Hi: Permit me to stick my nose in this topic �� The essence of Agile, from my novice perspective, is that the delivery dates are fixed, the scope of work adjusted to fit that schedule, and work gets split and the undone work pushed to the next release/iteration if it can't be done in the iteration. Here is it can be implemented in marketing in a transitionary way – maybe do the real work in Agile, do the organization in Waterfall (note to purists, this is called Wagile): Here are the teams: Photography team – One week iterations; Design – two week iterations; Editing/Proofreading Team – One week iterations; Client Management Team – One week iterations; You create a project plan for a customer. In that project plan you put in tasks for the work to be done and build dependencies between the tasks: Schedule talent; Initial shoot – Assign to the Photography Team. This becomes a story in the Photography Team's storyboard; Review shoot with client; Secondary shoot – Assign to the Photography Team. This becomes a story in the Photography Team's storyboard; Review shoot with client; Incorporate selected photography in print ad – Assign to the Design Team. This becomes a story in the Design Team's storyboard; Internally review the draft ad – Assign to the Editing/Proofreading Team, it's a story to them; Review the draft ad with the client – Assign to the Client Management Team .... Another way to look at it is this – the high level waterfall project management plan would look something like: Schedule talent; Photo Shoot Assign this task to the Photography team; This becomes a user story to them; They can break the user story down as much as they like to represent the iterative nature of shooting, I don't like the talent, I don't like the background, can you do their hair differently? What other wardrobes to you have? Ad nauseum. Build Ad Assign this task to the Design team; They can break the user story down to show the iterative nature of design Review the Draft Ad Internally – Assign this task to the Editing/Proofreading Team, you know what happens; Review the draft with the customer Assign this task to the Client Management Team They can add subtasks to represent the nerve wracking and profit decreasing nature of design, review, argh, design, review, just a few more adjustments, design, review, ugh, client changes manager, design, review... Etc. Maybe doing Agile from the bottom up, in increments, is a good transitionary process. Assign the work to the appropriate person or Agile team. Keep the overall management of the process in a Waterfall project. Moving to a more pure agile for the management of the work items assigned to Agile teams is a little trickier, but it can be done. You have to wrap your sequential train of thought into an iterative management methodology. You don't HAVE to, running the overall effort Waterfall – linear at a high level, and letting your work teams do things Agile can work just fine. People can better understand that. Voice of Experience. If your client doesn't understand iterative development methodologies, they might think you are overbilling or unnecessarily overcomplicating the process. If you run the management linearly, they'll better understand what you are doing. The fact that your work teams are doing their work in an Agile manner is a lesser thing then. Maybe someday, in our lifetime, clients will understand and request iterative processes, but in my experience, it isn't common. Agile doesn't work well if the client doesn't accept fixed increments of time – remember scheduled iterations/releases are a cornerstone of Agile. If one client needs 80 hours of work done in 240 calendar work hours, that is a different timeline than 80 hours of work in 160 calendar workhours. The first example is a more relaxed pace, the latter one is chock full of late nights, too much coffee, and blurry eyes. Having a highly variable delivery schedule for customers can really make Agile tough to implement. Yeah, I can describe how to make it work, but it feels like we are gaming things. It won't feel natural. In the case where you offer different delivery speeds, Kan Ban might be better. That's a different thread of discussion. I'm not sure I'm helping here at all. I can just see a way through the fog many marketers have with regards to Agile. Thanks, Eric ------Original Message------ My team has the same request. I went to an Agile session at Leap last year and decided it is not a fit for our in-house marketing team. When I asked the people in the session with me the consensus was it is not always a solution for marketing. It is great for software development. That being said, I still hear 'we need to work agile' a lot. I think each company needs to decide what agile means to them. We are restructuring to be in teams (vs cross-functional) to work more efficiently and we will always need to respond to some requests quickly, but 2-week sprints don't work. Some of our projects need to be done in less than a week, others take 2 months. Teams gets us closer to the agile model, but not truly agile by definition. This is probably not the response you were looking for but I wanted to contribute. If any marketing teams are doing true agile work I'd love to hear the details! Dianne Keohane Globoforce
