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

[AndreaDi]

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.

[MelissaPi1]

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!!

[AndreaDi]

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]

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

[AndreaDi]

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

[MelissaTa]

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

[AndreaDi]

Thank you @Melissa Talcott‚

Yes, this first scenario resonates with me because deadlines will still be very relevant. My team and I have been debating that this call for agile sprints is actually around leadership just throwing a process they are familiar with. (these are all engineers who are used to JIRA and sprints). That notion that people say they want a kanban board because it is a good view versus actually wanting to engage in the full agile/sprint process. If that makes sense.

I would definitely like to see those resources.

Going back to your first scenario. How was the kanban board set up for that execution team? What did the creative/studio team work off of for their task/project list? If it was the kanban. where were the deadlines/priority communicated to each person?

thank you!

[AlexandraHu]

Hi @Melissa Talcott‚ and @Andrea DiMauro-Walton‚! We are experiencing a similar situation. Our Marketing department has been implementing various agile principles but we have not been able to figure out a streamlined way to execute production work due to waterfall workflows with hard deadlines and dependencies. We are concerned that even if we have a dedicated team for a product, they will still be dependent on their work list or project schedule to know if their work is ready to start or who should be reviewing next. We do not want to create ambiguity around their work for the sake of a Kanban visual and would appreciate any tips or resources for solving for this.

[MelissaTa]

@Alexandra Huie‚ and @Andrea DiMauro-Walton‚

I apologize for the delay, between Summit and catching up after Summit...it's been a week!

In a quick nutshell...we shared resources with our creative team, and used the Kanban board to track projects. I used a filter to only show "ready" backlog items, as teams would tag us on tasks that were months out. A big problem there was getting people to actually mark dependencies complete, and the task showing in our backlog. We were getting ready to move to an all-request type of flow, as I felt this would better capture everything coming to the team. It wasn't perfect. I spent a lot of time in meetings, I think more time was spent in a more account management role than anything else. I worked with the marketing teams and made sure they had good creative briefs and that anything the team would be assigned was in fact ready. We also made sure that anything being assigned to the team was in fact work we should be doing. We had the blessing from our CMO to turn down work that was not revenue-generating work. We had a set of priorities and those were our top allocated projects and pulled from the backlog.

I ran the team (only in spirit) using weekly sprints. We had a weekly meeting to review what was new in the backlog and what needed to be worked on. It was also the opportunity to make sure we had everything we needed to be successful. We also had daily standups, and I would often review the backlog with my team leads.

I would suggest that any marketing organization make sure they really understand what Agile is, and really look at it from a marketing perspective. I recently obtained my certification in Agile Marketing from AgileSherpas. I have talked to other customers/organizations who have sent their CMO to train with them. It's a great way to really get a full breadth of understanding but from a marketing perspective.

As you will see, there is no one way to bring Agile to a marketing organization. Every organization is different, and you have to really look at how your teams are structured and experiment. Maybe try with a smaller group and continue to expand. We are always iterating and finding better ways to work.

If I think of more, I will send it. Again, apologies for the delay. I hope you are both well.

Thanks.

[BeckyDa]

Yes, that'd be great, thanks!