For those of you that have adopted agile principles for marketing operations, what have been the benefits and what did you wish you knew before adopting a new methodology? Also, what work management platform are you using to enable agile?

We’ve been using agile principles in our marketing operations for a while now, and the biggest benefits have been faster delivery, clearer priorities, and fewer bottlenecks between teams. One thing I wish we knew earlier is that agile only works when everyone actually commits to the process, standups, retros, and proper sprint planning really matter. Also, picking the right tool makes a huge difference. We currently use [insert your tool e.g., Asana, ClickUp, Jira] to manage sprints and workflows, and it’s been a solid enabler

Scrum, which is what most are talking about here, is only one of several agile methodologies. I have used a combination of scrum and kanban (scrumban) for marketing projects because it allows you to pivot more quickly without overloading your teams. I've found that work commitments based on sprints make it difficult when a marketing tactic can be inserted into a project literally over 2-3 days. To hack that, we devise work priorities for a set cadence with the knowledge that assigned work priorities may change, particularly if you have downtime waiting on approvals.

Kanban incorporates WIP limits, which are extremely helpful for employees who get overwhelmed by large lists or feeling like they can never get ahead. You have them only commit to a couple, and nothing gets added to their plates until those are completed (or, more likely, passed on to another review process).

Your choices should also be based around the type of work and how long they take to complete. Two week sprints are ineffective for writers, who can work on 10-20 different pieces in different stages during that time. UX teams, however, could find two week sprints very helpful for mapping out work that involves deep research or analysis and possible aligns with a feature release or web dev sprint tasks.

Not really a truly Agile team, but I did adopt Agile principles (sprint planning, sprint cycles, scrums etc.) for creating certain larger assets in quick fashion (i.e. long-form research report). Agree with others that Agile and marketing don't always work together well because of how many marketing team members wear multiple hats.

We use Agile for our customer product development teams. We use Azure Dev Ops to track sprint planning. I have found the Agile development process has fundamentally improved our ability to keep up with customer demands while maintaining the foundational capabilities in our customer products. Our native mobile app is probably the best example of this.

We largest benefits we've experienced are visibility into the work our teams are focused on and the time it takes to complete that work. This has enabled us to focus on prioritization of our backlogs and provided us with the opportunity to address inefficiencies in our processes.

There are two things I wish we knew before making our pivot.

First, we should have had a stronger change management plan prior to rollout. We still get a lot of "we can't tell our stakeholders no" and "we've always done it this way". This has resulted in us refocusing on mindset shifts and proper training for our teams.

Second, with the nature of marketing, it is almost impossible to have long standing cross-functional teams. This requires us to either 1.) transition certain resources on/off the teams more often than we would like or 2.) centralize certain roles into what the industry would call "component teams". We call them Solution Practice Areas (SPAs). This has been our largest hurdle and in my discussion with peers in the industry, many share this frustration.

We use Jira to manage our backlogs and track our work. We have highly customized templates and workflows to account for the type of work we do and the information we capture.