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Some few brave souls have attempted to use Agile methods in business, sales, marketing teams.
The Perforce use Agile methods in marketing team, here will describe our journey so far, the problems we overcame, and the road ahead.
INTRODUCTION
Perforce develops version management software
250 employees, 5 offices, Three continents Perforce’s engineering teams adopted Agile
starting in 2008
Perforce engineering and Agile
MarComs: product release promotion participating in trade shows and events producing outbound collateral engaging in social media channels
Product management and technical marketing: Product management: product business analysis and
planning technical marketing: on technical trends and
competitive research
Perforce marketing department structure and functions
Lack of communication and transparency hampered marketing.
Marketing did not understand the engineering priorities, roadmap, or product direction
communication problems were even more severe between the US and UK offices
Lack of communication
Marketing managers did not always understand what their teams were working on day-to-day.
No clear record of task priority, daily task assignments were often inferred, or communicated verbally or over email.
Lack of management visibility
A change in engineering schedule, while often unavoidable, has a large downstream impact on marketing
Marketing is bound by another department’s schedule, making it difficult to plan effectively.
Schedule chaos
That problem actually grew worse after engineering adopted Agile.
Marketing activities simply have a long lead time and are difficult to adjust at the last minute
Schedule chaos
The problems encountered by the marketing teams are those often solved by Agile
In early 2011 the decision was made to adopt Agile in marketing, using the Scrum framework
Scrum!
Basic visibility improved (intra-department) The white board is a mess Little visibility inter-department Little coordination with remote teams
How did we do?
Simply having 30 minutes each day for the managers to hear what everyone was working on
those meetings were taking too long. With as many as 8 people in the room and on the phone, finishing in a half hour was difficult
Basic visibility improved (intra-department)
The task board was not a resounding success those first months.
No value for the remote workers or the team in the UK.
The white board is a mess
Engineering manager would not have gotten a good sense of marketing’s tasks and priorities from looking at the task board
there was no cross-department participation in the Scrum activities, so no information was shared between departments.
Little visibility inter-department
It was very difficult for those of us working remotely to participate
Several of us travel frequently and often missed the standup meetings
Little coordination with remote teams
Round One was a mixed bag In true Agile fashion, we adapted and made
some changes This section covers our experiences in the
second half of 2011 and the first part of 2012.
ADOPTING AGILE: ROUND TWO
Put more emphasis on using collaboration tools
Using Basecamp for some project planning and collaboration
Teams in Alameda continue to use the physical task board to facilitate the daily standup meeting
ADOPTING AGILE: ROUND TWO
After some experience, we got better at task estimation how much could reasonably fit into a month what types of tasks were likely to be impacted
by external factors what activities had to be decomposed into
smaller tasks
Better estimation
Marketing has settled into something of a rhythm with Agile.
Adopting Agile have actually exposed underlying problems in business processes and organization.
CONCLUSION
Adopting Agile in marketing brought some immediate benefits
The problems that were exposed were lingering
A long road ahead of us We need tools
CONCLUSION
Recommended