Agile planning

Agile Planning
July 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/

neilperkin.typepad.com
@neilperkin

This is not about promoting a new process
“There is no singular process” John Jay

A Perfect Storm

Accelerating change
Organisations not only felt bombarded by change, but that many are struggling to keep up.
8 out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead, and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/gbs/html/ceostudy

The relentless digitisation of products, services and communications
Disintermediation & disruption:
A journey away from linear, one way, interruption, frequency, inflexibility …towards what?
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/04/beta_tees_and_l.html

Experiences not messages
“I suspect 2011’s Cannes Lions festival may be looked back upon as the year advertising and technology agreed to meet and get married on the beach.” Mel Exon, BBH

"The internet is a the great dis-intermediator – it connects everything to everything else…Previously mass media aggregated attention and brands bought it. To earn your own attention you have to do things, create content, that people elect to spend time with.” FarisYakob
http://blog.marketing-soc.org.uk/tag/digital/

Big isn’t necessarily better
Broadcast rules don’t apply
Advantage doesn’t always come from scale
“My job is to help brands remember what it was like when they were small. Because on the internet they are.” Bud Caddell
http://little-people.blogspot.com/

The Changing Role of Media
= Attention
Content
= Attention, participation, interaction, content
Content, tools, services
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wespionage/

Media As Facilitator
“Media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals, and more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups” Clay Shirky

“The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information.We think the purpose of information is to foster communication.”Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danarah/

A massive opportunity to have a different relationship with your customers
Co-creation, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding

The Data Explosion
Marissa Mayer: it’s ‘bigger than Moore’s Law’:
Speed (real-time data)
Unprecedented scale built on unprecedented processing power
New data (uploaded from sensors and objects - the internet of things)
"Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating” Eric Schmidt

Real-time
Content creation is quick and easy
Cultural latency is reducing
“There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes for information to be transmitted, the amount of time it takes to have an effect, and the corresponding cultural decay rate. The real-time web of twitter and facebook has brought the cultural latency rate down to almost zero. In response, companies must act faster, responding in real time, to keep apace with its customers.” FarisYakob
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bright/

http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/engagement/

The more interconnected our social graph becomes, the faster new ‘parasitic’ applications and new ideas spread

Struggling to get his 2-year-old daughter to sleep, Mansbachlet off some steam in the form of a status update: "Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, ‘Go the — to Sleep.'

Hit Number 1 on the Amazon best seller list one month before release – due largely to a pirated PDF version

So what Is Agile Planning?

So what Is Agile Planning?
…not a new process, more a set of guiding principles

7 Principles…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/

But first, a little context…
The Agile Manifesto (Redux)
Individuals and interactions
Processes and tools
over
Working outputs
Comprehensive Inputs
over
Collaboration
Contracts and hierarchy
over
Responding to change
Following a plan
over
http://agilemanifesto.org/

1. Ideas From Anywhere

Porous Enterprise - Chance favours the connected mind
The Eureka Myth – the myth of the lone-creative genius with a spark of sudden inspiration
Ideas take a long time to mature, sometimes laying dormant (in the form of 'partial hunches' or half-ideas) for years.
It is the collision of these half-ideas that enables breakthroughs to happen. Rather than being a single thing, ideas are networks, or new configurations.

Porous Enterprise - Chance favours the connected mind
The great driver of innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity between us that creates infinite possibilities for ideas to be swapped
Agile enterprises that understand this create and enable spaces (physical and virtual) where ideas can mingle (in the way that coffee houses did in The Enlightenment)

Porous Enterprise
Employees who increasingly recognise the value of being connected to the interesting ideas in their own and related markets
Employers who encourage their employees to connect
http://thisisindexed.com/

Porous Enterprise
Connected employees bring new thinking into the organisation
Allows for innovation at the edges – non-core thinking
Relationships seen as valuable assets
Flow of ideas into and within organisations
Companies less reliant on ‘stocks’ of knowledge, and more connected to ‘flows’ of knowledge

The Networked Enterprise
A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers
“…fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Strategic_Organization/The_rise_of_the_networked_enterprise_Web_20_finds_its_payday_2716

No silos
We compartmentalise creativity
Try to control it, set targets, apply rules
Make it the domain of particular job titles
Or box it into brainstorming sessions
“The longer you work, the more people want to put you in a silo so they can define who you are on their terms – our job is to never let anyone determine who we are by their terms” John Jay

Creative Culture…
Creative process involving a large number of people
Often from different disciplines
Marshalled around a vision
Working as a team
“The notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.” Ed Catmull, President of Pixar

Creative Culture…
"We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say 'we are not following'.” Ed Catmull
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daviddelarosa/

Engineering Culture…
Resourcing for projects is purely voluntary
Project leaders pitch developers to generate interest
Engineers decide which projects sound interesting to work on

Agile Development is often centred around the belief that the best results come from self-organising teams.
What if we worked like that in communications?

Agencies as incubators
Tech startups get:
$18,000
Office space
Access to industry mentors
Access to big brands
W & K get:
Access to startup talent & pixie dust

The rise of talent networks
An influx of highly talented individuals into the market equipped with the ready means to turn that talent into real value
The need for organisations to be far more flexible with structures / overheads
The opportunity for organistaions to work in a new way is properly viable
Networks are highly efficient: broad talent base, new thinking, flexible costs

A 'brand studio', like a movie studio - pulls in talent to work on specific projects, facilitates a good result, and provides the environment and the infrastructure for effective collaboration
"teams are formed around individual client needs, and when those needs are satisfied, the team is dispersed"
http://www.cocollective.com/

2. Users at the centre

“There are two ways to get bigger as a company – look at what you’re good at…or start with the customer and work backward…even if it requires new skills" Jeff Bezos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/legendmedia/

Observation in context
Not out of context (like a focus group)
Actual experience
Learning from UX?
Google Firestarters – Design Thinking in Planning
http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2011/06/firestarters-2-design-thinking-in-planning-the-event.html

Challenge The Question – Find The Problem To Solve
“Marry the problem, not the solution” Dan Greenberg, Sharethrough

3. Not a single solution but lots of choices

“Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant”
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” Clay Shirky
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benheine/

Abductive Thinking
Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence)
Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible.
Helps challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.

Creating and curating choice
What if, instead of generating one solution to one problem, our job was about creating as many choices and options as possible for clients?
Tom Hulme http://vimeo.com/14138667

4. Test and learn

The Lean Start-Up Movement
Disruptive innovation is everywhere
Every company, regardless of size needs to act like a start-up
Combine of the use of open-source software, agile development methodologies and ferocious, customer-centric, rapid iteration.
"My own definition of a start-up is an institution asked to create something new under conditions of high uncertainty…This has nothing to do with company size.” Eric Ries
http://startupquote.com/
http://madebymany.com/signals/the-lean-startup-movement

Agile working practices
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Agile processes are becoming more and more central to how content and services on the web work
Advantage from responsiveness and adaptability rather than scale

Failure is useless unless you learn from it

Traditional ‘Waterfall’ Approach
Concept
Detailed
Design
Build
Ford Motor/Razorfish agile principles
http://www.slideshare.net/razorfishmarketing/razorfish-ray-velez-and-laura-fraga-ford-motor-on-agile-processes?from=ss_embed

Agile Processes
Agile processes are based on a continous process of Design it, Build it, Test it, Ship it
Concept
DetailedDesign
DetailedDesign
DetailedDesign
DetailedDesign
Build
Build
Build
Build
Sprint
Review
Sprint
Review
Sprint
Review
Sprint
Review
Design with vision, optimise with feedback
Ford Motor/Razorfish agile principles
http://www.slideshare.net/razorfishmarketing/razorfish-ray-velez-and-laura-fraga-ford-motor-on-agile-processes?from=ss_embed

Test and Learn
“We absolutely believe we couldn’t build one of the best loved internet brands in the world without consumer science at the core of our product development methodology.”
John Ciancutti, Netflix
Allows for a ‘test and learn’ approach
Iterative approaches, prototyping
Not just crafted big pieces, but smart combinations of smaller executions
Better end product through flexibility and collaboration
Agile content changes to reflect user feedback and interaction

Zynga - Ghetto Testing
Hundreds of concurrent tests to small groups of users
“Not using metrics is like flying a plane in a cloud with no instruments” Mark Pincus
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chutney_bannister/

Making Stuff Hackable
Research by M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management: over a three year period the amount of money that individuals spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product R & D.
…it doesn’t need to be perfect

5. Always On Marketing

Speed Bumps
Less emphasis on campaigning, more on continuous communication

Build brands from the bottom up rather than the top down
Be useful, interesting, entertaining and playful in the service of people
Think about what communication strategy can learn from UX design
Do something and interesting things will happen
Build a culture of experimentation not planning
Realize perfection is the enemy
Be rewarded for good behavior
Small ideas build long ideas
http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/2011/05/how-to-think-and-make-small.html

"ideas as unfolding stories, a stream of iterations and interactions that invite people into the process”
“Do stuff and learn from it rather than learning and doing.” Gareth Kay
http://www.slideshare.net/garethk/think-small-7958212

Bonfires and Fireworks
John Willshire http://smithery.co/
http://www.slideshare.net/gamages/what-is-media-planning-7502182

Converse Domaination
Using Google as a window onto Converse's audience, Identifying keywords that they were performing but that no brands were buying
PPC in relevant, non-competitive environment leading to a continuous series of content microsites, connecting with the audience in playful, informal ways.
On a slim budget of $100,000 over 600,000 unique visitors, beating a traditional cost/visitor by 2600%

Participative, Spreadable Ideas
VW Brazil sponsored the biggest music festival in Sao Paulo, the Planeta Terra…
Promotion for their coolest small car the Fox, through a mashup of Twitter, Google maps and real world prize locations.
VW hid secret tickets across the entire city, and then displayed them on a microsite using Google Maps. The only way to zoom in was to have the community band together using the #foxatplanetaterrahashtag
A race in the real world to get to the location first. Ran day and night for 4 days.
In less than 2 hours, the campaign #hastag became the #1 trending topic in Brazil, where it stayed for the length of the campaign.

Fiat Mio – Crowdsourcing A Car
Fiat in Brazil asked people to contribute ideas for it’s new model – 17,000 did
Refining the brief, entering into a dialogue with Fiat’s designers
Brought to life as a concept at the Sao Paulo Automotive Show, November 2010
http://www.fiatmio.cc/en/

Ford revealed its 2011 Explorer on Facebook, connecting people pre-launch
The first time a major car company has forgone an auto show for a new car reveal
The day the car was revealed online, searches for Explorer more than doubled
Compared to a typical double-digit increase seen after a Super Bowl ad
http://mashable.com/2010/07/26/ford-explorer-facebook-reveal/

Local Motors
Open-source, distributed car company
Community of 3,600 contributors submitted 44,000 designs
Build and sell through network of local centres
Development cycle 5 times faster than traditional car manufacturers
A process which is 100 times less capital intensive

6. Smart collection and reapplication of data

Business value will come from not only breaking down the silo's between our people, but in joining up, and opening up, our data.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxymcslick/with/3180482810/

Catalysts for Innovation: The Open Web
A total of 1,019 APIs were added to the Programmable Web API directory, that's double the number added in 2009.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/01/weekly-poll-new-apis-doubled-i.php

Joined up marketing
Data often remains in silo's, un-optimised, not joined up
Smarter use of data = the better digital based services can get at delivering personal value
Offline/online single customer view creating real customer centric experiences
Generate better models for value attribution
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22158928@N00/2941827863/

Turning Data Into Wisdom - The DIKW Model
a more useful form of knowledge or evaluated understanding, that adds value, that requires judgement
information that has been processed, organised or applied in some way
Information has some degree of meaning, structure and purpose applied to that data or stimuli
discrete, objective facts, observations, readings, stimuli that have no meaning or value
Companies sitting on huge amounts of value
Data that can deliver the kind of intelligence & insight that can transform business performance

Aggregating and Filtering

Scrobbling
Originated by Last.fm – building a detailed profile of each user’s taste by recording details of the content they consume
This can be displayed on profiles, or shared through widgets
And used to power content recommendation

Zite – The iPad’s Intelligent Magazine
Learns from your everyday reading - what kind of stories you click on, how long those stories are, how long you’re reading them for
And the stories you don’t click on (to give you less of those).

Professional + Social Curation

Data Driven Services
Offers consumers recommendations for restaurants, retail outlets, based on an analysis of the activity of over 25 million Citi credit card holders (about 1 billion transactions a year)
Referencing information like how many times people visit, return and how much they spend. By comparing an outlets prices the service can point to locations that are better value.
Intelligence for outlets - a breakdown of where customers live as well as average incomes of the residents in that area.
http://www.bundle.com/

Social Recommendation Services
A movie recommendation service built on top of twitter
Moving beyond ratings/reviews to sentiment analysis driven recommendation

Data + Social + Gaming
Designed to let fans interact in real time with the action in the UEFA Champion's League
A game that syncs automatically with the TV, and allows you to predict what will happen in the game

Using data to deliver better user experience
“A visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment”

Google Prediction API
Provides pattern-matching and machine learning capabilities
Categorise, analysebehaviour, power recommendation

Twitter can accurately predict future box-office takings of big release films
Hewlett Packard study studied 3 million tweets about 25 movies last year,
Taking account of the rate at which messages were posted about it could predict the box office takings before the film opened.
Sentiment analysis on the content of messages could similarly foresee the ongoing degree of success or failure. Both with a high degree of accuracy.

Can Tweets Predict The Stock Market?
Indiana University Bloomington studied 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters
Measuring the mood of the 'twitterverse' on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 %
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball

Predicting the Present
Latest Bank Of England Quarterly Bulletin (PDF) described how it can use search data as an economic indicator, benchmarking areas such as housing, tax, benefits and unemployment.
Official economic statistics are generally published with a lag. Search data is very timely; it's a by-product of everyday activity as opposed to survey questions after the event; it provides continuous collection of data on an extremely broad number of areas; and it can be effective at helping analyse issues that arise unexpectedly.

Predicting the Present
Upload your own data, see a list of the search queries that most closely relate to that real-world trend or pattern
Or input a search query, converted into a data series of searches over time, and this time series can then be put through the same process in order to identify a list of correlated queries over time.
Or identify how your time series or search query behaves across geographical areas, see patterns by location, and upload data by region.

7. Free your mind (and your budget)

Having Fewer Boundaries Can Be Counter-Intuitive
Shared Space is an urban design concept that integrates use of public spaces for the benefit of all, removing traditional devices that segregate
Far from leading to more accidents, behaviour is more positively affected by the built environment and human interaction than through rigid controls and artificial regulation.
Individuals reduce their speed, are more aware of their immediate surroundings, seek out eye contact with other road users.
Makkinga - Netherlands
Ref: Martin Thomas ‘Loose’

…a bit like budgets
"We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour...The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles.” Hans Monderman

Unplanning
Plans are rigid, set far in advance, take up huge amounts of management time
Assumptions and predicted outcomes are out of date
Detailed plans are the enemy of adaptability
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82202517@N00/

A Way In To Agile…
McKinsey :`Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment’
Recommends brands spend 80% of their budget on banker strategies and tactics, and 20% on learning through well structured tests.
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Boosting_returns_on_marketing_investment_1602

Thank you
neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/agile-planning.html
@neilperkin

Appendix: Resources
Books:
Steven Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From
The Game Changer – AG Lafley, Ram Charan
Martin Thomas – Loose
Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody
The Power of Pull – Hagel, Seely, Brown
Blogs:
Paul Isaakson… http://paulisakson.typepad.com/planning/
John Willshire… http://smithery.co/
Mark Earls… http://herd.typepad.com/
Gareth Kay… http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/
MadebyMany…http://www.madebymany.co.uk/
FarisYakob… http://farisyakob.typepad.com/
Ian Sanders – Unplanning http://www.scribd.com/doc/27810926/Unplan-Your-Business

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Agile planning

by Neil Perkin on Jul 14, 2011

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