Project clutter is a big problem for any Marketer. Managing day-to-day and long-term projects is something that only a few do well. The focus of my session is to share how my team has increased productivity by focusing on active sprints, setting long-term expectations, and communicating effectively across company. Using a Scrum board, backlogged items remain conveniently out-of-sight until they become relevant in next planning session. Efficiency is maximized because team members are laser-focused on their sprint(s). During planning, projects are assigned a complexity metric (via story points or time estimates) so that unrealistic expectations are removed.
Here are ideas to better manage your marketing team's workflow, uses of JIRA Projects and Agile Scrum boards, methods of aligning your marketing team with Engineering and Product and more.
4. About ServiceRocket
Helping people get the most out of their software
TRAINING TrainingSUPPORT UTILIZATION
- Founded in Sydney, Australia 2001
- Palo Alto, CA HQ since 2010
- 180 employees across 4 global
offices: Palo Alto, Sydney,
Santiago Kuala Lumpur
5. Recent Webinars
Topic:
Date:
Connecting Salesforce and JIRA
August 8, 2014
Applying SDLC in the Atlassian Suite
February 6, 2015
Reporting Add-On for Atlassian Confluence June
23, 2015
Scaffolding Add-On for Atlassian Confluence July
21, 2015
A Deeper Dive into the Atlassian Suite
August 06, 2015
7. 2005 by Chris Kohlhardt and Clint Dickson
About
World’s first online diagramming software!
4M+ users worldwide & 10k+ active installs
on Atlassian marketplace
10. Facts on Software Dev Process
64% of features in products are rarely or never used
The average project exceeded its schedule by 63%
50% of projects fail due to bad / missing requirements
Projects deemed “successful” had customer
involvement listed as a critical success factor
Source: The Standish Group
13. The Agile Manifesto
Individuals & Interactions OVER Process & Tools
Working Product OVER Documentation
Customer Collab OVER Contract Negotiation
Responding to Change OVER Following a Plan
16. What Can I Walk Away With?
Enough Scrum knowledge to be dangerous
Ideas to implement to existing process
Methods of aligning your business team(s) with
technical team(s)
27. Which Software Is Right?
What is currently being used in-house?
Will it work for what I need?
How much customization is involved?
28. Learn More About Scrum
Follow the blog for a more in-depth approach
AgileMarketing.net
http://www.agilemarketing.net/GettingStartedWith
AgileMarketing.pdf
Problem: Visio doesn’t exist for the Mac!
Web 2.0 was right around the corner, Gliffy was one of the first Web 2.0 apps
The only 10k+ active install vendor on Marketplace
Introduction
Impossible to teach scrum in 60 minutes
I’m going to talk about very high level ideas
Follow-up with a more in-depth blog post talking about the details of story points, writing tickets, etc.
Core principles of Agile
What problems it’s supposed to solve
What we do at Gliffy
How we scrum
What things have we found successful
Remember that this is geared for business people, so I’ll be talking about many business objectives
Benefits that I’ve seen from switching to Scrum
What should you do on your end to get this going?
I thought it was interesting to know the history on agile and what problems people were facing that they created a solution for it
My source is the Standish Group, which is an open-source community of IT and Engineering professionals
The average project took a lot longer longer to complete than was scheduled
A common factor to the delay was the amount of context switching that happens daily
Half of projects fail because of bad or missing requirements
Requirements take forever to write, nobody likes doing them
You can spend several hours writing them, and they’re probably still incorrect
64% of features were rarely or never used
The backlog was being developed without checking if the customer actually had a need for them
Easy as cake - involve your customers often and more often, they’ll tell you what they need
You’ve got your strategy and scoping phase
Waterfall requires a lot of work upfront
There’s a heavy dependency on requirements to be perfect from the start, which isn’t good because chances are, 50% of them will fail
Then gets passed on to the design team to create mockups and wireframes
Who then passes it to a development team
Who then tests, and ultimately deploys
Agile is against that and thinks it’s better to have feedback loops from within each of those stages
A simple way become more agile with this model, is to add that feedback loop to every stage
Agile is about “just enough documentation”
After you have “just enough” documentation, validate your hypothesis with qualitative surveys
It could be with an internal team, or a small external team
Ask if you’re solving the right problem
After you design, send a small group of customers this prototype
Have an advisory board of sorts
Are you still solving the right problem?
Then send it to your development team
They can release a beta to test with your existing customer base
Until you finally can deploy the product
Interactions OVER Process
Collaborate with your team rather than following the process step-by-step
Working Product OVER Documentation
Have a smaller set of deliverables rather than depending on the requirements from the start
Customer Interaction
Keep your customer involved, whether it’s a qualitative or quantitative approach
Whether it’s an internal team or external customers
Responding to Change
Customer behaviors change and technology changes, you have to be adaptable to these things
What better way to capture the entire agile manifesto, than with Will Farrell as Mogatu!
Typically a Product Owner who owns the backlog
The Scrum Master is responsible for the day-to-day responsibilities
Team Members are responsible for their own activities
Scrum knowledge:
I want to equip you with enough knowledge on Scrum that you know where to look if you’d like to implement it
Ideas:
Ideas to better manage your workflow
If Scrum isn’t for you, then I hope that you have some ideas to incorporate into your existing flow
Methods for Alignment:
Methods to align your business and technical teams
Everyone talks about transparency, and this is a big way you can achieve it
I want to mention again that I’ll be going over issue types and story points in my blog post, that can be its own webinar
I simply want to show you how we plan and process our sprints
So for this example, every project is a Story, and stories should not take any longer than 2-weeks to complete - otherwise, it should be broken down into several stories
Backlog Grooming
Only stories live here
Owned by Business Sponsor
They determine prioritization and what goes into a sprint
Sprint Planning
Our sprints 2 weeks but it doesn’t have to be
Key: look at availability of staff - vacation, events, holidays, etc.
I like to incorporate an 80/20 rule to the board, where the 20% is reserved for additionall things that will be added
Daily Standup
What did we do yesterday and what we’re doing today
What does it look like? FLY-IN BOARD
Time-boxed
Disruption decreased, focus
The rest of your time is laser-focused because things are isolated and time-boxed
Meetings
Yes, a few more meetings, but they are mostly short meetings
Grooming/Planning - 1 hour
Standups - 2 hours total
Review - 1 hour
Teams are aligned, including the exec team
Ideas are never wasted
What does it mean that ideas are never lost?
SEO idea to increase visitors to the site via SSL conversion goes straight to the backlog
SMS, email, etc.
Best practices for how to capture this
Your managers will LOVE you, because you’re managing their expectations
I hate when managers are breathing down your throat asking what projects have you completed?
Give people the chance to micro-manage you through technology
Do you feel that your staff is unhappy?
Are their ideas stagnating?
Are projects not getting completed on time?
Turnover?
Do other teams that I communicate with use the same software?
Is it easy to adopt?
Will the exec team be able to look into its boards?
How much time does it take to set up? Can I use it right out of the box?