Client Success Story
SAVING $1M IN PRODUCTIVITY
How a Scientific Solutions Company Saved $1M with Agile and Increased Job Satisfaction in the Process
As a major global player in the life science and clinical research space, we were struggling to ensure our marketing was innovating at the same pace as the rest of the organization.
In 2017, our in-house creative marketing team took its first steps toward learning Agile marketing principles—still a new concept at the time—through an online internal training course by AgileSherpas.
We were captivated by Agile right away. The course wasn’t just Agile methodology training; it was Agile training for marketing teams. Immediately, we envisioned how its flexibility could start speeding up our workflow and improving our creative output.
The creative marketing team dove into Agile, and the positive outcomes were swift and impressive. Our Agile implementation led to a 32 percent decrease in planned costs and a 17 percent increase in year-over-year leadership Employee Satisfaction Index scores in 2019 alone.
Between 2018 and 2020, creative marketing’s shift to Agile marketing saved the company over $1M in productivity.
We measured the improvement by:
- Marketing efficiency
- Task cycle time
- Throughput—task completion in two weeks
- Employee satisfaction and retention
Groundbreaking, indeed! The bottom-line impacts—and the palpable enthusiasm and collaboration among the teammates—were the catalysts for taking the next steps in our Agile journey.
""We thought, ‘Wow! We could really use this type of methodology to create productivity within our daily workflow."" — Senior Director, Brand Experience & Creative Marketing
We partnered with AgileSherpas to begin our Agile marketing transformation for our marketing department, bringing together creative, digital and strategic marketing within our North America Marketing unit. Our goal was to align these three siloed organizations into a cross-functional marketing machine—with AgileSherpas guiding us over every peak and valley.
For us, the biggest challenges in implementing Agile would be:
- Pivoting from piloting Agile to diving in headfirst during a pandemic
- Choosing and using the best Ways of Working for us
- Letting go of the idea of “perfection”
Pilot Projects…and the Pandemic
Our first step in bringing Agile to the larger marketing group in 2019 was to start with team-centric education on marketing agility. AgileSherpas tailored a series of educational sessions to help us better understand the roles and functions of people in various marketing units. That data provided a framework for which Agile functions would be most helpful across the board.
AgileSherpas validated the work done to date by teammates within creative marketing, several of whom stepped up to mentor the division through Agile. AgileSherpas CEO Andrea Fryrear delivered in-person trainings to work through pilot projects to try various Agile Ways of Working. The pilot process gave us clarity to choose the methods that would work best for our team.
Starting small—and sometimes failing fast—allowed us to keep moving forward without disrupting our ongoing work. Those lessons would carry us forward into the pandemic, which swelled just after we launched our first pilot in 2019.
Experimentation is part of the Agile process, which is built on a foundation of flexibility and adaptation.
Recommended reading: Discover Why Flexibility Rules in Agile Marketing
Choosing and Using Ways of Working
As a team, we became nimble with implementing Agile. Due to waves of unplanned initiatives—like creating unified messaging for an international scientific firm—we had to end our first pilot project early to refocus the team’s skills and time.
It was truly Agile at scale. While it would have been easy to revert to the status quo workflows, we stuck with creative marketing’s established Agile Ways of Working, Scrum, and Kanban.
These foundations allowed us to swarm and deliver on a growing body of prioritized projects with a strong, aligned message in the face of global uncertainty.
How We Implement Scrum
Managing our workflow across the larger team requires a deep understanding of our teammates’ current and forecasted workloads. When presented with work requests, we started asking about the priority of one project over another.
The core of Scrum is time-boxing, with a focus on setting and achieving small, actionable commitments. Some of the features we love the most in this methodology are the Scrum Ceremonies, such as:
- Sprint planning: Prioritizing daily and weekly work for maximum output and team comfortability. Through sprints, we can easily determine who can do the work, where it stands in the grand scheme of projects and when it is estimated to be done. That clarity is a win-win for our creatives and internal clients.
- Standup meetings: Talking through that day’s priorities. Marketing teams are rarely bored and often buried. Talking through a day at a time helps us avoid overwhelming task lists and concentrate on what we know we can accomplish right now.
- Prioritized backlog refinement: Ensuring that all agreed-to projects are completed at a high quality, even if they were previously deprioritized. “Not right now” does not mean it has less importance. We regularly review our backlog to ensure we’re giving attention to our department-wide backlog while balancing capacity and protecting the team’s focus.
- Retrospectives: Discussing what worked, and what could be done differently next time. These conversations keep us accountable and continually moving forward, rising above the status quo to increase joy in work by maximizing opportunities to adapt.
How We Implement Kanban
Our cross-functional team is keen on efficiency. So, we love the heart and soul of Kanban, which revolves around:
- Lean manufacturing
- Waste reduction
- Flow-based simplicity
But we initially struggled with another focus area of Kanban: Visualizing our work.
The marketing team’s project management software isn’t highly visual. So, updating the Kanban boards—physical or digital representations of work, like Post-it™* notes or Tableau™*-like platforms—became extra work for the team rather than a benefit.
Today, we’ve adapted the parts of Scrum that work for us, coupled with the parts of Kanban that create a hybrid, yet optimal experience in our environment.
Recommended reading: 5 Ways to Work More Effectively with Non-Agile Teams
Letting Go of Perfection
As a scientific organization, we have a desire to be thorough and get every detail exactly right. But at the same time, we want to be nimble to continually improve our processes. Nothing in marketing is perfect. Practicing Agile marketing taught us how to accept that fact and move higher volumes of exceptional work out the door—without sacrificing timeliness for perfection.
Reducing the pressure to be perfect has helped our marketing team feel less stressed, freeing their minds for innovative projects.
In 2021–22, we reengaged AgileSherpas to expand our Agile practice with more pilots. Value stream mapping was one of the most beneficial elements during this leg of our journey.
In these exercises, we deconstructed our project workflows to spot opportunities for improving communication and efficiency. Participating in these activities gave us insights into how to work moment-by-moment in step with our internal and external colleagues’ journeys.
AgileSherpas gave us the confidence to accept failures, explore new pathways, and make the next rightest decisions. Along with our own trial-error-success testing, AgileSherpas gave us invaluable, self-sustaining guidance through their Train-the-Trainer experience, which gave our Scrum masters deeper insights into how to implement Agile across our entire department.
Ceaseless Learning Is Pivotal to Agile
Every time we reached an apex in our journey, AgileSherpas continued to deliver timely, educational follow-up. Even when we weren’t actively engaged in a training cycle, they continued to guide us with the latest and greatest updates in Agile marketing best practices.
We enjoy receiving messages from AgileSherpas. They excel at ongoing education, and there are always little nuggets to take back to the team and apply, even in quick touch-base messages.
Our marketing team has always delivered high-quality work—it’s the standard at our organization. Taking the Agile marketing journey with AgileSherpas as our guide improved our Agile knowledge, aiding in our journey to increase our efficiency and productivity. And with their mentorship, we’re dedicated to carrying out a vision for continuous improvement in our organization.
