Ian Marx explains why the use of agile frameworks should not be restricted solely to software development activities.
Agile frameworks such as Scrum are increasingly being used in almost all areas of business – not just software development projects. I’ll explain why this is, and I’ll share an example from the company I’m currently working for where Scrum could be used but isn’t.
While the agile manifesto principles refer explicitly to software, the rules of Scrum make no mention of it. Scrum derives from the innovative methods employed by manufacturers in Japan and the USA in the 1980s, recorded in a seminal paper on new product development by Takeuchi and Nonaka that used the analogy of a rugby team moving a ball up the field, working together as a unit. Using case studies the paper showed how successful new products are developed when small, self-organising teams are given direction (in the form of objectives not tasks) and the autonomy to move the ‘ball’ forward collectively without management interference.
The Scrum software development process emerged in 1995, and has become increasingly popular with software developers over the past two decades, but we are now seeing Scrum methods being applied once more to other industries, such as construction; and to other disciplines, such as marketing.
In my team’s case we work for the marketing department of a cloud-based software provider, and we build websites, product-integrated trial forms and partner portals. Scrum is used widely in the company’s core software engineering department, and in UX design, too; but we are the only Scrum team in marketing.
The difference between marketing and engineering in our company is highlighted by their choice of project management tools. Engineering has a number of Scrum teams, all using JIRA to manage their sprints. Marketing staff, however, use Asana to assign tasks to themselves and, crucially, to other colleagues, often without asking those colleagues first. Marketing has deadlines and no way of measuring their teams’ capacity to meet those deadlines. There is no project management to speak of, just orders that come down from the top to the bottom of the management hierarchy to get things done now. No excuses. No questions asked. “You can think of it as bus”, our new Vice President of Marketing said to her assembled troops, including me, on the day she made a number of my UK-based colleagues redundant, “you can stay on the bus or you can get off the bus”. It’s her way or the highway. And there is only one bus driver.
I had a one-to-one meeting with the aforementioned VP before she flew back to the USA, and I explained how Scrum is working well for our team, and how we were delivering business value reliably from sprint to sprint. But she was adamant that agile and Scrum, in her opinion, are too “rigid” and “restrictive” for marketing, despite my protestations. And yet many of my colleagues in other marketing teams bemoan the lack of planning that results in a pattern of lulls intermixed with sudden surges of activity when an order eventually trickles down to them to launch a particular campaign because lead numbers are lower than expected. They also complain about their lack of input into some of the decisions that are made on branding or messaging by newly appointed ‘superiors’ who know the business less well than they do. They often tell me how much they admire the way our Scrum team operates.
Our team has indeed been performing well, and I have been coping with my three roles as Senior Developer, Scrum Master and de facto Product Owner. We have been blessed with autonomy and very little management interference. But all that changed a few weeks ago when my team and I were suddenly given a ridiculous deadline and told to deliver on it. The project in question had previously been taken off my team, because our VP didn’t like the realistic release schedule we came up with. The project was passed around a couple of US-based agencies who were paid a small fortune but failed to deliver anything of worth, and it eventually reverted to us. Given the short timescales involved, I insisted that we drop our other projects (temporarily), a condition that was accepted reluctantly, and as a team we switched to one week sprints to accommodate evolving and varying requirements. Recognising our capacity and velocity, we knew we would have to work a lot of extra hours to meet the deadline, but we managed it, and our burndown charts bear testimony to the extraordinary effort we put in. But it’s a hollow victory because no lessons were learned by our bosses. They shouted and we delivered, which is not a good way to work. In my capacity as Scrum Master, I acted as a ‘firewall’ to protect my fellow team members from the pressure and abuse from above, but it’s not an experience I would care to repeat.
It all comes down to education. Many of our colleagues, especially senior ones, don’t understand Scrum, and they are under the impression that non-technical areas of marketing cannot be agile. And yet so much of what they do, from content generation, brand development, conference organisation and campaign management are ideally suited to Scrum or Kanban. As a Scrum Master it’s one of my duties to instruct and coach my colleagues that agile methodologies are applicable to most business functions. It has been difficult because my bosses are thousands of miles away. But communication is a two-way thing and we have to listen and adapt too, because that is the agile way.
Next week we get a dedicated Product Owner for the team (based in the USA of course) so that’s one less job for me to do. Will that make a difference? Only time will tell.
I’ve learned a huge amount from my good and bad experiences in the past year with my current employer. But the key takeaway for me is that it’s better being a member of a noisy Scrum team, all pushing towards a shared goal, than a silent passenger on a bus to nowhere…
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