Thanks for your thoughtful response. You have some excellent points on the dislikes.

Step 2. In the O (observation) step of our ORID process, we do bring in the numbers and facts to support the rest of the decision making process. Great point on the importance of these KPIs. We could do this better, and are in the process of upgrading our dashboard metrics, which will inform the process even more than it does today.

Step 4: Yes, it definitely means customers. This was an oversight. We conduct Validation Interviews to test messaging, drivers, calls to action and so forth with our customers. They are the most important stakeholder.

Step 6: True that we have it easier as a mostly co-located team. We do have some team members including our EVP located remotely, and we use video conferencing on a daily basis to connect with those people. Also, AgileZen is very widely used in our team. I’ll check out some of the other EMM solutions you reference. Thanks again, and please continue to share your insights as we all learn together here.

In response to long term vision challenges, we try to remain very flexible and we do have to re-prioritize often. This can result in some inefficiencies, and we are always looking for ways to get more efficient here. But generally, we favor frequent change over sticking with an old plan. Our long term vision is a work in progress, as forces realign frequently. Please share your ideas and your team’s lessons with us, and we can all get smarter together here.

Likes:

Step 1: Acknowledged that marketing is different from software development. Marketing lives in a very fluid environment. In software development, programmers freeze the requirements and then build from those requirements. There is no ‘freezing’ in marketing, the environment will continue to change and we must adapt to it.

Step 3: Marketing goals must align with business goals. This seems like a given but I have seen marketing organizations have far different agendas than their sales counterparts.

Step 9: Marketers must be ready and willing to respond to change – change is constant in marketing. Sometimes practitioners of lean, agile or six-sigma become so enamored of the process it becomes more important than the output. Avoid this at all costs.

Dislikes:

Step 2: Perhaps the author did not have the time to reference the facts used during the ORID process. Marketing has to be about ROI or brand/market impact. Any ORID process that does not utilize solid market data (response, ROI, cost per sale, etc.) is bound to arrive at the wrong answer.

Step 4: Poll our stakeholders – I hope that also means customers. Marketing needs to continually inform its decision making with the voice of the customer.

Step 6: The physical task board works great when all the marketers are co-located but what do you do when people sit around the world. Take a look at some of the EMM solutions (like Aprimo, Asset Link, Unica, etc.) that provide good electronic substitutes for a physical task board.

I believe whole heartedly that process disciplines like Lean, Agile, Six-Sigma have much to offer marketing. However, these tool kits will need to be adapted – not just adopted – if they are to have significant impacts for marketers.

Name the time and place and we’ll make it happen. I bet we could learn a lot from how your team works as well. Thanks for posting!

First, we divide our work into various types of tasks and use color-coded cards to represent the task types. The primary types are Fixed projects (large, long-term, immovable projects, like conferences), Flexible projects (things we plan to do but can slip a few weeks if needed, like redesigning a brochure or completing a new whitepaper), Recurring projects (daily, weekly, monthly tasks, like social media updates or a customer newsletter), and Breaking News (unplanned items that inevitably arise from other teams but must be completed).

Our philosophy is that a marketing team is similar to a news organization. In the news analogy you have some weekly columns that must go out like clockwork and you have some larger editorial pieces you want to complete but can easily be bumped if a breaking news item like a fire happens.

So we color code our cards so that we can visually see what tasks cannot be moved and which ones can if a breaking news item occurs.

At the beginning of each week we plan out the next two weeks. On a daily basis we review / update the board during our stand-up meeting. Cards fall into one of four phases, Planning, In Progress, Peer Review and Published.

As breaking news arises from internal teams or outside forces (press releases, product updates, maintenance windows, etc) then we place them into the backlog and then depending on the urgency we discuss them in the stand-up and determine the Story/Audience/Channels for the breaking news item. We then write-up task cards and insert them into our timeline, perhaps moving some of the Flexible project tasks cards back to the backlog for future consideration.

Great post!