Scaled Agile Inc. has released an updated version of its SAFe 5.0 for Lean Enterprises, a framework for building a “lean-agile” mindset across business functions, including development, compliance, marketing, IT operations and others.
Why we care
The latest release aims to help companies implement agile processes across the entire enterprise, putting the customer at the center — already a key theme for marketing organizations focused on customer experience.
“SAFe 5.0 helps organizations address technical and agility deficiencies, as well as strategic and tactical incompatibilities between the business and IT, to master the core competencies necessary to achieve true business agility,” said Dean Leffingwell, SAI co-founder and chief methodologist.
SAFe 5.0 includes two new competencies — Organizational Agility and Continuous Learning Culture — with an aim of helping organizations integrate across departmental functions and provide a roadmap for ongoing improvement.
More on the news
The framework also includes guidance to help determine a business’s current state of agility.
The initial version of SAFe launched in 2011 with a small group of early adopters who implemented the agile framework.
Scaled Agile claims 70% of Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. have SAFe-trained professionals on staff.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.
Working in agile has been around on the software side for a few decades but the martech industry has been getting on the bandwagon in the past few years. While it’s still the early adopters running full-fledged agile marketing teams, it continues to be the way that companies are headed to be more mainstream in the coming year.
You may soon be asked to work in agile instead of the traditional, hierarchical way that has been the norm for the past 100 years in marketing. You’ll need to adapt from your current ways of working.
Below are three major changes that you’re likely to see in how your company approaches project management in 2020.
Marketing plans will be short-term flexible roadmaps
It used to be the norm to write a detailed marketing plan for the year ahead (or even five years ahead). However, we are learning that as soon as these marketing plans get distributed to the teams, they are already out of date. Our marketing landscape moves so quickly now that we need to be flexible and adaptable to change, which is why agile marketing is so valuable to teams.
This isn’t to say that marketing plans don’t have any value – it absolutely helps steer the strategic direction of the teams. It’s how they are put together and used that’s changing to keep up with our fast-paced world.
The new marketing plans are high-level roadmaps that manage campaigns. There is little detail because the people doing the work fill in the details as they get closer to doing the work.
Just because it’s on paper doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. These roadmaps should be re-visited every week or so to see if the timelines are realistic and review priorities.
Here’s an example of a 2020 marketing roadmap:
Source: Aha.io
More generalists than specialists will be needed
For a while, marketing roles were all about getting very specific skills and specialties. With the movement of agile marketing, generalists are valued more than specialists. Here’s why: Agile marketing is all about prioritizing the highest value work and getting it done.
The change in focus highlights the difference from keeping individuals utilized to creating a team that can deliver the most valuable thing when its needed.
Let’s say that the highest priority for the team is to add a landing page to the website for a special event. The project might require a graphic designer, software developer, copywriter and editor all working on the landing page.
Now let’s say the graphic designer is finished with her piece, but the work isn’t considered done until it’s usable and in the hands of customers. If the graphic designer is willing to help with some of the writing, coding or editing, this keeps the team focused on the most valuable work rather than just keeping someone busy.
This isn’t to say that the graphic designer needs to be experts in all of these areas – her craft will always be her core skill. However, if she knows enough to assist in other areas it’s a win-win for everyone.
So as you are thinking about your career in 2020, see if there are other skills that you want to learn that could benefit your team and the work being done.
What to work on will be generated from teams, not ordered from above
For many decades, marketers waited for directives on what to work on and how to work. They were given very detailed requirements or creative briefs. In 2020, we’re going to see more and more marketers at all levels being empowered to generate campaign ideas.
This is great news for marketers because it means you’re no longer the McDonald’s order takers of your marketing department! Management will come to you less and less and say, “I need a 10 piece chicken nugget, small fries and a drink.” Instead, it will be more like, “I need something for lunch, what can you offer me?”
In agile marketing, a lot of teams have a marketing owner that triages all requests from stakeholders and decides what is the highest priority. But the marketing owner doesn’t come to the team with directives on how to get work done – there’s a fine line of ownership. The marketing owner owns “what” is needed and the marketing team owns “how” we’re going to accomplish the work.
The marketing owner may come to the team with a request from the customer’s perspective, like a parent wanting to compare the best college options based on their kid’s interest in one click.
So the team may decide to build a dashboard, or an app, or maybe a game. In 2020, the people actually doing the work will become more empowered than ever before to use their creativity and experiment to learn how best to meet marketing objectives.
It’s going to be a great year for marketers in 2020, I can just feel it! It’s so exciting that we will become more flexible, adaptable and agile.
More predictions for 2020
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”
Too often companies approach agile marketing as a new process for the team, but in reality, there are often substantial organizational changes that need to be made. The companies that do well implementing agile marketing have both elements in play: real agile experimentation on the ground with teams and leadership buy-in.
Learning from the ground up
Agile marketing is all about learning from experimentation, so what better way to experiment than with the team actually doing the marketing execution work.
The best way to prove a new method of working is to test it and learn from on-the-ground success stories, as well as failures. This grassroots approach can work really well, especially in smaller companies that may already be agile-minded.
Here are a few small experiments that you can try with minimal disruption:
1. Start a daily standup meeting with the entire team
This is a really low-cost, high-yield way to improve communication and collaboration. It’s a minimal time investment with a lot of benefits such as improving communication as a team rather than one-off conversations, reducing the need for additional meetings and a way to instantly solve problems together.
To get further buy-in from leaders on implementing agile marketing, document time saved from other meetings as well as how quickly problems are resolved this way versus how your team worked before the experiment.
2. Visualize your work
A lot of marketers are plagued by too much work with little transparency into what they’ve already committed to doing.
By visualizing the work of everyone on your team and making it transparent and visible to everyone, the team can begin having trade-off conversations when new requests come in. This can be done with a simple board on the wall or a simple online tool such as Trello or Monday.
Rather than blindly just filling up their plates, it can become a negotiation-type of conversation. “I can add that request, but here’s the impact it will have on the other thing we’re working on right now for you.”
With this experiment, track how many requests you were able to negotiate – to start at a later time or not at all – with these new shared insights. You can also measure the results to determine if this new approach has helped the team complete more work with fewer interruptions.
Leaders who are willing to change
The grassroots to agile marketing approach is definitely a good starting point, but in conjunction with those efforts, there needs to be leadership buy-in to radically change a stodgy culture with outdated management processes.
An agile marketing team becomes successful when it has the ability to work from one prioritized marketing backlog. This allows the people doing the work to spend time actually working, not fielding ad-hoc requests.
In order to do this successfully, leaders need to understand their role isn’t to assign work or to interrupt the team with emergency requests. This slows the team down and makes deadlines for completion unreliable.
An agile marketing leader needs to work at a higher level to provide strategic direction while allowing the team the freedom to figure out how to best accomplish those goals.
It helps to have one person on the team, often called a product owner or marketing owner, that is accountable for prioritizing the team’s work.
Creating value for the frozen middle
Middle managers feel the most threatened by the organizational changes that come with agile marketing so it’s important to clearly communicate their value and how they contribute to an agile company.
These managers work well as practice leads in agile marketing. The manager may lead the content team, for example, and as a practice lead would make sure that the content writers have standards for quality, learning opportunities and feel supported in their craft.
To succeed in agile marketing, look to start grassroots experiments with the team while educating leaders and middle management on how their roles can evolve to support this new way of working. Agile marketing isn’t just for one team – it’s for the entire organization to become more flexible, adaptable and customer-centric.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”
A trend among agile marketing implementations is to forgo the Scrum Master role and to absorb this into a single role that combines Scrum Master and product owner responsibilities into one “marketing owner” role. While this is what’s happening in the marketplace, let’s explore the pros and cons of this practice.
Let’s start with three reasons for not having a dedicated Scrum Master.
A Scrum Master is expensive
Many marketing departments aren’t able to justify the cost of hiring a Scrum Master. This role is not comparable to anything companies have ever hired before, so securing funding for a Scrum Master is particularly difficult because it is often misunderstood.
A Scrum Master is in high demand, and since the majority of the experienced ones come from the software industry, salaries are typically higher than most marketers are earning. According to salary.com, a Scrum Master earns a median salary of $90k. More experienced ones are earning well into the six figures. This is a big expense to justify for a role that doesn’t typically contribute to actual “output” of marketing campaigns.
In order to justify the high cost of a Scrum Master, it’s important that companies take the time to really understand what the role does and evaluate the cost-benefit analysis to the company. If you’re confused about what value the role will add to your company, check out the ScrumMaster Checklist.
Team dependency
Some teams become too reliant on a Scrum Master. Without one, oftentimes teams will take on the “self-organizing team” role a little faster. A self-organizing team is what we strive for in agile marketing – it means that the team owns how they will accomplish the work, how they will work together and strives for continuous improvement.
In companies where there is a group of motivated self-starters with shared trust and a culture that encourages risk-taking and innovation, the self-organization may already be inherently there. However, a good Scrum Master can help the team become more self-organizing. There are times when relying on the team to do it themselves can backfire, especially if the company’s culture has been very traditional and top-down.
An already agile company culture
For small, nimble companies, the Scrum Master role may simply not be needed. The Scrum Master spends a lot of time teaching the organization how to run with agility, how to adhere to the principles and values of agile and helps to bring culture change to the organization. If the organization’s culture is already agile, a Scrum Master may not be worth it.
Many companies still think the role of a Scrum Master is a replacement for a project manager but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The Scrum Master is there to empower the team and bring culture change to the organization. If you’re hiring a Scrum Master just to manage the team’s work, it’s time to change gears.
Now that we’ve explored three reasons why a dedicated Scrum Master may not be needed, here are three reasons why hiring a Scrum Master may be a good idea.
Company lacks Scrum knowledge
If your company is newly embarking on Scrum, you likely don’t have the experience and expertise in-house. Many companies try to convert existing roles to be the Scrum Master but they miss one very vital skill that a Scrum Master possesses – a deep understanding of Scrum. The role serves as an expert teacher of the Scrum framework and the agile principles and values.
Scrum Master evangelizes Scrum in the organization
When Scrum is new to the organization, a key role that a Scrum Master plays is evangelizing a new way to work throughout the company. This can be especially helpful if you’re a larger organization that is doing a major cultural overhaul.
Companies that are new to agile marketing often think that the transformation is isolated to just marketing. In reality, it becomes a new way to work for everyone in the company. It’s called “business agility.”
Scrum Master keeps the team focused and removes blockers
Another benefit of hiring a dedicated Scrum Master is to keep the team focused and remove blockers. So what exactly does that mean? Here are a few examples:
A manager swoops in and asks a team member to just squeeze in a small campaign for him. The Scrum Master would be there as a shield to the team saying that the team is already committed to work in the sprint and explains the Scrum way of working and how it goes into a prioritized backlog. This allows the team to just work and there is someone there to explain to the manager how a team works in Scrum.
The team can’t get their campaign live because they are waiting on approval from a manager in the legal department. This is seriously inhibiting the team from getting their campaign to market. The Scrum Master would go to the manager in legal, explain the impact on the team and work towards a better process.
So, now it’s up to you to decide whether hiring a dedicated Scrum Master is the right thing for your organization. If you’re already small, nimble with an agile culture, it may not be necessary. However, if you work for a traditional company with a lot of hierarchy, a Scrum Master may be invaluable to your team and organization.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”
If you want to jump on board with the agile marketing bandwagon, that’s great! But before you do, realize that your company culture may need a substantial overhaul before you can really reap the benefits.
Before embarking on an agile transformation, you need to be culturally ready to embrace a new way of working. Adapting agile practices at the team level may lead to some process improvements and efficiency, but agility is not just for the worker-bees – it’s about organizational change.
If you’re a small marketing group with just a handful of people, chances are you’re naturally working in a culture of agility – especially if you’re in an innovative or startup environment. In those cases, jumping to the practices of agile, like Scrum, Kanban or Scrumban are fine.
However, if you’re a larger enterprise that’s been working in waterfall for years with siloed teams and top-down hierarchy, cultural readiness is going to be key for agile marketing to be successful.
I’ve seen many companies try out agile, but the ones that are doing it well realize that it’s not just for the team – everyone at the company, whether they are on a delivery team or not, needs to be ready to change the way they’ve always worked.
Build empowering teams
A lot of companies focus their energy on spinning up new teams as quickly as they can to say they’re “agile.”
Being on a team doesn’t make you an agile marketer. What makes it agile is being on a team where you’re empowered to make decisions, innovate, learn and adapt without outside interference.
For a lot of companies, the above scenario is pretty scary, but what’s even scarier to me is hiring talented people and not giving them any space to create or innovate.
To be ready to build an empowering team, the organization must trust that the people they hired are capable.
Now this isn’t saying there are no boundaries and that agile marketing sets a team of people loose to do whatever they want! An agile marketing team has a shared purpose and roadmap that comes from stakeholders, but how they approach the work is up to them.
Create generalist roles
Agile marketing is all about getting the highest priority work done as a team, not resource utilization. At the end of the day, someone could be utilized 150 percent and get a lot of work started but nothing done that’s usable.
When companies stick to very stringent traditional titles, people are afraid to cross the line into another person’s territory. Unfortunately, what this leads to is the above – a focus on utilization rather than value.
So to set up teams for success with agile marketing, roles need to become more generalized. Sure, the graphic designer will be the primary person that does that work, but maybe others on the team can pitch in and help.
In agile marketing, we call this becoming a “T-shaped” player, meaning you have a primary skill and two other skills that you can help with when needed for the team to meet its’ goals.
Get rid of processes that cause delay
Organizations must look at how work flows in – from idea to delivery – to understand where bottlenecks happen.
Every time that work sits idle waiting for approvals, or passing the baton from one team to the next means waiting in the queue, is called a cost of delay and a really expensive problem!
If work takes you six months from idea to delivery, but 90 percent of that time it’s stuck on someone’s desk or waiting for a person to be available that is waste!
So to be successful at agile marketing, that waste needs to be minimized. A lot of that happens by cutting out unnecessary documentation and approvals and giving the team more autonomy and authority.
If you’re about to embark on an agile marketing journey, that’s fantastic news! Just make sure that your company culture will allow for empowered teams, generalist roles and is ready to re-think current processes that cause delays.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
