Archives For Agile

In 2012 a crew of marketing folks, of which I was one, spent a day hashing out how to apply agile and lean principles and practices to marketing teams. One of the key takeaways was a written proposal for an Agile Marketing Manifesto.

Authors of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, SprintZero, June 2012

Authors of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, SprintZero, June 2012

We wrote an Agile Marketing Manifesto as the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development is geared squarely at software development teams and didn’t really fit:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

I spoke at the Integrate Marketing Summit last week and over the past few days I’ve been thinking about the Agile Marketing Manifesto. I keep thinking we should have left with something simpler, more concise. Cutting away the duplication I wound up with the following. I am presenting it to you as an iteration on the original, perhaps the Manifesto for Agile Marketing v2?

Manifesto for Agile Marketing

We are discovering better ways of creating value for our customers through new approaches to marketing

Validated learning over opinions and conventions

Customer collaboration over silos and hierarchy

Responding to change over following a plan

Meaningful experimentation over minor optimisation

What do you think? React on Twitter:

 

Over the past 18 months Fabiana AzevedoAustin Walne, Paul Willard and I have been running and building the San Francisco Agile Marketing meetup. We’ve had a bunch of great speakers and learned a tonne of stuff applying agile and lean practices and principles to marketing.

In 2014 we’ll continue the conversation around agile marketing. If you’ve not given  any thought to applying agile techniques to the world of marketing world then now is the time – show your support for an Agile Marketing event in 2014. The goal: take you from 0 – 100kmph in one day.

 

Agile 2014 in Orlando

January 2, 2014

Folks, just a quick heads up to get this on your radar. In late July and early August 2014 the Agile conference is on in Orlando – this is, in my opinion, the biggest and best Agile conference in the world. Lots of newbies and lots of experienced people come together to learn from one another and push forward the software development industry.

Rahul Ganjoo, my co-conspirator at Twitter, and I have submitted a talk. I’ve also submitted a talk on actionable metrics for an agile enterprise. If you plan on presenting you better get in quick as the deadline for submissions is January 14.

 

Technology reporter Paul Rubens takes a look at IT failures and why they happen, even in big companies, in his article Why IT failures are unlikely to go away. One comment really frustrated me in that post:

Making the software more reliable would undoubtedly be possible, but to do so the developers would have to invest so much more time and money that the price of the product would end up having to be unacceptably high.

Bah!

It is a matter of discipline. If the team knows how to do Acceptance Test Driven Development, and they have the discipline to practice that consistently then they cost will not be significantly higher. The problem arises when a product owner does not see the value of good quality today, and instead pushes that off forever until it is someone else’s problem, or it is too hard to fix without a rewrite.

Technical debt is a thing that can be managed. Companies big and small need to have the discipline to manage their technical debt, and to build quality in. Don’t leave it as an after thought.

Anyways, this post is actually about The Phoenix Project, a great great read about how to address the problems described in Rubens post. Pick it up today and have a read over the weekend, honestly it won’t take more than a day to read.

The Phoenix Project is fun as it is a wonderful story that is infused with the theory and practice behind lean. And no doubt you’ll be able to relate to some of the situations that the team encounters.

Perhaps the folks in Rubens article should pick this up. Quality is fixed, we expect high quality, deliver it!

Go get The Phoenix Project today!