Agile Creativity
Monday, October 22nd, 2012
Presented by JT Moore, Chris Knotts and David Mantica
Presentation Agenda • What is Agile – High-Level Look
• Foundational Principles / Values Expanded
• Core Setup Practices – High-Level Look
• Agile Flavors
– Quick Look at Radical Management
• Agile Creativity – Flavor of Agile for Marketing
– Seven Tips
– Five Practice Suggestions
• Five Critical Agile Practices That Will Be Used in Marketing
– Self-Organized Team
– Levels of Planning / User Stories
– Estimating Costs
– Iterative Work
– Retrospective
• Common Pitfalls
• Future of Agile in Creative
Agile in a Nutshell
• Transformational way of work
• Built a foundation of principles and values – No 1 inch thick rule book
• From those values and principles come practices – Like daily stand up, retrospective, story points, etc.
• Practices are organized into flavors – Agile “flavor” model on next slide
Highly extendable – very similar to open source Scrum is to Agile, as Red Hat is to Linux
The Disruption: Agile
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
agilemanifesto.org
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it
and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Critical Agile Values
• Transparency
• Trust
• Truth
• Continuous Improvement
• Inspect / Adapt
• Collaborate
• Coach
• Team Autonomy
Agile Practices / Concepts
• Business unit / Development unit
• Product Owner / Scrum Master
• Daily Stand up (Daily Scrum)
• Iteration
• Definition of Done
• User Stories
• Task Board
• Burn Down / Velocity
• Retrospective
Agile Flavors
Radical Management » Steve Denning / Paul Stevens
• Agile Moving to Leadership and Management
• Basically a Productized Version of Agile for Managing, Based on Agile Guiding Principals
• Five Foundational Principals of Radical Management
– From maximizing shareholder value to maximizing custom delight
– Manager from controllers to enablers
– Work organized bureaucratically to work organized around customer outcomes
– From straight economic value to that plus transparency, continuous improvement and sustainability
– From top-down command communication to conversations
Agile Creativity
Taking the values, principals and concepts of Agile, as a way of working, and
applying them to the creative process
Agile is a Value Driven Model
Fits with Marketing Deliverable Goals
Plan
Driven
Value/
Vision
Driven
Requirements
Cost Schedule
Cost Schedule
Features
Predictive Process
(Waterfall)
Adaptive Process
(Agile)
Constraints
Estimates
The plan creates
cost / schedule estimates
The vision creates
feature estimates
Agile Creativity (Seven Tips)
1. Co-Located Team – Real or Virtual War Room
2. Add Technologies to the Creative Team
3. Develop “T” Shaped Talent – Problem solvers
– Highly skilled in specific area
– But interested in many areas (empathetic)
4. Get Real Time Insights
5. Plan / Use Offsite Idea-thons
6. Iterate and Test Campaigns
7. Partner on Pilot Projects
Agile Creativity: Suggested Practices
• Collaboration 2.0 – Inspiration occurs at the intersection of advertising disciplines
• The Minimum Value Brief – MVB – Initial iteration to stimulate additional ideas
• Hack-a-thon Mode – Crack out ideas fast using MVB concept
• Campaign Prototyping – Picture is worth 1000 words, but Something done is worth 10,000
• Beta Test with Customer
Self-Organized Teams in Creative
13
About The Teams?
Agile Teams also have three responsibilities as part of the Agile adaptation.
1. Collaborate & communicate
2. Remove obstacles they can remove themselves
3. Get the work completed that they have committed to
Five Levels of Agile Planning In Creative:
• A great place to start is by analyzing the levels of Agile Planning, deciding in planning when something is DONE
Product Vision Yearly by the product owner
Product Roadmap Bi-yearly by the product owner
Release Planning Quarterly by the product owner and team
Iteration Planning Bi-weekly by the team
Daily Planning Daily by the team and individuals
Agile Estimating in Creative
16
MVB (Iteration) in Creative
Retrospective in Creative
Failure to address organizational culture changes. The shift to delivery, improvement and transparency.
Failing to involve leadership in supporting Agile. A new way of doing things require this partnership.
Failing to obtain the proper training. Without a solid foundation, many teams see early obstacles as failures.
Failing to involve the business. Agile requires a significant shift in how the business contributes.
What Common Pitfalls Lead to Agile Failure?
Business
Involvement
Experience
and Guidance
Management
Support
Organizational
Culture
Agile Creativity Future
• In software development, Agile works and is here to stay
• Agile as a way working has been successful at Google
• Technology, the web and software are becoming bigger and bigger requirements for marketing/creative success
• Need is there BUT… – Who will develop the specific practices required
– Will a trade associate support practitioners through education and certification
– Will jobs be created that require this skill set
Questions