Joining us is Brandi Starr. She is the COO of Tegrita, a full-service marketing technology consulting firm, host of the Revenue Rehab Podcast and someone who is passionate about helping people and teams succeed. She shares how they are leveraging Agile in their work and with clients.



























Transcript
Jim Ewel
Brandy, can you share with us what motivated you to adopt?
 
Brandi Starr
Our marketing team was fairly new and we were getting things done but it felt like everything was taking forever. We tended not really hit many deadlines and so I started looking at different approaches to try to improve efficiency and move things through and so that's where I stumbled across agile marketing in my research and the fact that we are a technology company, very familiar with agile on the technology side and so we chose to dive right in and take on agile.
 
Frank Days
What does agile look like at your firm?
 
Brandi Starr
A little different than at most companies. We are a consulting firm and so there are two parts of agile for us. We primarily use agile within our internal marketing team and so within marketing, we have our monthly planning.
 
Our sprints are a month which is long by comparison to most organizations but we do our monthly planning. We have our monthly retros. We have not used the whip limits.
 
We tried and we found that that just didn't really work for us. However, we are planning with story points and looking at how much we're able to move through in a given sprint. Then on the client side, we are using what I call agile light because our clients all work very differently within their organizations.
 
We can't go full agile but we have adopted using a Kanban with our clients for planning the work that we're going to be doing, having monthly planning meetings and then we have an internal retro on how we've managed the client and the work that we've done and how we continue to improve and so far that's going pretty
 
Jim Ewel
one of the things I'm really interested in when people adopt agile is how they organize the teams. Are you organized in the cross-functional teams or how to do approach?
 
Brandi Starr
super small. Our marketing team is three people. I had operations and marketing and then I have two marketing managers and then we have several people on the team who support marketing.
 
One of our client strategists and two or three of our technologists also support the marketing function. For all intents and purposes, it is a cross-functional team and we are all using agile. We're making sure that we're publishing the plan for the sprint and that everyone's signing off on it. We have our standups which are mainly with the smaller team. It's quasi-cross
 
Frank Days
As you're using agile with your clients, you talked a little bit about Kanban. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the interactions and processes and how that compares with what you use for your internal non-client
 
Brandi Starr
With our clients, our contract structures can vary. For some clients, we are working on very specific projects. They will contract with us to do a specific body of work.
 
Those clients, we aren't using an agile process. For our larger clients,