For those of you that have adopted agile principles for marketing operations, what have been the benefits and what did you wish you knew before adopting a new methodology? Also, what work management platform are you using to enable agile?

We use Agile for our customer product development teams. We use Azure Dev Ops to track sprint planning. I have found the Agile development process has fundamentally improved our ability to keep up with customer demands while maintaining the foundational capabilities in our customer products. Our native mobile app is probably the best example of this.

We largest benefits we've experienced are visibility into the work our teams are focused on and the time it takes to complete that work. This has enabled us to focus on prioritization of our backlogs and provided us with the opportunity to address inefficiencies in our processes.

There are two things I wish we knew before making our pivot.

First, we should have had a stronger change management plan prior to rollout. We still get a lot of "we can't tell our stakeholders no" and "we've always done it this way". This has resulted in us refocusing on mindset shifts and proper training for our teams.

Second, with the nature of marketing, it is almost impossible to have long standing cross-functional teams. This requires us to either 1.) transition certain resources on/off the teams more often than we would like or 2.) centralize certain roles into what the industry would call "component teams". We call them Solution Practice Areas (SPAs). This has been our largest hurdle and in my discussion with peers in the industry, many share this frustration.

We use Jira to manage our backlogs and track our work. We have highly customized templates and workflows to account for the type of work we do and the information we capture.

Agile methodologies are less efficient for marketing teams that are designed as a service to the business, vs those which are intended to drive profitability. They should be structured around objectives (i.e. grow a particular segment or product). If the team is set up as a service to the organization (i.e. other teams are directing the work), they really just become a team that operates on a 2-week planning cycle (sprint). You want the team to self-organize and build user stories around a particular problem.

There are some 'shared resources' on marketing teams that make truly Agile squads difficult, because those resources are often required on multiple Scrum teams. Creative, analytics and media are good examples. Unless you have resources to dedicate to each Scrum team, they will continue to be bottlenecks. Solution: Assign 50% resources, grant permission to outsource, or train the team to do these things themselves more of the time (i.e. use AI for creative dev) rather than relying on the usual experts.