The Agile Marketer

Chapter 5A Snapshot of Leading Methods

Not all Agile methods are appropriate for all contexts. And the method that ends up working best for your team will likely be different from the one you started with. That's because methods must be adapted to your team, your culture, your projects, and your goals. This evolution is baked into Agile through a retrospective process that periodically evaluates how Agile is working and how it can be improved.

There is something meta about this aspect of Agile because part of what allows Agile to accommodate change (to function in rapidly evolving contexts) is the fact that its ability to change is part of its DNA. Agile is a dynamic (if structured) approach. Agile does not change for change's sake; it changes in response to feedback that shows that change is needed. And when Agile is working well, it settles into a consistent rhythm.

As with any approach, Agile has its advantages and disadvantages. It is not suited to every project or context. It works very well for services that are always on (like marketing automation), moderately well for programs that have a regular cadence (like a monthly webinar), and least well for one-off initiatives.

The established Agile methods that are popular today differ considerably in their degree of structure as well as in the specific contexts in which they are applied. More structured methods like XP are, for instance, very engineering-oriented and prescribe detailed practices for writing code. Scrum is somewhat ...