A New Way to Manage

Monday, July 26, 2010  //  0 Comments  //  Blog, Project Management

Any project manager with a few years or experience, or anyone who has had an experience with an advertising agency can tell you one thing; The process nearly never goes as expected. Yet for years now, we as project managers have chosen to force clients into a process that defines goals and expectations as if we actually know what is going to happen. Fact is we don’t have a clue, no one does. But how will we switching to agile make a difference? It’s simple, because agile development is prepared for change and will allow us to develop our marketing campaigns faster, more targeted, and more transparently than ever before.

What is Agile Development?

Agile software development refers to a group of development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing teams. Here are Momentify we are choosing to use a modified version of the SCRUM development method.

The Reason for Change

One of the big criticisms of SCRUM development is that it’s life cycle is too short and it doesn’t preserve the equity built into brands due to it’s lack of planning up front. We understand this concern, but it couldn’t be more wrong given the current socioeconomic climate in the digital world. Things move faster than you could ever plan for. Just look at the recent “Man You Could Smell Like” campaign from Old Spice, it gained them a 4.6% market share worth millions of dollars using a plan that was reacting to the publics comments live via you tube. There is no way Old Spice could have predicted that the videos put up would have millions of views, or even which video would be the most popular- but what they did predict was that people would be attracted to the personal feel of the campaign as a whole. That was their big idea, a set of socially driven commercials promoting  an old school brand. Your big idea may be to attract more corporate clients with a new website, or expand the reach of your pizza shop with a local TV commercial.  Whatever your big idea is, you need to get it started and react to the results.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, we adopt an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

For more information about our new process, read on.