Many organizations today deploy Agile in some capacity throughout their operations. More than 75% of organizations have stated that they have adopted Agile practices to accelerate their software delivery cycles. Although faster software deployment is a key benefit to embracing Agile, other teams within organizations like marketing and sales are adopting Agile to improve productivity. More specifically, companies with global teams can leverage Agile program management as a method to align objectives and improve delivery.
Implementing Agile Program Management practices doesn’t happen overnight. At Planview, we started the journey almost two years ago across our distributed teams in Austin, Stockholm and Bangalore.
In a newly published blog “Aligning Global Teams Through Agile Program Management: A Case Study” featured on SAI, Verena Bergfors, head of EMEA Marketing at Planview shares her perspectives on how the team successfully integrated international teams and Agile practices for better alignment and delivery, and she offers tips to consider for your Agile program.
This blog summarizes some of the main points from her blog, but I encourage you to read the full version on the SAI site.
The Challenges
From Verena’s perspective, there was a lack of alignment and delivery across the distributed teams at the onset of the Agile transformation. This led to defaulting to a “North America-first” oriented approach and the international teams just followed suit.
The challenges included:
- EMEA marketers misaligned from overall big picture objectives
- EMEA teams deploying different marketing campaigns in comparison to North America teams
- Poor demand generation and low impact campaigns
- Difficulty staying on strategic goals due to different cultural and time restrictions
These were not new problems, but now that the organization was embracing Agile, it was a challenge worth trying to fix.
Advancing the Agile Program
To counteract these issues, the team took an integrated Agile project management approach for all the teams. Since some of the marketing teams within Planview were already using Agile, the focus was on integrating the EMEA teams into processes and ceremonies to breakdown silos. Leadership decided to align the EMEA teams by region and language to maximize their local expertise for campaigns. Integrating international teams into Agile resulted in significant success. It led to increased alignment between teams, regionally impactful campaigns and better demand generation.
The results were game-changing. Here are two of many benefits Verena outlines in the blog:
- The ability to deploy 1-2 campaigns per PI to running up to 5 campaigns per PI
- EMEA marketing increased productivity from 4-6 new localized assets/materials per year to 18-20
To learn more about the in-depth findings of integrating international teams with Agile, check out the full blog “Aligning Global Teams Through Agile Program Management: A Case Study”. To learn more about Agile Program Management , watch a product demonstration.
![Agile Program Management: How to Increase Agile Scaling Success [Video]](https://blog.planview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Apm-video.gif)
