When I talk to people about Agile marketing, many think it‘s a new concept and that agile methodologies from the IT world are not easily translated to marketing.  My experience tells me agile marketing is, in many cases, simply the formalization of what great marketers have been doing for years: following basic business practices and project management. 

Agile, at its core, is pragmatic and focused around prioritizing what’s most important to your company’s strategy with the people most impacted by the work. What I didn’t say, was that agile was easy to get started with, although it certainly makes execution easier once you have your team and priorities in order. Aligning priorities and getting the right people at the table to do that prioritization are central to doing agile the right way-- whether you are talking about an IT project or a marketing program. Agile Marketing is also about being adaptable in your marketing programs.

Aligning priorities and getting the right people to the table are central to successful Agile Marketing. To that end, here are 10 things you need to do to create an agile marketing organization:

1. Be ready to empower your teams to take responsibility for delivering their programs within budget and a fixed timeframe.
2. Hire and grow highly adaptable people. I'm sure many of you have heard the quote most often attributed to Charles Darwin: ”It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent of the species that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."  Agile marketing is all about adaptability to market change. I discuss in my book Agile Marketing, that  this practice can be nearly impossible to execute in the business world unless you have individuals who are innately adaptable.
3. Create program teams that are cross-departmental and include both your end customer and people from all across your internal value chain to develop your programs. Don’t work in a marketing silo; include all those in the prioritization and planning process. Think end customer, sales, legal, as well as IT, to help you in developing out your program.
4. Set priorities that are focused on what gives the end user and business the most value and what is easiest to accomplish. 
5. Let your marketing team play ‘planning poker’ to estimate what is easiest to accomplish. 
6. Give your team a fixed time period to develop the first set of priorities for the marketing program and work in one month sprints, testing your work on your end users along the way to know what is best to iterate on in later sprints.
7. Have daily scrum calls where your marketing program developers focus only on those things they have accomplished and what they have next to accomplish as well as any obstacles they need to get out of the way.  Don’t let others outside the agile process get in the way of this conversation, they can listen, but only allow those who are accountable for delivering something the ability to talk on these calls.
8. Set up weekly project leadership team calls that allow executive leaders and other constituents an opportunity to see progress and where there are challenges and give them opportunities to provide direction. It’s important, however, that any new program requirements be put in the program backlog and not upset priorities mid sprint.
9. Create and manage an active marketing program backlog of the changes people suggest. Manage the prioritization of them monthly using the estimation process in points 4 and 5.
10. Iterate to success…..just like your IT projects, everything, including marketing, can be improved by working iteratively with a collaborative, customer-focused team.

For more about Agile trends, read Dion Healthcliffe's blog on Smart Enterprise Exchange here.

And Smart Enterprise Exchange members can learn more about Agile Marketing by downloading Chapter One of my book.