I just started a new process with my Marketing team at Currensee. I wanted a way to keep us organized and prioritized while we’re juggling, no joke, 20-30 projects at a time. In the land of start-up, it seems like each day brings a new priority and requirements change midstream more often than I’d care to admit. I’ve worked with the Agile process for some time and thought, why not create our own Daily Marketing Scrum?
Here’s what we did.
I got the team together, including our designer who is a shared resource for other parts of the organization. Each person got a stack of index cards in a particular color (mine are pink, how fitting:). We spent 5 minutes writing down all of the projects we are each working on and then we organized them on a tackboard by person. Once that was done, we started running down the list person by person and prioritizing the work. Quickly, we recognized the benefit of doing this as a priority for our designer was not on his list because he was waiting for info from another team member. A new index card was added to the designer’s list and he now had his top priority for the week. We worked together to identify what is hot fiyah and what is not and gained alignment on the priorities for the week.
In the world of Scrum, it’s the Scrum Leader’s job to ensure there are no roadblocks and to minimize distractions. Sounds like a good job for me. The new process will give my CEO full visibility into everything we are working on and he will need to work with me to reprioritize or add/change requirements (I’m on to you, Dave). We spent about 45 minutes going through each project to make sure everyone understood the requirements and then we prioritized and aligned priorities across the team given high interdependence on other resources to get stuff done.
Another benefit – you quickly see who is over tasked and who has capacity. Our brandy new intern had just two things on his list. (Poor kid started on Friday!) Man, that changed fast. We were able to reprioritize projects on other team members’ lists and give those to the intern, thus freeing up other resources to complete the higher priority projects.
So, overall, a great start to Day 1.
Time spent scrumming: 60 minutes
Projects prioritized: 35
Number of index cards used: 64
Number of lives saved by having a process that creates organization and priority: 5
Stay tuned as I’ll give you an update next week to see what else we’ve uncovered as efficiencies and how we are using Scrum to make our team more effective. Are you using a Scrum process in your Marketing department? Would love to hear your experience!