still building conversation. Obviously, only share things that you could share in a public space - no NDA stuff. :-)

And, in my experience, getting Marketing and Product aligned was a slow process, but kind of necessary to take it slow, so that we didn't invest a ton in huge experiments. First, we started by just looking at each others work. Marketing would look at the Product "Epics" (not sure what your company is calling them, but these were "quarter" sized things, not 2-week sized things). And we got Product and Marketing leads in the same room for strategy and "why" conversations every quarter. As that happened, there were at first questions like "why do we have to waste our time seeing their stuff", but then we got to "oh, you're building that messaging, or targeting that persona? I didn't realize that... let's adjust...". At the same time, the Marketing team was just looking at their own work and practice breaking it into smaller increments of value.

This might be starting too high level - what do you think? Can you share a little more of the specifics? Thanks!!

AndreaDiAuthor
Level 3
April 27, 2021

Hi @Melissa Pickering‚ !

No worries and thank you! I would definitely be comfortable keeping it here. Yes, I was thinking the offline stuff would be if anyway was hopefully willing to let me see into their instance possibly. I wanted to see some of this in action, but we can always start here first and maybe that won't be necessary.

Yes, everything you are saying here makes sense and is definitely where we are starting. We are looking at all our inputs (all the teams that request work from us) and how Product is doing it today. So that is currently in progress.

My questions here were a little simpler (I think) and I have a few different questions. I think we can start with the first basics of how Creative projects are broken up into sprints. Is the Epic the overall project in the non-agile world (example: Product eBook). Then are the sprints the different tasks? (example: Develop content with stakeholders, Copywriting refine round 1 and 2, Design round 1 and 2, Production, delivery and enablement). Or how are most people using Epics and stories here?

kynabaker16
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
April 26, 2021

Hi Andrea,

This is such a good question. I know we have a few other customers who have joined this group... maybe some of them would be interested in chatting with you? @Zuleika Acevedo‚ @Michelle Ray‚ @Steven Enos‚ Just adding you here to Andrea's convo to see if you guys have any ideas for how she might get started.

Thanks,

Kyna

AndreaDiAuthor
Level 3
April 27, 2021

Thank you @Kyna Baker - inactive‚ I appreciate it!

Adobe Employee
April 27, 2021

Hi Andrea,

I previously managed the studio team at Workfront before transitioning to my new role. We didn't manage in Sprints, as we couldn't be constrained by the due date being the sprint end date. Instead, we managed everything on the Kanban board and used Scrum meetings to help our team communicate. This required me to work closely with stakeholders to understand what was driving due dates and to manage the backlog very closely. It's best to set WIP limits so you don't over-schedule your team, and it also allows you to keep some "open" time if needed for those last-minute projects that always seem to derail a sprint.

In previous roles, I did manage creative teams in Sprints. With one organization I was able to manage this easily as we had dedicated resources to that team (marketing manager [product owner], project manager [scrum master], content strategist, copywriter, designer, development), and this allowed us easily to align as we didn't have to share resources. With shared resources, it's best if you can find alignment to a particular team within the product lifecycle org to test Scrum. You will want to establish what you want to measure with this team and be sure to capture that data before and after.

I have some great resources I can share with you regarding Agile Marketing. These are not Workfront specific resources, some of them from the certification I just received in Agile Marketing. Would you be interested in these?

Thank you! Hope you have a great day.

Melissa Talcott

Level 2
May 6, 2021

Yes, that'd be great, thanks!