This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (https://agilemarketingalliance.com/). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches.
Transcript
Welcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah.
Hannah Bink
Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much.
Melissa
So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale.
Hannah Bink
I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool.
Melissa
Tell me more.
Hannah Bink
So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility.
Hannah Bink
They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust.
Hannah Bink
If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market.
Melissa
So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here?
Hannah Bink
Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution.
Melissa
Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis.
Hannah Bink
Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore.
Melissa (30:27.526)
Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Hannah Bink
Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information.
Hannah Bink
What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really.
Melissa
Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches?
Hannah Bink
So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise. And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster.
Melissa
Well, it reminds me of something we talked about in the first part of our conversation where we were talking about the shift in participatory budgeting being from one where somebody pitches something. You know, you’re in sell mode. You know, I think we should do this initiative and I think it should be funded and this is how we should sell the, or set the budget. And the same thing with these giant presentations, it’s like, you’re in sell mode. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve invested a lot in research. I’ve done pretty slides and I’ll be rejected if you don’t accept my idea. We’re shifting that into a conversation. The conversation goes more like, hey, I have an idea, I have an hypothesis. Here’s what I’m expecting to happen. We could probably have a whole other conversation about leading indicators and guardrails. But the idea here is that we’re in an ongoing conversation around ideas and anything can happen at any time to say, we need to fund this more or less. And I feel like therein lies the power of a lean business case.
Hannah Bink
Absolutely. And I have to say, I feel like my executive team remembers more and they digest more because it’s iterative, one, so they’re on this journey, they’re part of this conversation as we’re going. But also when we’re talking about at scale, agile at scale, these executives have 400 things bouncing around their heads at all times. So the value of getting to the point, if you’re trying to affect change inside an organization, cannot be understated. And it gives you a tool to do that.
Melissa
It gives you a tool and it gives you a tool to remain flexible so that it doesn’t feel like careers are on the line. You know, like, oh, my thing, this case that I pitched didn’t work. That’s OK. It allows more room for failure, too.
Hannah Bink
Absolutely.
Melissa
So Hannah, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve got one last question for you that’s been burning on my mind, which is this whole notion of lean business cases and participatory budgeting, especially in SAFe, applies to technology portfolios, which I think are very product-centric. And I feel like marketing views things differently. We don’t necessarily have these product portfolios that they do in technology.
Melissa
So how do you think these practices need to be adapted for use in marketing?
Hannah Bink
So at the end of the day, it’s back to the principles, right? We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as… We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as we both well know, there’s a lot of technology in marketing that can easily be your first step to using Lean Business Case as you’re trying to adapt it in your organization.
Hannah Bink
I’ve actually done that recently. I’m trying to get some more investment in our website. I’d like to translate it into seven languages. So I’m working on the lean business case as part of safe lean portfolio management approach, and I’ve found it’s really, really helpful. There’s a, there’s a standard step-by-step process that allows me that exploration time to better understand the business impact. What am I actually proposing here? And the approach of having a portfolio Kanban offers me that visibility into all of the strategic investments my company is making. To understand one, as someone already discussed this, that would be wonderful. Two, what are the other strategic investments our company is making? And as a marketer, how did those investments affect what we do every day? And it just gives me more context to understand when my leadership comes back to me and says, we’re a little overwhelmed on WIP here. I have that level of visibility to understand fully the impact of what I’m bringing to the business. But in marketing, whether it’s technology or maybe we’re investing in a new research area, or maybe we’re investing in a new channel mix or event strategy. There’s a lot of high cost things that we do on a day-to-day basis, or we’re thinking about doing. It just, it gives you that tool once again, where you can explore safely with that visibility and that iterative approach that Agile is truly core to the way Agile operates every day.
Melissa
So Hannah, I feel like you and I have been talking a little bit, geeking out on lean business cases and participatory budgeting. And I’m thinking about some of our listeners who might be brand new to Agile. And I could see this feeling a little bit overwhelming. So for those of you who are at the end of this show and feeling like, “oh my gosh, I could never do that,” what are a couple of first steps that people could take in this direction without having to jump all the way into the deep end?
Hannah Bink
Choose something that is key to your leadership, but they’re a little stuck on. Maybe you could introduce one of these activities, maybe both of these activities as a way to start thinking about investment differently. I’ll give you an example. Maybe your CMO is thinking about targeting a new segment.
Hannah Bink
Well, a new segment targeting strategy takes a lot of investment, right? There might be systems that have to be stood up. There might be education that needs to happen. You might have to hire new sales reps. Who knows? Starting to break down some of those long-term or strategic things that are still a little murky and using this as a pilot could be a really effective way to do that.
Hannah Bink
Another approach is if you find yourself as a marketing organization truly overwhelmed with all the competing priorities coming your way, not that would ever happen in any company, this might be a tool to help focus the new requests that are coming in, the new investment proposals that are coming in, or the new staffing strategies, or the new product investments that are coming in as a way to either bring the customer closer or get a clearer view of what the proposer is actually pitching you. Just a few ways to pilot it early and learn.
Melissa
Yeah, I’m hearing you really articulate the Agile principles, right? Which is break things down, experiment, adapt and learn, and apply that to this as well. You know, pick a starting point and continue to iterate. So, you know, Hannah, you’re just a wealth of knowledge around this. If people are interested in connecting with you, how can you be reached?
Hannah Bink
I am available on the interwebs on LinkedIn under Hannah Howard Bink. They can also reach me through Scaled Agile. I love a good email and I usually do respond.
Melissa
Sounds great. I appreciate your being here with us today.
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