The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 4Overview of an Agile Marketing Adoption

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery—there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.

—Rick Warren, American pastor and author

The transformation of a marketing organization—particularly a large one—into an Agile marketing organization usually gets its first push not from the top and not from the bottom, but from the middle.

A vice president or a director realizes that the organization can't sustain its current marketing practice. Things are getting done, but at the unacceptable cost of burnout—long hours and stress. It's all last-minute or late, quality is falling, and good people, to avoid burnout, are leaving.

Priorities are constantly shifting, due not to external pressures or the changing needs of customers but to the lack of internal communication and to re-work; and these, in turn, are the result of inadequate up-front communication and discussion of acceptance criteria.

This marketing organization is executing at the level of what I call “hero mode.” It is only through the heroic efforts of individuals, not through teamwork and certainly not through a well-honed process, that anything gets done.

Somehow, one mid-level manager hears of Agile marketing. It sounds promising. Perhaps it can increase his team's productivity and help him deal with the seemingly crazy, constantly changing priorities. He hadn't initially thought ...