Agile Creativity

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Presented by JT Moore, Chris Knotts and David Mantica

Presentation Agenda • What is Agile – High-Level Look

• Foundational Principles / Values Expanded

• Core Setup Practices – High-Level Look

• Agile Flavors

– Quick Look at Radical Management

• Agile Creativity – Flavor of Agile for Marketing

– Seven Tips

– Five Practice Suggestions

• Five Critical Agile Practices That Will Be Used in Marketing

– Self-Organized Team

– Levels of Planning / User Stories

– Estimating Costs

– Iterative Work

– Retrospective

• Common Pitfalls

• Future of Agile in Creative

Agile in a Nutshell

• Transformational way of work

• Built a foundation of principles and values – No 1 inch thick rule book

• From those values and principles come practices – Like daily stand up, retrospective, story points, etc.

• Practices are organized into flavors – Agile “flavor” model on next slide

Highly extendable – very similar to open source Scrum is to Agile, as Red Hat is to Linux

The Disruption: Agile

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

agilemanifesto.org

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it

and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Critical Agile Values

• Transparency

• Trust

• Truth

• Continuous Improvement

• Inspect / Adapt

• Collaborate

• Coach

• Team Autonomy

Agile Practices / Concepts

• Business unit / Development unit

• Product Owner / Scrum Master

• Daily Stand up (Daily Scrum)

• Iteration

• Definition of Done

• User Stories

• Task Board

• Burn Down / Velocity

• Retrospective

Agile Flavors

Radical Management » Steve Denning / Paul Stevens

• Agile Moving to Leadership and Management

• Basically a Productized Version of Agile for Managing, Based on Agile Guiding Principals

• Five Foundational Principals of Radical Management

– From maximizing shareholder value to maximizing custom delight

– Manager from controllers to enablers

– Work organized bureaucratically to work organized around customer outcomes

– From straight economic value to that plus transparency, continuous improvement and sustainability

– From top-down command communication to conversations

Agile Creativity

Taking the values, principals and concepts of Agile, as a way of working, and

applying them to the creative process

Agile is a Value Driven Model

Fits with Marketing Deliverable Goals

Plan

Driven

Value/

Vision

Driven

Requirements

Cost Schedule

Cost Schedule

Features

Predictive Process

(Waterfall)

Adaptive Process

(Agile)

Constraints

Estimates

The plan creates

cost / schedule estimates

The vision creates

feature estimates

Agile Creativity (Seven Tips)

1. Co-Located Team – Real or Virtual War Room

2. Add Technologies to the Creative Team

3. Develop “T” Shaped Talent – Problem solvers

– Highly skilled in specific area

– But interested in many areas (empathetic)

4. Get Real Time Insights

5. Plan / Use Offsite Idea-thons

6. Iterate and Test Campaigns

7. Partner on Pilot Projects

Agile Creativity: Suggested Practices

• Collaboration 2.0 – Inspiration occurs at the intersection of advertising disciplines

• The Minimum Value Brief – MVB – Initial iteration to stimulate additional ideas

• Hack-a-thon Mode – Crack out ideas fast using MVB concept

• Campaign Prototyping – Picture is worth 1000 words, but Something done is worth 10,000

• Beta Test with Customer

Self-Organized Teams in Creative

13

About The Teams?

Agile Teams also have three responsibilities as part of the Agile adaptation.

1. Collaborate & communicate

2. Remove obstacles they can remove themselves

3. Get the work completed that they have committed to

Five Levels of Agile Planning In Creative:

• A great place to start is by analyzing the levels of Agile Planning, deciding in planning when something is DONE

Product Vision Yearly by the product owner

Product Roadmap Bi-yearly by the product owner

Release Planning Quarterly by the product owner and team

Iteration Planning Bi-weekly by the team

Daily Planning Daily by the team and individuals

Agile Estimating in Creative

16

MVB (Iteration) in Creative

Retrospective in Creative

Failure to address organizational culture changes. The shift to delivery, improvement and transparency.

Failing to involve leadership in supporting Agile. A new way of doing things require this partnership.

Failing to obtain the proper training. Without a solid foundation, many teams see early obstacles as failures.

Failing to involve the business. Agile requires a significant shift in how the business contributes.

What Common Pitfalls Lead to Agile Failure?

Business

Involvement

Experience

and Guidance

Management

Support

Organizational

Culture

Agile Creativity Future

• In software development, Agile works and is here to stay

• Agile as a way working has been successful at Google

• Technology, the web and software are becoming bigger and bigger requirements for marketing/creative success

• Need is there BUT… – Who will develop the specific practices required

– Will a trade associate support practitioners through education and certification

– Will jobs be created that require this skill set

Questions