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, where we are involved in the day-to-day, so in many cases, they are outsourcing their email or marketing ops to us. We are involved in defining the strategy and all the initiatives that are happening in marketing will have our hands in.
The plan is a bit more loose. With our Kanbans, we keep it simple. We use smart sheets.
We have it set up with the card view. We have our backlog. Anything that comes up as a potential project goes into the backlog.
Then when we are doing planning, we are looking at, okay, here’s what we said. We were going to work on this month. This still makes sense. What do we need to grab from the backlog, anything we need to add to the backlog? Because clients are working on contracts where we’ve planned out their hours for the month of the quarter and we have estimates on each of the cards, we can determine if we’re putting too much into work in progress. Is it the right balance? And so that part works really.
And it’s actually created a lot more accountability and insight for our clients where a lot of them are not quite as organized. They kind of are just working on what they work on. They’ll have ideas and then those ideas get forgotten along the way.
And so that has been the most helpful part of agile. And then also so that we are continuing to improve the way that we work with our clients, the fact that our internal team does a retro and we essentially bring anyone who’s worked on the account to the retro to talk about how did it go? How do we improve?
We do the start, stop, continue. And that’s also helped us to improve how we manage our
Jim Ewel
Brandi, you talked about some of the parts that have helped you. What have been some of the challenges that you’ve encountered as you’ve adopted?
Brandi Starr
so initially the sprint duration was a challenge. We were trying to go with weekly sprints, which is what’s the most common. And it just, we just don’t move that fast.
And so we quickly abandoned that. And then also having whip limits on the internal side. Because most of the people that are supporting marketing, so other than my two marketing managers, all pull double duty.
So I do some of the consulting work, I own operations, I own marketing. Our strategists are primarily client-facing, but support marketing. It was really, really difficult to actually assess bandwidth.
There may be one month where I lean in and I’m doing 30 or 40 hours of marketing work. And then there’s some months where they’re kind of on their own and I only do 10 hours. And so you can’t really define an actual whip limit because it changes day to day. And so that was the other piece that really did not work
Then also with clients, daily standups trying to meet more frequently than weekly. Also didn’t work like we couldn’t other than one client where the volume is high enough that daily makes sense. Our other clients we’ve shifted to like a weekly standup process because it just didn’t work for schedules, didn’t work for budgets. And so we had to abandon that part as
Frank Days
You talked about WIP limits. So we had a recent guest on the podcast who’s talking about work in progress and the challenges that it introduces to the team by having too much work in progress. I’ll freely admit that when I’ve practiced agile with my various teams work in progress has always been too much WIP is always been the killer.
Everyone is whether it’s pressure from above or it’s over ambition or whether it’s underestimating the value. Can you share what your process looks like around managing your WIP limits?
Brandi Starr
So what we’ve started tracking is days. So define is our first stage when it comes out of the backlog and so we’re looking at how long it sits there before someone actually starts working on it. So we’ve been tracking that I think for eight or nine months or so as well as our percentage of work that’s getting completed on time.
So based on the dates that we set we always are focused on clearing the board because the goal is that at the end of the month, everything is done and the middle of the combo board is empty. And so tracking those two numbers as well as how many story points were able to put through month over month has really helped us to see what is realistic for our team. So even though we’ve not been able to set like an actual work-in-progress limit to say like if we’ve got too
much in this stage, then nothing else can move there. What it has done is it has helped us to not be overambitious and to actually really be realistic. And so when we see that okay, our percent on time is going down and our day.
is and define is going up. Yeah. We probably put too much that sprint.
Much better. And so that’s been kind of our approach to creating balance. And I was able to build some excitement around Clear the Board. So far, we’ve only had one month where we’ve actually cleared the whole board. That’s great. And it happened. I made a big deal of it. Like, we posted in Slack. I sent virtual confetti gifts, all sorts of things.
Get a big deal. And so that has also really helped everyone involve to be more conscious of what they can actually do. Because nobody wants to be the reason that we don’t clear the
Frank Days
I was just wondering about the little sibling of WIP, which is the unplanned work. The stuff that comes up in the middle of the sprint, do you have a process on how you triage things as a month is a pretty long sprint? There must be tasks that come up in the middle of the sprint people have. It is someone being ruthless about, OK, this one comes in. That one goes out kind
Brandi Starr
We are fortunate that we don’t have a high volume.
There are times when it peaks something happens, especially things in the national crisis or things that people are paying attention to. Sometimes you have to stop work or take things out of market or things like that. But for the most part, we do pretty good at planning ahead and not having a lot of last-minute stuff.
However, when there is, we do in our marketing daily standup, we have that gut check of, can we really get this done without putting something else on hold? Or do we need to put something on hold? And so it is really quick.
And I try to not make it a whole discussion. Like, it really is a gut. if we can get this done or not.
And I’ve gotten my team comfortable with being able to say no. If we do this, something’s got to give. And so that’s why I say I wouldn’t say it’s ruthless because if there is something that really has to get done and we can’t put something on hold, we do make it happen. And we do occasionally stretch ourselves then. But for the most part, we do pretty
Jim Ewel
Brandi, I’m curious if you have applied some of the iterative aspects of agile to your practice. What I mean by that is oftentimes we kind of work in a waterfall method. We get a creative brief in, we do the campaign, we declare victory.
We said the campaign’s over, right? And the essence of Agile is iterative to try to do a little something and see how it works and then iterate on it. Have you applied that aspect of agile to your practice with your
Brandi Starr
So we’ve been able to take that iterative approach in a couple of small ways. With our clients, I have started to really get them to think about what’s the MVP? Like what do we need to actually get done to get something in market or to get this project complete? And how do we iterate on it
Because we do, I do see probably more on the client side where projects will kind of just drag on and on and on because there’s this desire to be perfect. And instead, I try to shift them to “done is better than perfect”. Like how do we get to good enough?
And that works on certain things and with certain clients. So I do at least try to preach the iterative mindset where I can so that we don’t get stuck in those cycles of revisions and all of those things. On our team side, I think we actually do a little better in just being comfortable in certain places with the process of iterating.
Because we’re consultants, there is a little bit of a different expectation of we can’t put anything in the market that’s half done because it reflects poorly on our brand and it impacts our business. Our digital ads are a great example. We’ve found that LinkedIn has been most successful for us.
But our social ads aren’t quite yielding the revenue that we’d like. So we’re going through an iterative process. Like we had our phase one, we put it in market, we’re looking at what’s working, what’s in there. not and we’re as we’re going into January, our fiscal starts in November. So we’re now going through our second iteration of that and keeping what’s working, trashing what doesn’t. So we have an iterative process very much at the forefront of our minds. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve nailed it. Like it is still, there are still a lot of things that I do think stay in progress that maybe could have been done earlier in the month.
So earlier in the sprint, that comes down to the last day because we’re trying to make it perfect. So there’s room for growth there, but we are at least, we are at least being iterative.
great to hear. It hoists as a challenge for all of , do all that stuff completely do this iterative approach. I mean, I know I find that very challenging. So can
how you work with your clients in terms of like you said some of your clients, your smaller clients, it’s, it sounds like it’s fairly waterfall, right? You have a statement of work and you deliver against it, right? That probably makes sense. Given the size of the project, you can, you can actually define it. You probably have a pretty decent amount of certainty around scope and scale of the project. As they get bigger, what does it look like? Are these bigger clients that they just on retainer and
then, and so the way that we work is we will plan their hours by the year, but broken down into quarters. So okay for simple math, let’s say they’re buying a thousand hours from us, and they know that there’s a ton of work that happens in Q1, but Q4 is kind of coasting. So we may say that Q1, we are planning for 400 hours and Q4, we’re only planning for 100 hours and then in Q2 and 3, it’s going to be 250 each.
And so based on how their business flows, what they have in their annual plans, we will estimate just at a really high level where the hours should live in the year. And for some clients, there’s a little more detail there like some clients like to have specific projects in their statement of work that they believe that they’re going to work on for those larger clients, it really is just hours. And so we start off planning that in the annual retainer.
So that’s what’s in the statement of work. And then from there is where we have our con bond at the beginning of the year, we start to throw everything in the backlog that we know that we might work on, even where it is just a nice to have or some of those some of those cleanup type things that you only really do when you’ve got some extra time, we get all of that in the backlog and then we start to plan against what their planned hours are. So , what do
need to and then we also break it down so that it’s not whole projects as a single card. In most cases, we will do the strategy, the development and the execution as like three separate cards. So we might develop the strategy for an initiative in January and then the planning and build in February.
And so that way we’re able to take projects in an appropriate chunk. And so that’s been really, really helpful. It gives clients into visibility of what we’ve committed to. It creates some accountability for their teams because again, they don’t like to be the reason we don’t clear the board. And so that that part has really been really good in giving them structure where the statement of work is more
Jim Ewel
Do you have to anyone in a consulting or an agency environment who is just starting on their journey?
Brandi Starr
Don’t feel like you have to implement it in a textbook case we went through an agile marketing certification we learned all of the best practices, the standard way of doing things. And initially, I was real gungho to implement it straight out of the textbook. Like, here’s what my material says.
Here’s what we’re going to do. However, in a consulting environment, whether you’re leveraging agile for your marketing team or with your clients, there are nuances that are just very different than a lot of other organizations. And so it’s not all or nothing when you are implementing agile even if you just take some of the principles, it moves you in the right direction of being a more efficient more scalable organization.
And so I would… keep going iterate. We talked about being iterative, but iterate on your agile journey, and keep the parts that really work for you and make your teams better, and don’t use the parts that don’t. Like it seems like really simple advice, but sometimes it can be frustrating when you feel like you got to stick to what you learned, and that’s just not the case.
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