Why an Advertising Agency Should Work on SCRUM
SCRUM is a popular framework for software development. It allows companies to gradually create a product and agily refine it. But SCRUM is useful not only in IT.
newage. digital agency CEO Alexander Rolsky told how he adapted the approach for the work of a marketing agency. Now the system helps to keep track of hundreds of campaigns in dozens of advertising accounts, and not go crazy.
What is SCRUM
SCRUM is an organisational methodology that is used to iteratively work on projects. It allows you to be flexible without losing focus on global goals.
The essence of the approach is that work planning is carried out gradually, in even segments, which are called sprints. For each of them, the team collects a pool of tasks (the concept of stories is used in SCRUM), unchanged until the end of the sprint. Each story is evaluated in story points – the rating describes the volume and complexity of the tasks taken in the sprint. So, the tasks 'recheck the feed' and 'create a media plan' can take the same time, but the one that is more difficult will cost more story points.
As the project progresses, the team completes tasks, collects story points, and accumulates ideas for the next sprint. And so in uniform segments, projects are constantly being finalized and improved.
What Is The Difference Between SCRUM In Marketing And In IT
In general, the SCRUM approach in marketing is similar to the same method in the IT field. But it is in our agency work that there are differences that make SCRUM even more important than in software development.
In product IT companies, the team is engaged in one global project. Let's say we are talking about creating a mobile application: tasks are gradually thrown into the backlog and do not conflict with each other, because they are moving within the framework of a single project.
And for agencies in the backlog, tasks for different projects, campaigns, and clients intersect. And between them, it is necessary to distribute priorities in order to give due attention to each.
With standard weekly planning, it may happen that a difficult launch of a campaign will divert attention from the current ones – and the team will only remember on Friday that they did not have time to complete something for another client.
But when planning a sprint, we understand in advance how much time each client will get and how difficult tasks will be completed for him.
How Does An Advertising Agency Work With SCRUM?
Work on SCRUM goes iteratively, and cyclically. This means that the processes described below are constantly repeated in each sprint.
1. General Work Organisation
Determination of Sprint Length
The first thing to do at the beginning of each sprint is to determine its length.
Short sprints are convenient because they allow the company to maintain maximum 'flexibility' and the willingness to make frequent adjustments to their plans. In addition, this implies a short feedback cycle: we quickly receive feedback from the client and do not waste time working in the wrong direction.
But long sprints are also convenient. The team has more time to pick up the pace, and room to manoeuvre – to solve the problems that have arisen. In addition, the longer the sprint, the longer the period to achieve its goal, without the need to plan for the next one.
We use short weekly sprints by default, but use longer periods as needed for some clients and projects.
Choice Of Time And Place For Daily Stand-Up
In flexible approaches to organising work, it is important to regularly synchronise with colleagues so that the whole team understands who is working on what and how well they are working each day.
And for this, you need to determine in advance the place, the time of daily meetings – and conscientiously attend them. Such planning takes 5-15 minutes and is worth every second spent because it 'puts the ball in the game' – and after the meeting, everyone knows what to do today.
The newage.agency project teams meet in the morning, usually between 9:00 and 10:00.
2. Planning Preparation
At the end of each sprint, the team plans for the next one, but to do it right, you need to prepare in advance.
Before each planning, the team leader checks a few items.
Does the team have a Team backlog – a document that accumulates potential tasks for the next sprints? We create separate backlogs for each ad campaign and PM checks if any of them got lost.
All tasks should be classified by importance.
Since the sprint includes tasks for several clients, and they can have the same priority of importance, the PM assigns different responsible executors. This allows you to distribute the load and complete tasks on time without shifting deadlines.
The PM must understand each story. He does not need to know in detail what exactly should be done, but he needs to be aware of why a certain user story got into the Team backlog.
Note: Stakeholders can add user stories to the product backlog, but do not have the right to assign a level of importance to them. This is the prerogative of the PM. In addition, the stakeholders should not be involved in the evaluation of labour costs – it is the responsibility of the team.
Before planning begins, the PM cleans up the backlog, evaluates the importance of tasks, and clarifies details on topics that are not well understood.
3. Sprint Planning
Definition of Sprint Goals
This is where the structural, ideological differences of SCRUM from the usual streaming work planning begin. In SCRUM, each sprint has a goal that serves as an answer to the key question: “Why are we working on this sprint and why don’t we just go on vacation?”. The benchmark can be anything: “make more money”, “complete three stories with the highest priority”, “prepare to launch a campaign”, or even “surprise the customer's marketer”. The goal must be formulated in business language, and not in technical terms, that is, in words that even people outside the team will understand.
The sprint goal can seem a bit silly and far-fetched during the planning process. Its key value is shown by the middle of the sprint when team members are already slowly forgetting what exactly they want to achieve in it. If you have multiple SCRUM teams working on different projects (like we do), it's helpful to have a list of sprint goals for all teams in one place. For example, hang them out for everyone to see, so that every employee (and not just management) knows what the agency is doing and why.
Choosing the Stories That Will Be Included in the Sprint
The key point in sprint planning is the process of generating a list of tasks. More precisely, the choice of stories that need to be copied from the product backlog to the sprint backlog and made in the next two weeks. It is the team that determines how many stories will be in the sprint. Neither RM nor anyone else should directly influence this choice.
Readiness Definition
It is important that both the PM and the team formulate a readiness criterion. Can a story be considered complete if a report is made, but there are no conclusions and a note is not prepared? Or the task is ready only after the result was sent to the client and rescheduled.
At first, we tried to use checklists to determine the readiness of a story, but we abandoned this solution. Now we either prescribe specific criteria for each story, or we say: “A story is ready when RM thinks so.” In this case, it is the manager who is responsible for conveying his wishes to the team and controlling the readiness of the story.
Planning Result
The sprint is considered planned, and you can start implementing when, as a result, there are such points:
The purpose of the sprint and its duration are clear
There is a list of stories that the team will do as part of the sprint
Each story has an assessment in story points and the criteria for task readiness are clear
The performance and workload of each team member are calculated, no one is overloaded, but also does not sit idly
The time and place of the daily rallies have been determined
When the plan is ready in this form, it remains to execute it, synchronise with colleagues and throw ideas into the backlog of the future sprint.
What Does The SCRUM Approach Give to an Advertising Agency?
For us, SCRUM has increased team throughput. People understand their load and can add or subtract tasks based on this. Moreover, the load is not only in hours, but also in the volume of cases. If we understand that some task takes a lot of story points, but is unprofitable, we can cut them off. And it works on all levels:
teams understand a clear order of actions: what will be done and in what order,
the project leader knows what the team is doing on an ongoing basis,
Management has a digital toolkit to understand the workload of teams.
When you run 500-600 story points for several weeks, and then suddenly 250, this signals a problem. It's times like these that we connect and connect.
On the other hand, if, with an average of 500 story points, a team suddenly gives out 900, this is also a strange situation, and some operational decisions need to be made - transfer part of the projects to other teams or help with redistribution.
Important! Shortly after implementing SCRUM, we noticed that project teams were evaluating story points differently. Conventionally, the task of “writing a letter to technical support” costs five story points for one team and 25 for the other. Therefore, we at the agency developed a scale for evaluating typical stories: a certain type of task should be calculated from and to. This allows you to evaluate the load of different teams 'in one line' and compare their results.
In addition, it is beneficial for customers, because optimised processes reduce the cost of services. We spend less time on the same work and, accordingly, we can keep the commission at an acceptable level. Plus, when the team works on processes, the number and probability of errors decrease.
So, SCRUM helps a marketing agency:
to increase command throughput
clearly define a set of tasks for the sprint - without the ability to endlessly add new ASAP cases
connect the goal of each sprint with the global projects of the company
synchronize the work of the team on a daily basis
adequately assess the workload and labour costs
provide managers with a digital, measurable tool for assessing performance in order to notice problems or, conversely, super results.
