“Validated Learning Over Opinions and Conventions” A couple of weeks ago I was helping kickoff a team of 8–10 Agile Marketing teams. The kickoff spanning a couple of days includes: Agile Marketing training High level planning of their first quarter Iteration planning for their first agile iteration While doing this I saw some gaps between …
Last week I helped facilitate Program Increment (PI) Planning for an Agile Release Train (ART) practicing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). One impediment for this ART was that although the leadership team ROAMed risks in PI Planning as well as continued to manage the flow of risks/issues using a ROAMing Kanban Board throughout PI execution, …
Invitation and Pull-based approaches for implementing agile at scale has been a reoccurring theme in my work, writing and talks in recent years — including my talk at Agile 2016 and this series on my blog. In recent months I was working on a SAFe guidance article on this topic. Richard Knaster as well as Dean Leffingwell …
In a recent Agile Marketing Meetup in Boston we tried to figure out how mature are the Agile Marketing teams/organizations out there. Last week I helped facilitate a third quarterly Agile planning event (also known as SAFe PI Planning or Big Room Planning) for a group of agile marketers I’ve been working with for the …
Tools for Agile Marketing seems to be the hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well. Here’s my view on what would be a great tool supporting Agile Marketing: It would …
One of the things I like in SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework™) 4.0 is the fact that is includes kanban visualization and flow management so explicitly as part of its recommended practices/building blocks at all levels ranging from the Portfolio (which was part of earlier SAFe versions) through the Value Stream and Program all the way …
We’ve all seen it. It’s quite an elaborate show with Scrum Masters, Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Secret handshakes, a lot of artifacts, ceremonies, roles. The recent “broadway”-level productions include bigger pictures, more roles, artifacts. It is like visiting the city set in that classic Universal Studio ride. Excellent production value but not really a working …
Improving teams/organizational flexibility/versatility is a topic that comes up often in my engagements. This includes discussion of T-shaped people/teams, Collective Ownership, Code Stewardship, Full-stack-developers and the like. I typically refer to Henrik’s classic (and recently my “scaled” version ). So let’s assume you improve the agile team flexibility which means you can “swarm” a couple …
Recently I participated in a steering discussion for one of the large-scale agile marketing implementations I’m consulting. We’re using a marketing variant of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) there — including planning and executing on a quarterly cadence using Program Increments (PIs). A key struggle that surfaced was: “Planning the quarter just a week or two before …
It’s Agile Marketing Time One of my interesting engagements these days is with a corporate marketing group in one of the top global enterprise technology companies. They have a very serious agile initiative in product development and their CMO basically said “I think I need Corporate Marketing to become agile as well”. When I asked …