Agile was born out of the need for a better way to develop software, but there are so many benefits a marketing, design, client service, or even sales team can reap by applying a few of the principles. Agile reduce the high amount of waste in today's legacy management systems, provides a framework to better operate in a constantly changing environment, and produces high quality value through rapid testing and iteration. While the tangible outputs may differ from team to team - a software team provides value through a product or platform, a marketing team may focus on providing value through content, or a sales team may provide value through a consultative approach - all teams can benefit from adopting an agile framework.

1. How marketing,
design, client service
and sales teams can
adapt agile principles
AGILEFOR THE REST OF US
Erin Martin

2. Agenda
1. Why agile
2. Scrum and Kanban
3. Confluence
4. Ceremonies
5. Agile Metrics
1. photo by @alexstrohl

3. Why Agile?
● Reduces the high amount
of waste in today's legacy
management systems
● Provides a framework to
better operate in a constantly
changing environment
● Produces high quality value through
rapid testing and iteration
2.

4. Scrum and Kanban
Scrum and Kanban are visual project
management tools, with any issue or item
you are working on showing up on a
Board accessible to everyone.
This visible nature drives greater
alignment, accountability, and
transparency across teams because
everyone can see what each other is
working on, ask questions, and be held
accountable for doing what they said
they would do.
SCRUM &
KANBAN
photo by @alexstrohl3.

5. Scrum
Best used for teams who need to plan their work and is based on short iterations called Sprints. Sprints in the
development world are usually two weeks long, but one month sprints work great for marketing and client service teams.
Active Sprint
What we were going
to prioritize for the
month
Prioritized
Items we are
thinking about for
next month
Backlog
I
Items that are good
ideas, but just not
a top priority
4.

6. 5.
Marketing Scrum Board

7. photo by @alexstrohl 6.
Scrum at Work
● Quickly adapt to last minute changes (and address the
all too common must-have-now request from sales)
● Easy to show tradeoffs that have to be made to
accommodate the request.
● Adding the project into the monthly active sprint means
something has to move to the backlog.
● Ensures all teams are cognizant of the decision being
made and the impact on future projects.
● A healthy backlog becomes as an easy way to identify
future team resource needs.
photo by @alexstrohl

8. “The Scrum board allows me to set deadlines and provide
transparency into when stakeholders can expect content to
be completed.
Work can also only be added in a sprint if something is taken
away, and generally it’s good to only fill up 80% of the hours
in your sprint; this makes room for any last minute fires you
need to put out that require work to be done.
It all circles back to the tried and true adage -- that it’s better
to work smarter, not harder.”
Madison Joslyn
Content Marketer
7.

9. Kanban for
Client Services
Kanban is best used for teams who can start work
without a plan and is great for service teams.
Product support, design, campaign management,
and implementation teams can use Kanban to
manage inbound client requests and issues.
The visual nature of the Kanban board allows
anyone to the team or an individual's capacity
(workload), which helps with balancing team
workload and setting correct timeline expectations
with internal and external clients.
KANBAN
photo by @djace178.

10. photo by @alexstrohl9.
Workflow
Workflow will vary by team, but
client service teams can use
To-Do, Pending Internal Action,
Awaiting Client, and Done, as
four simple status issues go
through to reach resolution.
View the average length of time
a case lives in a certain status,
for insights into areas that are
slowing you down or ways to
optimize workflow.
WIP
Limiting your work in progress
(WIP) gets more done.
Multitasking kills productivity
and limiting the amount of
WIP ensures focus on closing
out cases before picking up
new ones.
It takes some time to figure
out optimal WIP limits, but
figuring them out can reduce
resolution times, which means
happy customers.

11. “Having a Kanban board is vitally important for me to
stay on top of my Design Team’s workload. On one
screen, I can see what projects everyone is working on,
what stage of the design process they are in, and how it
impacts their ability to take on new work -- all laid out in
quickly digestible visual.
This is helpful not only when assigning new tasks as they
come in from clients, but also when projects need to be
shuffled around to accommodate Sales and Marketing
requests.”
10.
Nick Pope
Manager, Creative Services

12. 11.
Design Team Kanban Board

13. “The Kanban boards have vastly improved the way our
team collaborates across departments. In the past,
each team used a stand alone tracking system and
process.
Now we have the ability to document all campaign
details within one Kanban board while also linking to
multiple projects and stakeholders. Jira's
cross-functional tracking capabilities has eliminated
any need to dig through ancient emails to find historical
campaign information.”
12.
Abby Grotz
Manager, Campaign Management

14. Build, Measure, Learn.
Faster.
Agile is all about continuous testing to
learn, adapt, and adjust to what your
customers really want, before it’s too late. For
marketing teams who like to test everything, this
means you can act more like a product team - the
“product” is often content and the promotional
channel it goes through to get to an audience. Marketing
teams can use Scrum to build and test content and
marketing campaigns, measure performance, learn, and
iterate more quickly, just like a development team.
2.13.

15. Confluence
Agile is all about rapid
feedback cycles and
continuous improvement.
To keep everyone on the same
page and move projects
forward, faster, use
Confluence as a content
collaboration system.
This is a single source of truth
to share documents, write and
review copy, keep meeting
notes, outline SLAs, and record
business intel, which ensures
transparent and open
communication for all.
14.

16. 15.
Account Dashboards
Outline key account information (support
model, account teams, account goals, etc.)
along with a list of all relationship activity
that is currently active in Jira with the
account. This ensures all account activity is
visible in one snapshot.
Write and Review Blog Posts
Inline and page level comments
makes it easy to review copy and
provide feedback.
Content Library
Start a marketing library as the single source
for up-to-date decks and one-sheets.
Someone need a logo? Refer them to your
marketing library (and eventually you’ll never
have to email someone a logo again!)

17. 16.
Eradicate tribal knowledge
Started an internal wiki or how-to-articles
to document knowledge, processes, and
best practices.
Address Fires Fast
When a crisis happens, documenting all the
known facts, timeline of events, and talking
points for clients as fast as possible is crucial.
Create an alert section in Confluence dedicated
to these situations. It gets accurate information
out to internal teams fast, can easily be
updated, provides details into what’s being
done, and documents the incident for historical
reference later.
Record Meeting Notes and Follow Ups
Easily crowdsource the agenda, then record notes
and action items for easy reference. Even better,
we use a Macro to curate all of the action items
from a specific page, space, or label, all in one list.

18. “Confluence has radically changed the way my teams have
performed their core duties. It pulls together all process
documents and general truths into one place to eliminate
the mind-numbing search through your emails to find the
correct way to perform a task, and the risk that you're
working from an older version.
It also pays to determine in advance exactly what you want
confluence to achieve and what the most logical hierarchy
and taxonomy should be. And regular QA sessions to strip
out outdated and unnecessary information. This means the
difference between a confluence in daily use vs. one that
sits quietly dying.”
17.
Billy Tarter
Digital Media Director

19. Ceremonies
Ceremonies is a fancy word for meetings. One of
the key values of agile is individuals and
interactions over processes and tools, and I’m a
strong believer that proactively planning out
these cross-team touchpoints will reduce
randomization, streamline communication, and
help teams make decisions quicker. It’s also a
great way to have teams self-organize and
resolve issues - no need to micromanage.
The following ceremonies come
from Scrum, but can be
adapted to agile or learn
18.

20. Daily Stand Ups
Daily Stand Ups quickly inform everyone of what's
going on across the team and address any
blockers. Typically they are done once per day, but
every team can use a cadence that works for them.
Client service teams can have a daily stand up
where they review their workload and any issues
they need to talk through. For marketing teams
every other day or twice per week has worked well.
Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning is used for teams who have Scrum
boards. For a marketing team, hold a sprint
planning meeting the last week of every month to
review what was accomplished, what wasn’t, and
prioritize the projects to tackle next. This would
also include discussion of new requests that have
popped up and figuring out where to prioritize
those requests (often from sales).
19.
There are four typical ceremonies agile software development
teams use and how to adapt them to non-development teams.
photo by @alexstrohl

21. Iteration Review
Iteration Review is where teams showcase their
work. Product teams often have a ‘demo day’ to
showcase what they are working on and marketing
can easily do the same. Use it to showcase new
campaigns, programs, or materials to sales and
client services and a few weeks before a product
release to ensure everyone knows what is coming,
how to position it, and understand the tools and
materials they have to sell and service it.
Retrospectives
Retrospectives help the team understand what
worked well and what didn’t. Client services can
use retrospectives (often known as post-mortems)
after an issue is resolved to see what went wrong
and right. Marketing can use after a product or
campaign launch and help answer - what
assumptions did we have when we launched the
campaign? Were those assumption validated or
disproved, and how do we know that? What did we
learn and what will we do better next time?
20. photo by @alexstrohl

22. photo by @alexstrohl
Agile Metrics
Just like the agile workflow, all metrics are expressed in a
visual nature. Visual metrics make it easier to spot and resolve
issues in the process.
They also give hard evidence as a launching point to discuss
hard issues, which makes for a much better conversation then
one based on opinions and observations. There are a ton of
agile metrics available, but for non-dev teams velocity,
cumulative flow diagrams, and traditional business metrics
provide enough to operate as an efficient team, deliver great
service, and drive demand for products and services.
photo by @alexstrohl
21.

23. Velocity
Velocity shows how much work can be handled by a
team in a specific time period. Use it to better predict how
much work you can handle in an upcoming month or sprint.
Marketing teams can track velocity over time to identify how much
work you can handle, which lets you know if you’re committing to too much
or too little for next month. Anyone with a scrum board uses Velocity, which can
also be measured through story points, a unit of business value, hours, or issue count.
Cumulative Flow Diagrams
Cumulative flow diagrams visually show how many issues are in what
workflow stage, to easily identify and address bottlenecks. Client service
teams can see if cases are stuck in ‘waiting on client’ or marketing
teams can see if content projects are bottlenecking
in the tech review process.
Identifying bottlenecks is the first
step to optimizing a process.
22.

24. There is so much more to agile than is what
mentioned here, but hopefully it provides a few
nuggets of inspiration and tips you could apply
to your non-dev team.
It’s important to note that agile, lean, or any
other framework is meant to be just that, a
framework you adapt to work for you, not a
step by step guide or blueprint to blindly follow.
Every company and team is different and it’s up
to you to figure out what works best.
Read more in my original blog post,
Agile for the Rest of Us, on LinkedIn
Erin Martin
photo by @alexstrohl