Agile Practices: The Marketing Team Tries Sprints, Part I
The Hunch
By identifying and coordinating deliverables ahead of time, the Marketing team will improve their individual and overall performance while increasing job satisfaction.
In Theory
The Marketing team typically takes on work as it comes; requests from either outside contributors or the executive team. At times the perception is the team struggles to identify what they should be working on and how much of an impact their efforts make on desired outcomes. Recently, they agreed to try working in sprints over a 3-month period.
Some of the goals of the trial were to increase the number of people they reached while improving the quality of internal communication, and minimizing issues that would typically surface during the normal work cycle. Using the sprint process, they felt they could achieve their goals by benchmarking the outcomes from month to month and monitoring their progress in real-time.
In Practice
Working with an agile expert, the team identified the types of items they typically produce; content for articles, social media posts, email newsletters, and recipes – all varying in the amount of effort and days they take to complete. They also identified generic terms to represent items commonly requested of the team but fall outside of the standard categories – One-off and Wild Card. Using the story-points approach, they gave estimates to each item, whereby they applied a number (1, 2, 3, 5 or 8), as it relates to other items in their queue.
The above shows story-points applied for each type of deliverable
The team held a planning session with management prior to the first month-long sprint, and set expectations they would be taking on an experimental mindset; making guesses in some areas while avoiding being too specific in others. After the first sprint, they began to understand how the process could help them better identify, plan and take on their work, allowing them to adjust their focus and workload along the way.
Below depicts the results of the team’s initial sprint:
Looking at the results from sprint 1, the team completed 42 items with a total of 115 story-points. They were able to complete 9 social media posts, 12 recipes, 12 articles and 2 newsletters during the sprint. They also tackled 1 one-off item with a size of 3 story-points and 6 wild card items, totaling 10 story-points. The team used these numbers as benchmarks to help plan for the next sprint.
Sprint #2
Sprint 2 results:
The completed items in the team’s second sprint decreased dramatically, as well, their overall story-points – down 16 and 32 points respectively. Management and the team members discussed the results; what they indicated and some of the factors impacting the overall results. They agreed to keep an open mindset and planned for the final sprint. Let’s see how they did.
Sprint #3, the final sprint
During the planning session, the group used the averages from the previous sprints as a guide. They anticipated 34 completed items with story-points of around 99 total.
The table below shows the results of the 3rd sprint:
The actual numbers were very close to the group’s estimates from the planning session. The team completed 34 items, however they surpassed the story-points (99 estimated) by 10. Both the Marketing team and management were happy with the overall results. They then set out to analyze the 3-month numbers with the high-level goals they established at the outset of the trial.
This is a three-parts series. Please click the link below to read part two: