What is it that makes a marketing team truly Agile? On a related note, when do you know you’ve become a truly successful Agile marketing team? Far too many teams struggle or fail outright in their attempts to adopt Agile ways of working because they can’t answer these questions.
Before we can answer these questions, let’s quickly touch upon what being an agile team actually means. Simply having morning stand-up meetings won’t make you a Scrum Master, and getting a visual Kanban board doesn’t necessarily mean you are applying Kanban principles.
There is much more to true Agility than just a name and mainstream daily routines like Stand Up meetings.
Every team that calls itself Agile needs to go deeper than the surface practices and employ the core principles of Lean and Agile. This is how you cultivate the Agile mindset that’s so crucial for success. Without that mindset and the principles that underlie it, any success measurements are only going to distract you from deeper problems.
But while building an Agile mindset is a journey in and of itself, finding the right lean metrics to measure your progress
Start with this short checklist to see if you fit the minimum requirements of an Agile marketing team.
Quick check:
These three points are quite simple, but without them, none of the measures of success in a Lean or Agile environment would be possible.
The cycle time (CT) of a task is all the time between the moment the work on the task began and the moment it was marked as done. This metric reflects a customer-centered view on the time you take to deliver results.
Most of the time, your clients simply want to know when the project will be done. The exact breakdown of that time into individual stages and work organization is not something they care about as long as you keep your delivery date promises.
Looking at the cycle time for the same type of tasks gives you an idea of how quickly your team deals with that kind of task.
The rule of thumb is that cycle time for each task falls as soon as WIP limits are in use.
The cycle time of tasks on Agile teams tends to be dramatically lower than the time it took to accomplish the same kind of tasks before the team started its Agile transformation.
As the team perfects its processes, the average age of its tasks keep decreasing. Average CT might fluctuate slightly, as a number of internal and external factors influence every team, but any prolonged growth of the average CT should be a reason for concern and further investigation.
A serious increase of cycle time across your workflow could signify the emergence of a new bottleneck or a number of internal issues.
The efficiency of your workflow is defined by the ratio between the time your tasks spend waiting in queues and the time they are being actively worked on.
If a task has been waiting or queuing for 60% of its cycle time, the efficiency of its execution is 40%. The higher the ratio between waiting and actively working times, the lower your efficiency score.
Increased efficiency might be the single most important metric for measuring success of a Lean team.
In truly efficient processes, tasks don’t line up in queues waiting to be processed. They spend as little time as possible in any kind of waiting. A high-efficiency workflow saves you time and funds, optimizes how the team’s efforts are spent and even boosts team motivation.
Looking at the average efficiency value of a specific type of task will give you process efficiency, while taking the average for all tasks would reveal the team’s general efficiency score.
Lean is a synonym for efficient.
If your team strives for Agility, it will be alleviating bottlenecks as quickly as it can, taking all the necessary measures to let the work items flow smoothly with minimal interruptions.
It’s important that you don’t confuse throughput with efficiency.
Throughput reflects the number of tasks that get completed within a fixed amount of time, while efficiency is all about the deconstruction of the cycle time into value-generating activity and waste.
When the cycle time drops and the efficiency of your tasks goes up, it is inevitable that throughput gets a serious boost too.
Agile marketers need to keep in mind the benefits and the dangers of using throughput as one of the key metrics, however.
By no means should you concentrate on just throughput - not all tasks require the same amount of work and resources, even when tasks are of the same type.
However, looking at the tasks that were broken down into work items of comparable size makes throughput a good measure of team productivity.
Any sudden spikes and drops that are not caused by changes in the team or the nature of work are also a big signal about workflow issues. In its turn, a stable throughput, under the same conditions, would be a sign of a steady workflow.
WIP was mentioned previously because the number of tasks a team is working on concurrently is a key lean metric that should be minimized. However, minimizing WIP is more complicated than simply setting a limit and sticking to it.
Generally, you will set WIP limits for specific columns within a Kanban or other visualization board. For example, you may have a WIP limit of 3 in “doing” but only 2 in “review.” The first thing you need to do in order to utilize this lean metric is determine what the WIP limit for your team should be.
It’s a good practice to begin by setting your WIP limit a bit higher than you may want. This enables you to get a kind of baseline via the other lean metrics on this list. Then, once your team has a little more experience in Agile ways of working, you can try lowering your limits.
But how do you know when you’ve gone too low? Again, the lean metrics on this list will tell you. If you set your WIP limits so low your team members get blocked on a regular basis, you may notice your throughput decreasing and your efficiency worsening. Getting WIP limits right requires some experimentation.
The final lean metric you may want to consider tracking is the number of blocked items you have on your Kanban or other board. You may also want to track how long those items are blocked.
This metric can help you identify areas to improve your processes. For example, if you require help from someone outside your team to review work but that frequently leads to blockages, it may be time to reassess. For example, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) may be useful to define expectations from that external person. Or, you may see if there’s a way to eliminate that review step.
Some blocked work is inevitable, but minimizing how often this happens and how long those blockers remain in place can help improve all the other lean metrics on this list.
What does all of this mean for your team in simple terms?
Successful Lean marketing transformation bears very visible fruits. Using these metrics should make it easy for you to reflect them in numbers.
Going Lean brings a number of positive effects that let you know your marketing transformation went well:
One question you may still have is how you’re supposed to measure all of these metrics. Sure, it can be done manually, but ideally the visualization tool your team uses will have the capability to track them automatically. This is something to look out for when considering what tool you want to use as it can save a lot of wasteful effort calculating them manually.
Coming back to where we started from, going Lean has less to do with adopting just one or two of the trendy practices and more to do with deeper commitment to certain values and ways of work. The success and significance of the results of your efforts completely depend on how serious you are about your commitments.
Both Agile and Lean marketing encourage a strong focus on value and a customer-centric approach, working on one task at a time and stopping yourself from taking on too much work with WIP limits puts concentrated effort on each task, enabling you to do more with less.
Measuring the success of any initiative is always a very tricky venture. But combining a digital Kanban board with Lean and Agile methodologies takes away the heaviness of the operational part of things, letting you concentrate on the marketing work itself.
Commit. Measure. Improve.
It’s time to go Lean.
About the Author:
Dmytro is a gospel music lover, design enthusiast and a content crafter at Kanbanize - a digital Kanban Board solution that puts principles of Lean and Kanban at the heart of process management, helping teams get to real work efficiency and productivity.
