June 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19In step three, we added seven persistent cross-functional campaign teams, supporting five more BUs and in step four, we added the remainder of the marketers in delivery groups supporting those five BUs.Four steps over two plus years gave us plenty of opportunities to learn.Are we done?No, this is a journey, not a destination, and we continue to learn. We learned that marketing and app development teams really are different.Marketing teams need more vision and context to develop solid messaging and campaigns. We addressed this by investing in quarterly "big room planning" and investing more time to set the vision, align the strategy and plan initiatives. Stand-ups and weekly metrics, essential to agile, keeps us directed.The nature of some marketing work is harder to deliver in two week sprints. We developed persistent teams to handle ongoing, demand campaigns and temporal or initiative-based teams to handle specific events, such as a product launch or CA world. We flexibly staff the temporal teams based on the need at the time, from one person to many.The terminology is different so we use terms that resonate with marketers. For example: "features" become "initiatives", "release train" becomes "delivery group" and "release train engineer" becomes "coach".We also discovered that, while our agile teams quickly grew to love it, our departmental managers had a harder adjustment. They couldn't simply add work to an employee of "theirs" who is part of an agile team focused on a well-defined, shared deliverable. They had to shift gears from directing to coaching; they had to learn "servant leadership." We underestimated the coaching they needed and sometimes we outright forgot to include them in the initial ceremonies.We learned to watch for "agile theater", groups with the jargon and paraphernalia, but who lacked cross-functional representation, empowerment, and goal alignment to drive higher velocity decision making, improved alignment across functions, and commitment to business impact.The bottom line has been positive:· For the teams involved: engagement, feeling appropriately involved in decisions affecting their work, and feeling valued as an employee were all materially up year-over-year as measured in our Employee Opinion Survey.· For the company: campaign delivery times decreased, marketing sourced pipeline increased, and the win rate of marketing sourced opportunities increased.Agile Marketing has proven to be a better way for us--and we use it at scale. If you think Agile is only for small, co-located marketing teams, I urge you to reconsider and start your journey. But get a coach and be ready to experiment and learn. It will be bumpy--but the impact is worth it. If you think Agile is only for small, co-located marketing teams, I urge you to reconsider and start your journey
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