Agile Marketing Campaign Development

For the past couple of years FitforProjects has been involved in the management of projects where we are helping companies select and deploy marketing technologies – these tools are helping companies increase their marketing agility as they move to online and social media driven business models.  Interestingly, we are using Agile approaches in a non-traditional way to manage the process of developing requirements, selecting software, and rolling out the technologies across the globe.

But something interesting is also happening on the downstream/adoption-side of these projects: the Marketing Teams continue to use waterfall-based project management to plan and execute campaigns, but the product development teams are using Agile/Scrum to rapidly deploy new products and services.  This is causing process “traffic jams” because change is happening too fast for the marketeers to keep up.  As a consequence, the business is losing revenue and mistrust and tension grows between Marketing and Product Development.

Recently, during a brainstorming session, I suggested that using Agile and Scrum might be effective in radically improving Marketing’s internal business operations and creating a more responsive and lean marketing campaign process.  It turns out that applying Agile to the marketing campaign process is remarkably similar to using Agile on a classic IT project; you have most of the core “requirements” to create a Srum-based project including:

• (Semi) Dedicated Teams
• Fixed Deadlines
• Well understood process with a set of defined tasks including campaign design, images, text content, localization, hiring vendors, etc. that lend themselves to being turned into Agile “stories”
• Close collaboration between “campaign” developers and customers
• A campaign that is running is more important than a perfectly designed campaign that never gets off the ground

From a benefits perspective, Agile delivers:

• Better quality
• Better buy-in and more participation
• Better visibility into the progress of campaign development
• Faster campaign development and deployment

As my FitforProjects colleagues and I have been continually suggesting – Agile is not just for IT.  It’s a core foundational element in your “pragmatic project management” toolkit and should be part of virtually every business project.  I really encourage you to consider piloting Agile on your next business project – I think you will see benefits almost immediately.