**Brace yourselves – this is quite a long post!**

Good agile marketing managers are made, not born. Today’s marketing behemoths were formed by a dizzying series of opportunities in the decade before the financial crisis. Since then, marketing departments have had teams and budgets shrinking or being passed onto the finance department whilst we have come to hit a time of all-round fast-moving consumer goods and services – FMCG and FMCS. More projects with fewer people and less money means more stress for people whose time management approach is primeval.

 

Many of us divide our time across a flock of projects and work products and are constantly switching contexts. Therefore, we need to be more clear and observable, simplifying and making obvious to both ourselves and everyone else what needs to be done next in real-time.

Most of the marketers out there will just be using a bullet-pointed system or an Excel spreadsheet as a Gantt chart to write down their tasks, owners, start and end date. They might go further to put lots of colours on the chart, only just to solidify the stereotype between other departments that marketers love fluff and color-coding!  There are also many methodologies that have become big project management powerhouses and offer their own certificates, for example PRINCE2 or Agile. If you don’t know how to use those two, you cannot become a “proper” project manager. I still remember Carol’s words, one of the ladies who worked at Delloitte and taught us project management at the CIM Level 6 Diploma in 2013. She mentioned that everyone in the industry hates PRINCE2 and finds it cumbersome but it is a necessary skill for working in big Plcs. Since then, I figured out that project management is not about fancy names, expensive certificates and some letters behind your name on LinkedIn. It is about using the right methodology and applying it in your everyday life in real time.

So.. what do I use for agile marketing to work for me?

 

The lean approach

Back in 2013, I started reading about various project management methodologies to be able to write my CIM assignment. I was reading about PRINCE2 and somehow I stumbled into 5S-Kaizen, Six Sigma and Lean management. Fascinating? Yes. Overloaded with jargon and not easily digestible? Yes.

I decided to create a small cheat sheet for those three project management approaches, in case I needed to follow or adopt any methodology to my work projects:

	KAIZEN	LEAN MGT	SIX SIGMA
What	Japanese TQC & Toyota production system. Bottom up approach	Mgt philosophy developed by Toyota production system. Top down approach	Techniques and tools for process improvement by Motorola. Top down approach
Focus	Eliminate waste, improve productivity, continual improvement. Workers with positive mindset	Improve process speed and quality through reducing process wastes.  Work flow and productivity	Eliminating defects – data-based approach
Imple-mentation	Small group activities	Lean teams (i.e. Problem solving team)	Various belts, i.e. Yellow, Black, Green
Tools used	QC7 , 5S	Kanban, JIT, TPM, etc	DMAIC, Statistics

I quickly realised that those processes are more suited for manufacturing production lines. In my opinion, they are too bulky and slow for a 2019 service-based new product development project. If I had to pick from the above methodologies, I would probably go with lean management as things like Kanban, Git, JIT, 5S fit in hitting my project SMART objective.

Some additional information on the above approaches:

Kaizen is a system of continual improvement to achieve lean manufacturing. It is based on 5 Japanese words starting from S: Seiri (sort), Seiton (set in order), Seiso (clean up), Seiketsu (standardise), Shitsuke (sustain). Imagine it like the Marie Kondo of manufacturing – does it spark you joy? If it doesn’t motivate you to be happy: sort it, set it in the right order, clean it up, standardise your method and sustain your ways to keep you joyful!

Lean management and Six Sigma seem to feed off Kaizen when it comes to continuous improvement and respecting people. Six Sigma, however, being a more data-driven approach, it has various tools that can be used from statistics. Regression analysis, Pareto chart, value stream mapping or even poka-yoke (mistake proofing) are some of the tools additional to 5S-Kaizen that can be used. Kaizen is also used in lean teams approach.

Not all departments know what all of the above mean – and some won’t have the time to either research or understand. If you are in manufacturing operations yes, the above is your bible. I needed something simpler that doesn’t take much explanation and will be faster, simpler, updating in real-time.

PRINCE2 and Agile frameworks

The most fundamental difference between Agile and PRINCE2 is that the latter is a project management methodology. Agile refers to numerous software development approaches that are actually more flexible and adaptable.

PRINCE2 is a plan-based approach, it focuses on the main objective of the project throughout its entirety. It also defines management team members clearly and helps with staying within budget. Problem is, for me personally, it costs a lot to do something that Excel has already a template for.

Agile is very flexible and because of that it became very popular. It mainly focuses on execution and not as much on the management of the project. This is not necessarily bad!  Remember when we talked about shrinking teams and budgets? Add the “in real-time” and the hastiness needed in FMCG and FMCS and you get managers who have to execute strategies quicker than they plan them! The good thing with Agile projects is that the nature is collaborative. This means that everyone can easily accommodate major changes within the plan in seconds. Implementing smaller, short-term goals that will help the overall plan was never easier.

FinTech companies and people who work in software engineering use agile methodologies for faster, real time, accurate updates of multiple projects. Scrum is one of the most popular ones. We have all seen the titles on job boards “Scrum master” or “Scrum owner”; it just simply means “software project manager”. The downfall with scrum, though, is that it is easy to lose track of the project due to the intense working style. Daily communication is needed to implement changes properly – or as my German friends say “einwandfrei”. This can drain available resources and could lead to a counter-productive project. Maybe this is why it works so well in a software environment. You build stuff from scratch and you have to amend them daily as you test them.

Can we combine those two methodologies? Of course!  You don’t have to be a PRINCE2 certified project manager to actually know how to do a strategic Gantt chart (go on Excel and use that template). But you should be able to think more on your feet and create faster go-to-market routes to adapt with the fast-moving consumerism. My advice: learn from your IT department.

 

Want to become agile in marketing?

Agile marketing uses data and analytics to constantly source potentially profitable opportunities or solutions to problems in real-time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating results and rapidly repeating the process to maximise ROI. If everyone is functioning based on agile marketing, the organisation could run multiple campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week, keeping the company at the forefront of innovation in their sector.

A free tool that I used and has worked for me in the past is Trello. The latest project I used it for was to manage my marketing executive who was working remotely, a web developer and the operations manager of the financial services company I work for. The main plan was to update the website with new content and branding and create a new back-end for form-filling and pdf-downloading on the website. As I was the only person driving around sites, I was more agile in my approach of reminding people what they needed to do. However, sometimes people forget as new projects pile up on their desk unexpectedly. Trello helped me and the team get visibility of each project faster, simpler and in real-time. It basically helped the operations manager for example to remember what tasks needed to be done before the end of the week. It also helped me remind him what his tasks were, in case any were accidentally disregarded. In the end, we managed to get the project finished and ready for the director’s sign-off 3 weeks quicker than expected. All of this due to the real-time communication we had through Trello without the need to pick up the phone.

Trello is a simpler version of Kanban, another methodology to achieve just-in-time (JIT) results. It emphasises on delivery of a project the simplest way possible and the teams to work more effectively together. Trello might not have visual cards like Kanban but it definitely has little boxes you can move around just like you would do with visual cards in Kanban.

There are other tools out there, for example Asana. Feel free to use the one you find most useful to you and the team. The problem one might face is that people cannot be bothered using all those tools or they will forget. The change comes from the culture and how hungry one is to actually make a change in the FMCG and FMCS process to improve the profitability and health of the company. For me, agile marketing means faster, simpler, in real-time route to market. I would love to hear what it actually means for you.

 

Thank you for reading my (long!) blog, I appreciate your time. Feel free to leave a comment below. If you would like to give constructive feedback, please email me on vdiamanti@gmail.com