Marketing department uses lean-agile principles to empower employees and get more done.

Organizing around projects is typically a huge hindrance to flow. Bringing the people to the work (aka the project) causes delays and often requires constant task re-prioritization by management. The first order of business was to establish one, right-sized, cross-functional team that would be long-lived (meaning it would outlive any specific project). Then bring the work to the people instead of the other way around. It sounds subtle, but its hugely impactful.

Working with leadership we:

identified a pilot team

selected Scrum as the methodology

provided some lightweight training to the team, and

selected a pilot project to bring to the team.

Starting with a single pilot team has it advantages:

You can introduce change slowly. If we had started with everyone all at once, some people may have felt like the change was being pushed on them. With a pilot approach, you can treat it as an invitation and allow people to opt-out if they don’t feel comfortable.

Allows the team to practice Scrum while executing the project. Its a great place to start when a team is completely new to agile.

You can validate your decisions and make easy pivots. Is Scrum the right methodology? Is the team composition working? Is it helping to solve the problems we’ve identified? We can validate these decisions early in the process before it impacts too many people.

You can see key roles in action before making bigger scale decisions. We had to make a key pivot here. Refer to the key learning at the end of this document for why we were glad this was a small mistake.

Our pilot team seemed to be set up for success, but we quickly learned that team did not have good guidance on what they were supposed to build. Leadership felt like the ask was clear, but the team was floundering. They were not clear on the context nor did they understand the expectations of leadership. Clearly this is where some of the “approval” mindset was coming from. The team felt like they were running blind and guessing at what leadership wanted and the only way to check their understanding was to constantly go back to leaders with the question” Do you approve?” before moving on the next step.

This led us to focusing on Feature Refinement almost right away. We asked leadership (the proxy Product Managers at this point) to define and communicate the ask in the form of a well-written Feature that included a description of the problem, a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria. This got the team unstuck but, of course, it did not immediately solve the “approval” problem. That would take time and the building of trust but it got us moving in the right direction.

Having a single team that operates differently from the rest of the organization is not sustainable. After practicing Scrum with our pilot team for 2 iterations we started the feel friction caused by a dual operating model (agile and waterfall). We also started to hear that people not invited to be on the pilot were feeling excluded. We had not solved our problems yet, but the data was telling us we were on the right path and there was overwhelming buy-in to proceed. We were ready to scale to the whole department.

Now it was time to expand beyond our single team to include the whole department. To achieve scale, we relied on our experience with SAFe®, the Scaled Agile Framework, and selected essential components to get the results we needed.

Our first order of business was to get alignment on organizational objectives, define the worked that was needed to deliver on these objectives and create a roadmap. We brought the Business Owners, Product Managers, and Product Owners together for a 2-day roadmapping workshop with the goals of:

Getting alignment on organizational objectives

Prioritizing the work, and

Creating a 6 month roadmap.

The leadership team at Great Dane really delivered when it came to decomposing the organization’s strategy into right-sized features. They knew exactly what needed to be done, they simply needed some coaching on a few techniques, such as prioritization, feature slicing and acceptance criteria to improve how it would be executed.

Here’s the team learning and using a prioritization technique called Weighted-Shortest-Job-First (WSJF) to rank its jobs.

We decided to start with a 8-week Planning Interval (PI), comprised of four, 2-week iterations.

Then we brought this to the whole team and conducted our first PI Planning event.

A lot of work went into preparing for this session and creating the plan. I won’t bore you with the details as they are similar to the many Agile Release Train (ART) launches we’ve done in the past. But I will recommend you work with an experienced SAFe® Practice Consultant to get it right.

We also defined two transformation objectives with Key Results:

Objective #1: Delivery Predictably

Benefit Hypothesis: We believe that if we can deliver predictably, then we will create trust, foster empowerment, and improve employee morale. We succeed when our stakeholders receive what we promised when we promised.

Objective #2: Reduce time spent on maintenance of business (MOB) activities from 90% to 50%

Benefit Hypothesis: We believe that if we make a concerted effort to measure, document, streamline, and make visible the repetitive MOB work then the Marketing team can spend more of their time adding new value and less time “doing their day jobs”.

We defined measurable Key Results for each and reviewed them at each iteration and Planning Interval to make sure we stay focused on the problems we were trying to solve.

The last step of our approach was to make it sustainable. Brandie had clear objectives and key results for her department which helped create alignment from the very beginning. She also had a clear objective for us: Get the job done and get out. She wasn’t that ruthless about it, but she was clear that she wanted us to develop her team into leaders that could sustain this process on their own. Based on our experience and the capabilities of her team, we set a goal to achieve this at the end of Planning Interval 3. That would give us 24 weeks to anchor these practices into their culture.

We immediately set about filling key roles and created a 3-point plan to build each leader’s skills and confidence. During the the first PI, the Springbach coaches would lead the events to demonstrate the desired behaviors. During the 2nd PI, our Great Dane counterparts would pair with with us to learn by doing. During the 3rd PI, Great Dane would take the lead while we provided training and coaching.

Essential to this plan being effective was Great Dane’s leader’s dedication to identifying and nurturing talent. They worked diligently to recognize talent and understand their team member’s career goals to put people in the right roles.