Pop quiz hot shots! Think you’re a master agile marketer? Read the books, attended the seminars? Well it’s time to find out if you know your stuff. No matter what you are doing, implementation is always the most difficult aspect of a project. It’s time to see how well you have implemented the methods and understand the strategies.
The Agile Marketers Check List
Below are several critical elements to being a successful agile marketer. Take a look and assess how well you have done. How many of the following are you and your team doing and how well you are currently doing them?
Goal Orientated
According to a recent article by Amanda Maksymiw the “main component in scrum is the product backlog, or the complete list of tasks that you must complete in order to achieve your end goal.” Taking some time before each scrum and thinking about what it is you want to achieve as well as the potential roadblocks and resources you’ll need really helps to minimize flying by the seat of your pants. It forces you to take a more methodological approach to your marketing activities. By creating and focusing on the product backlog you will be in a better place to prioritize for the approaching scrum.
Idea Recording
How is this important, you might ask? Well, according to Maksymiw creating “idea backlogs” allows you to “help your marketing organization become more nimble and creative.” Essentially an “idea backlog” is a list of all the marketing initiatives that you and your team would like to accomplish during the next quarter or year. Maksymiw does warn that you don’t want to let “your idea backlogs get in the way of the work against your current goals!”
The all-Important Daily Standup
I realize I’ve written about this before, but I’ll keep touching upon it until I’m blue in the face: The Daily Standup Meeting can’t be overlooked. Having a quick scrum team meeting where each member can discuss what they’ve accomplished, what they plan on accomplishing and what the possible roadblocks are, is so beneficial. This instantaneously increases team transparency, no more wondering what your team mates’ status is with their part of the project! It also alerts team members of possible deadline misses, giving teams more time to take corrective action.
Analysis
The most important step in the process. To be a successful agile marketer, you have to be able to step back, analyze what you did and ask yourself what can you and your team do better next time. These retrospective meetings (aka. scrum review meetings) are typically longer than the standup as team members “discuss issues and impediments, or other ideas to improve the team at a larger scale. Maksymiw points out that these scrum review meetings “can take time and practice to get people comfortable with talking about issues, so sometimes it is easier to focus on potential improvements, in general.”
So, now that you have several criteria to compare yourself against, so how well do you stack up? Not as strong as you’d like to be? That’s OK. Remember, part of the beauty of agile marketing is that you can always improve on your next sprint.