The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 10Scrumban

No heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.

—Jeff Sutherland, author and co-creator of Scrum

No methodology works best in every situation. This holds true for marketing teams practicing Agile, where each team uses the methodology best suited for its needs. Deciding which to use may come down to personal preference, or it may reflect the nature of the work. Groups with control over their work and with work cycles of days or weeks tend to prefer Scrum. Groups with little control over priorities or timing and those with hourly or daily work cycles tend to prefer Kanban.

Many marketing teams choose to combine practices from each. You might adapt Kanban to include retrospective meetings to discuss what's working and what's not. You might adapt Scrum to implement work-in-progress (WIP) limits, to foster a culture of “done,” rather than wait for everything to get done during the last few days of a Sprint.

Ideally, then, the methodology is an empirical choice. Experiment to determine which methodology or combination of methodologies yields the greatest throughput, effectiveness, and team satisfaction.

Which brings us to Scrumban. Scrumban may the best approach for many Agile marketing teams. But only if they are genuinely practicing Scrumban, rather than practicing what the developers derisively call “Scrumbut.” Scrumbut gets its name from the phrase “We practice Scrum, but …” As ...