Tag Archives: sprint
A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Fumbling In the End Zone
Some Agile Marketing projects will wither and die. Oh, they get finished – they just won’t be used. Why?
A SOLO RUN DOWN THE FIELD
Sometimes a developer or team unilaterally decides Marketing’s had enough turns, it’s their turn – they’ll build their own vision. Seriously, I’ve seen it happen. Maybe it really is a great idea and Marketing just won’t green-light it. Maybe the two teams aren’t getting along. Whatever. The point is that deliberately skipping collaboration can allow departmental myopia to take over. It works out occasionally, if there’s a serious UX wonk behind the keyboard. But more often, a tech-only result favors the technical accomplishment – the user CAN complete their task – but the process is so annoying that users want to kick holes in their monitors doing it. And if the style and nav are to the specs of someone’s vision of cool, unmoored from the brand’s, users can bail thinking they’re on the wrong site.
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Tagged agile, Delivery, Finished, marketing, release, sprint
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Agile Humor – What Your PM Really Means
Your Project Manager is probably very polite. Maybe too polite…
THE CIO/CMO RELATIONSHIP – A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development
Some observations from the Forrester CIO/CMO Conference last week:
A COMBO CIO/CMO – LONELY AT THE TOP, BUT AT LEAST HE HAS EACH OTHER
Ponder the possibilities of one person serving as both CIO and CMO of the company. I have heard of two examples of executives doing this so far, one of whom I met at the conference. Leadership of both Technology and Marketing is a formidable reponsibility to shoulder on one’s own, but it does yield some advantages. For one thing, if you need to bogart some budget dollars, you don’t have to strongarm or cajole your counterpart. You just reach into the other pocket.
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Tagged agile, chargeback, CIO, CMO, marketing, sprint, technology
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – The Ten Commandments for Marketers
Agile is thy methodology – the way, the truth, the absolute shiznet to thy development team. Thou shalt not use any other methodology – at least not here.
Thou shalt not bitch about the lack of up-front requirements – neither shalt thou commit scope creep.
Keep holy the release day. It’s ain’t movin’. It especially ain’t movin’ for thee.
Honor thy development team. Seriously. Some morning Dunkins, a toy, a damn pizza wouldst not kill thee.
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Tagged agile, development, marketer, marketing, scope creep, scrum, sprint
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Why the Numbers Still Don’t Match
So you got a business intelligence system. It’s gonna be great! No more frustrating meetings where you spend half an hour wrangling over whose sales number is right! One source of truth, pure and simple! Suckerrrrr. Like Oscar Wilde said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple.
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Top Five Reasons Agile Teams Hate Marketers
In a previous column, we reviewed some reasons why some marketers give Agile the stink-eye. Let’s review why developers may be sending that stink-eye right back at ‘em.
They’re annoyed – by short attention span theatre.
Marketing is all about the art of the possible. Brighter, shinier, cooler possibilities assail marketer’s brains constantly – it’s relentless. Those deep thoughts surface at inopportune times – like when their original, slightly less cool vision is in testing phase. Intellectually, they may know the enhancement should wait for the next sprint. But emotionally, this new cooler version becomes their vision of the finished project. So they become serial badgerers, imploring the PM and the developers to make “this one little change” here, “a small tweak” there. Hey marketers – a little discipline please. If you catch yourself uttering a sentence that begins with “keep it exactly the same, except….”, snap the elastic on your wrist and go back to your desk.
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Tagged agile, code, developers, hate, hot fix, marketers, scrum, sprint
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Agile Humor: “Overheard” – An Agile Crossword
Posted in Agile Humor
Tagged agile, agile humor, agile jokes, analyst, code complete, cowboy code, crossword, debug, humor, jokes, kanban, lean, manifesto, offshore, puzzle, red bull, release, scope, scrum, sprint, waterfall
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Wait…So Following a Plan is Bad?
The Agile Manifesto is quite clear about how much it values following a plan – not so much. Response to change gets the love instead.
Therein lies the marketer’s dilemma. CMO’s notoriously have a hot nut for project roadmaps – but Agile development teams often don’t welcome detailed plans – ooh, ick, they’re so Waterfally. So how do you assure your sort-of-Agile-not-really leader that you are executing on a marketing project plan that’s not being sequentially followed by the folks who are actually building the software?
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Tagged agile, backlog, CMO, CTO, development, manifesto, marketer, marketing, performance, plan, server, sprint, waterfall, wireframe
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – The A Word
Marketers sometimes encounter Agile developers so full of themselves they’re leaking hubris all over the Kanban board. There is no part of the Agile Manifesto that says “It’s nothing personal – it’s just that we’re better than you”. But since most marketers are not that familiar with Agile principles, it’s not surprising that they blame the practice and not the practitioner when they encounter this behavior.
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Tagged acceptance, agile, Agile manifesto, analytics, arrogance, arrogant, blocking, cult, Jared Spool, marketer, marketing, sprint
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A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Backlog Bingo
My own requests to get on sprint backlogs are often analytical – that whole measuring success thing, for a variety of reasons: (1) enhanced analytics the business didn’t realize would be needed when a feature or function originally went live (2) basic tagging that should have been included when a feature or function went live but didn’t make it into the original sprint(3) tag modifications made necessary by site changes (4) repairs to tags that worked in test but for some reason broke in production.
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Tagged agile, analytical, analytics, backlog, developer, marketer, marketing, sprint, working software
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