Agile as a project management methodology has become hugely popular around the world as it expands from its software development roots to be embraced by organizations across nearly every industry. It’s no surprise then that agile marketing has become a hot topic, considering the natural synergies between how marketing and agile processes work.
Marketing project management is increasingly focused on speed of reaction while maintaining alignment with organizational goals, rather than the traditional approach of setting a target and then putting everything into achieving that over a period of months or years. For marketers now, it’s either react or risk irrelevance.
So, what is agile marketing all about, and how can you start making its advantages work for your team? Let’s take a look.
Breaking Silos and Improving Capacity
The bigger the marketing agency, the bigger the silos. Social media, content, account execs, design, SEO and whatever else the organization is into. While this can increase the knowledge within those departments, overall, the organization is losing efficiencies through communication lapses and poor collaboration. Agile marketing is all about breaking those silos and creating multi-functional teams that are able to react with speed and flexibility to whatever a client needs.
Say a client who’s on the books for long-term organic growth wants to take advantage of a random event that’s got national attention (like a squirrel climbed up their building), they’ll need a social campaign and want to run an offer around it. If that takes more than a day to put in place, then forget it, the moment’s gone and probably the client too. By integrating agile into marketing project management, teams are always prepared. Even if they don’t know the specific client they know the rest of the team, they know who to talk to and how, so the team can react, pivot and take action within hours, if not minutes.
Building collaboration into your teams is not just about bringing a whole office together for pizza once in a while; it’s a full-time methodology. It might move some people out of their comfort zones and require some effective people management, but the flexibility and capacity of autonomous teams can be a huge positive for marketing organizations.
Embracing the Changes Technology Can Bring
Of the many advances in technology that have allowed agile to flourish, such as custom-created project management tools, the huge improvements in data collection and analysis are among the most important. Within agile, this data-gathering and dissemination is also key and comes in a variety of forms, both through number-heavy results and the knowledge and input of team members at the coal-face.
This latter information is gathered every morning as team members talk about how yesterday’s tasks went and what they’ll be working on today. This qualitative data can then be supported by quantitative results, meaning that agile teams can effectively integrate iteration (i.e. the constant performing, reviewing and adapting of processes) into how they do their tasks.
For marketing project management, greater data and information sharing means better results and improved processes and that’s what agile is all about. This is greatly helped by having marketing project management tools such as Planview AdaptiveWork Go, which have been created with a specific focus on marketing. To find out more about how Planview AdaptiveWork can help you go Agile, talk to our excellent team today to organize a free guided demonstration.
