The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 7Process Management

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

—W. Edwards Deming, American engineer and management consultant

Applying processes like Scrum and Kanban to manage marketing is what many think of as Agile. My focus when I began my Agile marketing practice was on translating the software-development methods of Scrum and Kanban into methods that work for marketers.

What are these methods? How and why were they developed? What benefits can we expect from adopting Scrum, Kanban, or some combination of the two?

Scrum

Scrum was first mentioned in conjunction with product development in a 1986 Harvard Business Review article called “The New New Product Development Game.”¹ That article did not fully flesh out the Scrum methodology, but it did contribute to some of its most important concepts, including nonlinear development and the use of self-organizing project teams. They borrowed the term scrum from the sport of rugby to emphasize the importance of working as a team, particularly during the daily huddle.

In 1993, one of the creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, was the first to apply it to a software project. He developed the process with Ken Schwaber, who presented the first description of the methodology for software development at OOPSLA in 1995.² In 2001, both attended the meeting in Utah where the Agile Manifesto was written.

Scrum was born of a need to address emerging global issues in software development: ...