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A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Ten Reasons Your Business is Fighting Agile

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1. They’re not comfortable with change.

2. They don’t feel their voices are being heard over those of the development team.

3. They, or someone they know, didn’t get what they wanted in an agile development project.

4. Documentation is the go-to method for butt-covering, and lean requirements make them feel exposed.

5. They’ve learned to anticipate emergencies on release days due to poor version control.

6. Real-time decisioning is inconvenient when paired with all-day conference calls, wall-to-wall meetings and heavy travel schedules.

7. They’ve been preached at by a well-meaning Agile zealot.

8. They’ve afraid it’s flavor-of-the-month, like other “revolutionary” new processes that blazed in and sputtered out over the years.

9. They’ve lost faith in the backlog – it’s the place projects go to live with Jesus.

10. They think “collaboration” is Latin for “I don’t get to drive”.

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Three Degrees of Separation

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There are many types of seating arrangements you might encounter. Marketers new to Agile may be surprised that there’s actually office furniture specifically made for it. The look is modern, dividers are low, everyone can see and hear each other, and it’s great for fostering collaboration. Not so great when you need to call your doctor and describe that rash, though. A “caves” (private rooms) and “commons” (shared areas) approach can help when folks need more solitude than earbuds or noise-cancelling headphones can provide.

There are many configurations possible, with varying degrees of togetherness between the business and the dev team. Here are some examples:

REAL CLOSE – THE 2011 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS

The Public Relations Director sits next to the Scrum Manager. The Business Analyst sits next to the Email Marketing Coordinator. The Lead Developer sits next to the Social Media Manager. And they sip mochachinos and braid each others hair. Metaphorically, anyway. If (a) the dev team wants to commiserate about how clueless the business is or (b) the business wants to kvetch about how mean the dev team was for omitting the flash from the intro, each would have to get up and go somewhere to do it. Way too much trouble. If pair programming is in place, this configuration would be altered somewhat.

SORTA CLOSE – THE SEVENTH GRADE DANCE

The business folks on one side of the building, the dev team on the other side of the building. You share a stretch of carpet, maybe some common areas. Usually there’s a physical divider of some sort – a hallway, an atrium, conference rooms, elevators, a line of tables – something. You peer across the chasm curiously at each other. Bitching and eye-rolling at one another is kept on the down low – you could be caught. Come on, fellow Marketers. Grow a pair and cross over, it’s not that far. It’s dev – not Alderan.

SORTA CLOSE NOT REALLY – MARKETING IS VENUS, DEV IS FROM MARS

Separate buildings. Or cities. Try countries. This is where the commitment to collaborate really, really has to be there. Distributed teams are increasingly common, but here I’m really talking about dev teams separated from their business counterparts. Do the fly-ins – the team building events – the good video conferencing equipment. You’ll be fighting the “Us’ and “Them” syndrome. That battle isn’t the place to pinch pennies. Spend the money, and be vigilant.

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Top 5 Reasons Marketers Hate Agile

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DISTRUST – THEY’VE BEEN BULLIED BY A ZEALOT
Agile can be a revolutionary marvel when everyone keeps their egos in check – Marketers’ egos especially. But marketers feel burned when Agile development professionals, maybe drunk on empowerment, start delivering what they think the marketer should have asked for instead of what they actually did ask for. As said in previous posts, the marketer blames Agile practice for this arrogance, not the practitioner. Especially when they’re on the receiving end of the lecture on how there’s no need for turf wars because Agile is collaborative.

FEAR – THEY’RE AFRAID FOR THEIR JOBS
Some Agile teams mistake empowerment for omnipotence. User experience, email best practice, product demand and ROI, SEO impacts, call-to-action placement – marketers develop deep expertise on best practices over long periods of study and immersion. Do they feel threatened when an Agile developer two years out of school feels her expertise equals theirs because she read “Don’t Make Me Think” over the weekend? Affirmative.

FATIGUE – THEY’RE AFRAID TO TAKE A DAY OFF
The marketer’s project requirement was scheduled to take 2 hours of coding time, but the dev team hit a snag. In the land of Waterfall, marketers were rarely if ever asked to stop their daily activities to accommodate coding questions. No, they’d be asked if they had an opening on Friday, (sorry, golf event, how’s Tuesday?) to discuss the coding dilemma nice and civilized over an International Coffee Cafe Mocha in the conference room with the new comfy chairs. Then Agile comes. Suddenly, marketers are stalked on their way to the loo to make decisions NOW. No scheduling. No Cafe Mocha. Standing, no comfy chairs. And if the marketer or a proxy isn’t available, a member of the development team makes the decision for them. Yeah, tee off without me, guys. And pass me a can of Monster.

JEALOUSY – THEY’RE NO LONGER THE COOL ONES
Marketers always attended the cool events and conferences, controlled the cool swag items in the prize closet, wore the cool threads. Now the dev team gets the paintball outing, attends SES on the opposite coast, has the interesting desk toys and rocks matching team logo retro bowling shirts. Marketers who perceive loss of status tend not to embrace their usurpers with open arms.

CYNICISM – BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT THE SOUVENIR TEASPOON.
What does Agile remind some marketers of? Sweatin’ to the oldies. MBO. Process Re-Engineering. Six Sigma. Quality Circle. Knowledge Management. Total Quality Monitoring. The Ultimate Question. Peak Performance. One Minute Manager. Email blast. Greed is Good. Once these initiatives were that dreamy guy in the Lethal Weapon movies, now they’re just Mel Gibson. Many marketers don’t want to get all sweaty again for a fad that will fall out of fashion. So they simply stall and wait for it to be over. You know, like Prince says the Internet is.