In this episode, Yvonne Delaney discusses the importance of making organizational change stick when transforming an marketing organization to Agile.





Yvonne worked on creating an agile center of excellence for change agents within a bank.
She participated in a coaching program and paired with them to ensure the success of the change initiatives. Yvonne collaborated with leaders in the organization to create success stories in marketing during an 18 to 24-month agility journey.
The goal was to institutionalize agility in different areas of the bank and allow each team to tell their own success stories.
"Success vignettes" were created to help expand agile ways of working to other parts of the bank.


Highlights:


* Creating an agile center of excellence for change agents, including marketing
* Collaborating with leaders to create success stories during an 18-24 month agility journey.
* Institutionalizing agility across different areas of the bank, including marketing
* Empowering marketing teams to tell their own success stories.


Links:

Agile Marketing Alliance - https://www.agilemarketingalliance.com/

iTunes Podcast Episodes - https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/marketing-agility-podcast

This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (https://agilemarketingalliance.com/). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches.

 
 
Transcript
Welcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I'm Melissa Reve, and I'll be your host for today's episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah.
 
Hannah Bink 
Oh, I'm so excited to be back. Thank you so much.
 
Melissa 
So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you've used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let's jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale.
 
Hannah Bink 
I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you're trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It's really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool.
 
Melissa 
Tell me more.
 
Hannah Bink 
So there's a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I'll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there's direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility.
 
Hannah Bink 
They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget all...

Elizabeth Stepp, Senior Vice President at Truist, talks with us about her personal Agile journey. She also shares the Agile Marketing transformation process at Truist, a commercial and consumer bank with locations in the southeast US.

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,

Jim and Frank talk with Tricia Broderick. She is the Founder of Ignite Insight +Innovation, the co-author of Lead Without Blame: Building ResilientLearning Teams and someone who is passionate about helpingpeople and teams succeed.

We talk Esther Derby about why organizations find change difficult, how to lead positive, productive change, and the role of retrospectives in making teams better.

Transcript
Frank Days  00:02
Joining us is Esther Derby. She's a consultant and author who draws on four decades of experience leading observing and living organizational change. She has been particularly active in the Agile community serving two terms on the board of the Agile Alliance and co-authoring a book called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good teams Great. Her latest book is Seven Rules of Positive, Productive Change: Micro shifts, Macro results. Esther, thanks for joining us today.
This episode, we'll talk about why organizations find change difficult, how to lead positive, productive change, and the role of retrospectives and making teams better. So let's get started. Jim.
 
Jim Ewel  01:07
So Esther why exactly is change difficult for many, if not all, organizations?
 
Esther Derby  01:13
Well, I think there's a lot of reasons. But if you think about it, you know, people make changes all the time, right? So, change is not inherently difficult, you know, change happens all around us all the time. People choose change all the time. Often, it is the way companies go about it, that creates friction and makes it more difficult. For example, I see a lot of changes where a dictate falls from the Elysium, the corporate Elysium. And people have really no context, no understanding about what it's about, you know, they might get some talking points, but they don't have a deep understanding of the rationale. So you know, that makes it more difficult. Sometimes people are asked to make, you know, enormous changes, but yet keep up their previous workload. That makes it more difficult. Sometimes companies say they want to do something very, very different, like maybe, for example, that they want to be Agile. And so they overlay a process on top of all of their existing patterns. And they don't address the patterns. And so the patterns reassert themselves that makes change feel difficult.
 
Jim Ewel  02:31
In some sense, I hear you saying it's that people resist being changed. It's not that they resist change. Is that right?
 
02:39
Well, I think that's generally true. I mean, I don't think any of the three of us here would particularly like it if someone we don't know particularly well comes in and tells us to start doing things very differently when we have developed expertise in it for many, many years, which is often how it feels in organizations. Someone who doesn't understand your work comes in and tells you to do it differently. I'm not crazy about the word resistant, people don't resist change, they respond to change. Most people don't like being pushed or told to change, as you just said. 
 
Frank Days  03:15
In your latest book, you talk about two lessons you learned early on about change, that any given change might be positive for some and negative for others. And the second one being that change is ultimately a social process. Can you elaborate on those two lessons a little bit more?
 
03:34
Sure. Well, the story I tell in the book is about the first program I put into production, which was a program to automate an estimating process to making the decorative tape that goes along the sides of cars, I don't know if it's still a thing. But you know, that used to be a thing. You manufacture these decorative tapes and going cars. It was a very mathy program. And I overheard a conversation between the chief estimator and the head of the company the day before that went into production. And, you know,

Jim Ewel and guest Dominica DeGrandis discuss the importance of making work visible in order to optimize workflow and prevent time waste. DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible, explains how seeing work visually helps engage the brain and enables better attention and understanding. The two also discuss the "Five Thieves of Time," which include having too much work in progress, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities, and neglected work.

In this episode, we talk with Anthony about the tangible issues and challenges of employing Agile Marketing in an organization like IBM.

In this episode, we’ll talk about how 3M is using Agile marketing, how they got started and how they overcame challenges like personnel changes.




























Frank Days  00:03
 I'm Frank Days here with Melissa Reeve, your hosts for today's episode. Joining us is Giannina Rachetta, Product Marketing Manager at 3M and an Agile marketing evangelist. Thanks for joining us today, Giannina.
 
Giannina Rachetta  00:36
Hi, Frank. Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me.
 
Frank Days  00:39
Great. Well, in this episode, we'll talk about how 3M is using Agile marketing, how they got started, and how they overcame the challenges like personnel changes. Let's get started.
 
Melissa Reeve  00:53
Giannina, tell us about your journey to Agile marketing, did it start at 3M?
 
Giannina Rachetta  01:01
Melissa, kind of. It started previously, in 2015. Now that I think about it. I was gonna say 2014. And I looking back, you know, just looking personally, my background has always been in marketing. And I say it happens in the last probably 20 years doing marketing, I've always gravitated towards the software, technology company field.  And back in 2000, if you can believe that long, when I was working in marketing at a fast growing tech company in upstate New York, I actually watched how the development team at the time went from a waterfall approach over to adopting Agile methodologies and how they evolved that way. And it made total sense for me from a software development perspective. And again, in marketing, I've always been in the product marketing type of marketing, communications, product marketing, but always supporting software products. So I kind of had that in the back of my head. And then when I joined 3M in 2013, the division that I joined that I currently work in, produces software solutions for the Health Information Management, division, among other things, and from the get go, it was very clear that it was an Agile scrum team that I was joining. And, you know, right then and there, I knew I was gonna fit just fine. And part of my job in product marketing, I was very much involved in all the development teams, grooming sessions, sprint reviews, prioritization meetings, etc. So I was very familiar with the methodology from the software development side.  And now, you know, switching to agile marketing, it was really back in 2015, when I came across the really applying Agile to what I do, while I was doing some research on agile methods, and really through working on, you know, launching a product, there was a lot of coordination at the time, back and forth many stakeholders, presentations, updates, things we needed to produce out to the market, and things like that. And we we needed to work fast and independently, and we knew we knew what we needed to do, and have clear goals. So with a cross functional team of product owners, marketing, marketing, communications, advertising and all that, so we applied really very  rudimentary way of looking at what we were doing and kind of applying some Agile principles to it. And so, yeah, so I guess, really, from an agile marketing perspective at 3M That's kind of how I got started. I did a lot of self education.
 
Melissa Reeve  04:27
Yeah, it sounds like it it. Along the lines of education, what kind of support did you find?  You know,

We talk with Andrew Burrows about the adoption and evolution of Agile Marketing at IBM. He also shares his point of viewon the future of the movement and his involvement in the AgileMarketing Alliance. Highlights include:

* What led him to Agile Marketing
* The challenges of spreading Agile Marketing like IBM
* Real-world success stories
* His vision for what is next for Agile in marketing

 
 




























Transcript
Frank Days  00:29
In this episode, we're going to talk about the adoption and evolution of the use of agile marketing at IBM, along with Andrew's point of view on the future of the movement, and his finally his involvement in the Agile Marketing Alliance.

Jim Ewel  00:45
Thanks, Frank. Andrew, can you share with us how you got started with Agile marketing? Where did you Where did you begin?

Andrew Burrows  00:53
So I should open with the caveat that I do not speak on behalf of IBM, know my opinions on my own. Agile marketing. So it's quite serendipitous. I'm an accidental marketer. I used to play video games. And that's how I actually got my approach into Agile. And through doing that pretty badly in the 2007-2008 time, I started to get involved with lots of user groups in the area and building connections that led to an opportunity at IBM and I'll be honest, I was very naive. I had never worked at a company that size before. The idea that you could have a sub-organization of 5000 people was not really something that even entered my head. So I dived in to solve a problem and found myself in the marketing org.
 
Frank Days  01:40
At IBM, your colleague, Anthony Coppedge, credited you with quote, "single handedly building the construct for agile marketing at IBM." Pretty bold statement. What inspired you to lead this initiative?
 
Andrew Burrows  01:54
You can tell he's from marketing, right? Nobody at IBM does anything single handedly? I'd say that's the same for any kind of big organization here. So he's very, very, very generous with his praise, or his comment. You know, we had the opportunity within IBM, when Michelle Paluso became CMO to really try to do things differently. And to really drive an agile way of working. And we made a few decisions really early on this is this would have been in 2016 or 2017. A few decisions really early on about how we were going to do this that he's probably alluding to. We said we were not going to be framework first, right?  That the people who would discover the best way of doing agile marketing will be the marketers who do it day in and day out. 
 
Andrew Burrows  02:49
An agile organization is one where people, in our case marketers, are exhibiting agile behaviors more frequently. And for us agile behaviors were the 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, right? Can you see and hear those things actually happening? So our role would be, you know, stewards for that kind of behavior change. So all of our approach, the way that we set about the teams, the way we set about enabling the organization, fundamentally came down to: What is the difference between a marketing organization and an agile marketing organization? And how do we help the organization grow into that way of being? 
 
Andrew Burrows  03:33
Another way we looked at it was to say,

The Marketing Agility podcast is back! Join us as we talk with old friends Melissa Reeve and Jim Ewel of the Agile Marketing Alliance. They share the latest with the latest news from the group. Highlights include:




* What motivated them to start this organization?





* Where is the group in its evolution?





* What is next for the group?





* How can people get involved?

For the final episode in this series we reached out to Elissa Fink who served as the CMO at Tableau through an increadible period of growth. Elissa was practicing and scaling agile before most marketers knew what it was. She currently sits on Concora's board, has been an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington, and serves as an advisor to CMOs. Fair disclosure, she recently joined the board of Pantheon where Roland led the marketing organization. 
Enjoy the conversation and thank you for listening. 

This episode features Justin Zimmerman of RedX—you may recognize that name since he's been on the podcast before. We're checking back in with him to see how his agile journey has progressed and scaled. He talks about the importance of training and onboarding in the scaling process. He gets into what they call a "start right" process designed to make sure that new teams get launched in a way that increases their likelyhood of success over the longer term. Listen closely for his comments about why he avoids using the term "teams." And, of course, he talks about how they've applied and scaled agile methods. 
We hope you enjoy the show! 

This episode features Kiley Vorreiter, a creative program manager at Vrbo (formerly knowm HomeAway). Though Kiley does not have a technical background, she's completed an advanced Scrum certification and has been putting it to work at Vrbo. Kiley is in what she refers to as the "messy middle" of scaling agile. 
We hope you enjoy the session.






This episode features Kiley Vorreiter, a creative program manager at Vrbo (formerly knowm HomeAway). Though Kiley does not have a technical background, she's completed an advanced Scrum certification and has been putting it to work at Vrbo. Kiley is in what she refers to as the "messy middle" of scaling agile. 
We hope you enjoy the session.

In this episode, friend of the Marketing Agility Podcast Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas joins us to discuss Scaling Agile Marketing. She shares stories from her recent client work along with insights that she has collected working on her upcoming book.

This episode features Brian Homsi who serves as an agile delivery manager at Aetna but who came on the show to speak about the agile transformation work that he helped lead at Bose. Brian is a cerified Scrum Master who helped introduce agile marketing at Bose. The approach was new to most of the the organization so he walks through how they introduced the approach and then he focused in on the process of scaling to nine teams that were working on some of Bose's most innovative products (sunglass speakers and AR). 
 In this session Brian touches on the role of:

* scrum of scrum
* an agile leadership guild
* agile methods (both Scrum and Kanban)

Thanks for listening and share you comments below!

This is the first episode of season 2 of this podcast—our theme is scaling agile marketing. Following this, we felt it was appropriate to kick off the season with Melissa Reeve and Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile because their firm is the author of one of the most robust and well known scaling frameworks. 
In this conversation we set the stage by talking about the role of frameworks, how they complement and extend agile methods, and how they put their own framework to use at Scaled Agile. If you like what you hear you can hear more from Melissa on the SAFe Business Agility Podcast.

In this episode we talk with Thomas McMillan, the Vice President of Marketing at CompuCom. Thomas, who previously worked as a Director of Digital at Lowes, shared his experience with Agile Marketing and how he’s used those learnings to shape the way he’s helped implement Agile at CompuCom. We also discussed challenges that occur when embracing Agile as an organization and different approaches to managing workloads.

We talk with Bill Cushard, the author of The Art of Agile Marketing about his experience implementing agile as the marketing director at ServiceRocket. Bill's background is in content marketing but he's gone well beyond that in his current role. He's one of the few marketers that we've spoken with who's been using Jira to manage his marketing team. In fact, the sub-title of his book is A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence.  



He's articulate, a pragmatist, and someone to follow.  Give the show a listen:

In this episode we talk with Ian Lee, the national digital transformation leader for Deloitte Digital, and Derek Derouin who serves as a manager in Deloitte's digital marketing transformations group. I was fortunate to meet Derek at the RDV_Marketing event in Montreal back in March and have been looking forward to bringing him onto the podcast.

For our regular listeners, you'll know that we've had only a handful of guests from the largest consulting companies—though I've had more interaction through my work at Oracle and while doing research for my book—so this is episode will bring an under represented perspective to the table.

I was impressed with the depth of engagement that Deloitte is driving when it comes to supporting Agile transformation. In short, it's not just about strategic consulting focused on getting CMO buy-in. They certainly do that but they're also engaging on the ground level training teams in Agile marketing and driving adoption from the bottom up. They clearly have some valuable experience to share ... even if they are leading the pack of large consulting firms, this conversation serves as another validation that broader adoption is coming. Give it a listen!





















Search for:













Get Episodes via Email





Success!




First Name




Last Name




Email







Subscribe












Subscribe on iTunes





Learn more about Agile Marketing