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PHOTO: Edu Lauton

In 2021, for the first time in its four-year history, more than half of marketers identified themselves as Agile in the State of Agile Marketing Report. Agile respondents indicated greater adaptability, productivity, and satisfaction.

It seems we can finally answer the question of whether or not marketers should embrace Agile with a resounding “yes!”

But when we move away from “should we be agile?” to “How can we be agile?” The answers become more complex. It’s no longer about finding evidence that agile works in marketing. We need to create rollout blueprints and scale models, and make plans for change management.

Fortunately, the 51% of marketers who have already performed an agile marketing transformation have shared what helped them adopt and maintain their agile ways of working.

These are the top five tools in your own transformation toolbox if you want agile to be an integral part of your marketing organization.

Agile project management tools

While we’ll get into tools right away, please remember that a tool alone does not make you agile. Tools support our efforts to implement agile frameworks. They are not a substitute for change or a shortcut to transformation.

Given this caveat, we can see that 55% of agile marketers rated implementing an agile project management tool as the most valuable thing they did during their Agile adoption. This was the most popular choice at 12 percentage points, so it’s clearly a big deal in the early days.

Previous versions of the State of Agile Marketing report also placed great emphasis on tools, but the sudden distribution of the workforce during the pandemic catapulted them from valuable to essential.

Sticky notes on a wall became untenable overnight. Everyone needed a digital tool ASAP.

Interestingly, an agile tool was also one of the most frequently cited changes to keep adoption going. It’s not early on when agile tools make a difference.

Of course, if you only pay for one tool, its effectiveness will not be unlocked immediately. To get the most out of your purchase, consider the following:

• Use of mandate until the deadline. People will continue to revert to their old labor management practices indefinitely. Take the time to incorporate all of the work into the tool. Don’t expect this to happen outside of normal working hours. If necessary, contact your provider to ensure that the transfer is done according to best practices.
• Have your executives refer to the tool. Even if they’re not there every day to add work items or move cards on a Kanban board, executives across the marketing organization should understand the tool and refer to it frequently. This applies to both large meetings such as a town hall meeting and smaller reviews or status meetings. Knowing that their boss is looking at the tool is a surefire way to make sure people keep it updated.
• Start small before you buy big. If you’re brand new to agility, try lightweight, low-cost options like Trello, Mural, or Miro before signing a multi-year, large-scale contract with an expensive provider. You need a tool to provide support and visibility, but you don’t want to be tied to a way of working that is dictated by the tool. Experiment with more whiteboard-style tools, then decide what your upgrade could look like if necessary.

Related article: Trello vs. Asana: Clash of Freemium Project Management Tools

Consistent practices and processes

If your marketing organization has more than 10 employees, you will end up with multiple agile marketing teams. In these situations, 43% of Agile marketers found consistency between teams to be one of the most valuable elements of a successful Agile adoption.

For teams to work together effectively, there must be a high degree of similarity between the way they work. This is even more important if you plan to have people migrate between teams. A new team member shouldn’t have to relearn the agile process every time they move.

Of course there will also be some special features from team to team.

I recommend creating a reference model for all agile marketing teams. This documents about 80% of the practices, meetings, and artifacts that all agile teams must use, allowing for about 20% flexibility.

Your reference model may require the following:

• Daily stand-up meeting 3-5 times a week.
• Prioritized backlog of work items in a digital tool of your choice.
• Retrospective meetings take place every 2 weeks.
• Requirements for a well-written work item, including tags that allow sorting across multiple team boards or backlogs.

In addition to these core components, each team can adapt its way of working. You could end up with some kanban style teams never using sprints while others schedule a sprint every two weeks. With a reference model, you can achieve consistency as well as flexibility.

Related article: Balancing Flow and Iteration: A Custom Agile Framework for Marketing Teams

education and training

A lack of knowledge of agile is consistently the biggest barrier to greater marketing agility. So it’s not surprising that three of the most commonly cited changes that help marketers maintain agility have to do with education.

Over two-thirds of agile marketers say they use a combination of training and coaching for agile team managers, ongoing resources for agile marketing training and coaching, and training and coaching for specific roles of agile teams like scrum masters and product owners.

Another 18% use Agile Onboarding for their new hires, while 16% use coaching specifically for their managers.

This mix of coaching and training is great news as adult learners typically only get around 10% of their learning from formal training moments. The other 90% come from on-the-job learning, an ideal application of agile coaching.

When planning a rollout, make sure you include workshops and other training time, but add real-world applications and real-time coaching to keep it going.

Related article: A Brief History of Agile Marketing

Plan and budget differently

There is a lot of talk about the day-to-day activities that marketing agility provides, but the most commonly cited change that keeps agile going over the long term is a different approach to annual planning. In addition to a more agile planning cycle, we are also seeing shifts in budgeting for agile marketers.

The postponement makes perfect sense because the detailed, highly specific slide deck that often makes up an annual marketing plan is out of date the moment you hit the “Submit” button on the email that contains it.

Instead of putting hours and hours into their plan in the hopes that it will stay relevant, agile marketing organizations re-evaluate and readjust them year-round. For some, this happens quarterly; others make adjustments even more frequently.

In fact, 89% of agile marketers have tweaked their planning in some way. 74 percent have adjusted budgeting in a similar way, dynamically reallocating resources as their priorities shift.

As you move in this direction, make sure these layers are well communicated. It’s not good to adjust your plans and move the money if uninformed teams keep executing the old annual plan.

Related Article: Why Digital Policies Are An Agile Marketer’s Best Friend

Basis for tracking the impact of agile marketing

Regardless of what changes are on this list to aid your own move to agile ways of working, make sure you take a baseline measurement first.

Your goal is to track whether agility is doing the job you hire him to do.

If you want to move faster, measure your process efficiency. Half of agile marketers say they track their efforts this way, often using typical agile metrics like speed, cycle time, or throughput. You can also keep track of overall project completion times or the frequency with which work needs to be reviewed before completion.

If marketing results are your primary focus, capture your current level of effectiveness based on current KPIs.

Either way, compare your data from the days before Agile with the results you get with Agile Marketing. If you don’t see the expected impact (three-digit increases aren’t uncommon), double-check your processes and make sure you’ve got everything set up right.

While you don’t need to make each of these five adjustments, keep in mind that the bigger your change, the greater the impact.

If you use a strong agile project management tool, create a reference model, create a training plan, improve your planning and budgeting approach, and establish key metrics, you have the best chance of a successful takeover and sustainable change.

Andrea Fryrear is the co-founder of AgileSherpas and the world’s leading authority on agile marketing. She is also the author of the recently published book Mastering Marketing Agility.

Together with her team at AgileSherpas, she has trained thousands of marketers on how to adapt Agile frameworks to their unique contexts.