If your development team has been practicing agile for any significant amount of time (3 – 4 releases), then your marketing team should have jumped a while ago. You’re doing a disservice to your organization if you don’t. If your dev team is running a pilot agile development project or even thinking about “going agile,” jump now! Regardless of which department is transitioning to agile, it takes time. The sooner you jump the sooner can start realizing the benefits of iterative planning, managing and delivery. Even if there’ve been failed attempts at agile in the past, I would argue the benefits of successfully implementing agile in marketing far outweigh the crap you’re going to get for trying.

Having worked in software/technology companies for the last ten years, I know the frustration of missing release dates. It’s not fun putting marketing plans on hold or having nothing new to tell the market so you keep spinning the same lame story, and nobody likes the crazy hours marketing has to pull right before a release because there isn’t visibility into exactly what features are going to be released until the last minute.

The benefits of having both software delivery and marketing on a consistent rhythm aren’t hard to understand – the Agile Checklist is a great resource for learning to use agile rhythms. Using agile processes, new features are potentially ready to be released at any time and marketing has the collateral, website updates, customer communication, etc. already in progress or ready to go. Conceptually agile is easy – it’s the mind shift from only delivering a final end product to managing near term deliverables and the behavioral changes required to support the process that are challenging. 

I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on the impact of agile in marketing and the challenges I’ve encountered (and sometimes continue to struggle with) as a marketing ScrumMaster. I would love to hear about your own experiences with agile in marketing or other departments outside of development, questions you have and comments.