This article was first published on May 20, 2022, and was updated on November 25, 2024
Historical principles and methods
Project management is at the heart of a company’s mission and success. They often have to juggle a multitude of objectives, each one as important as the next. In an eternal quest for efficiency, methods have been developed for centuries to carry out large-scale projects and major works.
The modern vision of project management is relatively recent, however, and was born out of the constraints and challenges inherent in the major projects of the first half of the 20th century with accelerated technological development.
When we have so many pieces to the puzzle, a certain methodology must be put in place to ensure the success of a project, otherwise we end up with a hydra with several heads and each of them does not know what the other is doing.
The goal of project management is to structure the work and ensure that the result, whatever it is, has an added value for the company and especially for its customers. The satisfaction of the latter should in fact be the end goal of any business project.
What is agility?
You will forgive the writer’s reflex to open a dictionary, but the literal definition of the word agile (taken from the Merriam-Webster’s) gives a good clue to the nature of the concept: marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace.
Organizational agility therefore allows teams and companies to adapt to change by making decision-making fast thanks to simple and, above all, flexible processes.
Traditionally, an entire project was planned in advance as a series of successive steps. The next step is not taken until the previous one is completed. This is called waterfall project management.
The plan is executed sequentially, from start to finish, and the project is delivered. It may have taken months or even years between the start and the final delivery, but only after the final delivery will it be known for sure whether the project is a success or a failure.
This is not a bad way to manage certain projects whose outputs are 100% predictable and dependent on a sequence of operations that must be carried out in a certain order.
The waterfall approach with its final massive delivery, on the other hand, does not allow us to properly measure the value created at each stage, and yet there are some! It also does not make it easy to identify flaws before delivery.
Well, that’s one of the ideas behind agility: breaking a project down into multiple iterations that allow for a series of partial deliveries that allow the final product to be built, piece by piece.
If an iteration doesn’t give the desired result, the troubleshooting and adaptation are much less cumbersome because you only have to remove the last block of the tower: you know that the rest works. It saves us from playing the most unpleasant and expensive game of Jenga in the world where we rework a lot of blocks hoping that the tower doesn’t collapse.
This model, or rather philosophy, was first developed for the world of software development. It lends itself relatively well to iterative cycles due to the nature and structure of programming work.
But there’s not just one way to be agile, because agility is more of a way to conceptualize project management. It’s not a recipe that you can follow and it would actually go completely against the agile philosophy to say that there is a one-size-fits-all way.
The goal of agility is rather to bring about a paradigm shift in our management which is based on 4 fundamental values:
- Prioritizing people and their interactions over processes and tools
- Finding solutions that work rather than exhaustive documentation
- Collaborate with customers on an ongoing basis rather than negotiate contracts
- Adapting to change rather than following a rigid plan
Let’s explore what each of these values means for an agile company culture.
Prioritizing people
People are at the heart of decisions and value creation processes. Growing companies often make the mistake of letting processes take over people and end up with a functional but cumbersome structure that is sometimes perceived as cold. You feel like numbers, a simple cog in a machine.
In reality, it is humans who are behind the innovative power of companies. Their well-being, commitment and motivation are essential elements for the success of projects.
This is all the more important since projects are very rarely (if ever) carried out in silos. Everyone’s efforts must be coordinated and communication must be open and clear.
Solutions that really work…
… rather than exhaustive documentation. The latter is essential and fundamental to properly document projects and serve as a guide for subsequent steps. On the other hand, if we spend more time writing documentation than actively working on our projects, it’s not an efficient use of our time.
Also, if you feel obliged to do such exhaustive documentation, you have to ask yourself why. Does what I delivered really work, is the logical answer to the initial need, or does it not really work and documentation is required to compensate for a lack of coherence or relevance of the solution?
Collaborate with clients rather than negotiate
Whether internal or external, the customer is involved in the creation process from start to finish as well as in all the steps in between.
Iterating planning of a project and its partial deliveries allow feedback to be collected as it goes and then to make continuous adjustments. The customer knows where we are, where we are going and what remains to be accomplished.
In more traditional project management, there is a tendency to fall into a relationship of strict negotiation of contract terms and any change to the project implies an almost complete revision of it, costing more in time and money.
The iterative mode advocated by agile philosophies means that a major change in the customer’s demand, for example in terms of budget or deadline, only requires a review of the scale of the project without jeopardizing its delivery or quality.
Adapting to change
It’s impossible to predict everything from the start, and there will certainly be changes or unforeseen demands. This is one of the certainties of any project.
The iterative nature of agile projects allows these requests to be integrated into a future iteration without (too much) problem. You’re never in the middle of a 2-month work sequence, at least, not in IT or marketing projects.
An agile mindset allows you to welcome unforeseen events with much more calmness, as they usually don’t jeopardize months of work. At worst, we will have “lost” a week or two, but they will not really be lost because we are always building on top of the previous iterations.
Deliver a little value often…
… rather than delivering a lot of value just once. Or worse! Delivering little value after months of work.
Let’s take an example close to our field: the launch of a new brand. One might be tempted to develop everything upstream and launch the brand in a grandiose way: a complete transactional website, a well-stocked blog, a brand image declined for 15 personas, a complete product line and a massive advertising campaign to storm the internets immediately.
But in the end, after tens of thousands of dollars invested, the brand completely flounders and we only have a gaping hole in the wallet.
Approaching the launch of a brand with an agile philosophy means iteratively launching parts of the campaign. Obviously, there is a work of ideation, analysis and creation that must be done before any launch, even partial.
On the other hand, MUST the website be transactional from the start where a one-pager is enough to do a pre-launch and measure interest? Is it necessary to have a line of 20 products at launch or could developing 1 or 2 excellent ones to start with ensure the beginning of the brand? Does the advertising campaign have to be carried out on all fronts from the start or can we start with visibility campaigns on social networks to test what works?
Agile concepts and tools
Flexible goals
In agility, we start from the principle that setting precise and immutable objectives from the beginning of a project is impossible and completely counterproductive. Instead, we will propose objectives that are flexible over time and adjustable as needed. There is no point in staying on a road that you already know will not lead you to your destination…
The backlog
It brings together all the tasks, the “blocks”, that we want to deliver at a more or less distant moment in the future. They are organized in order of priority in order to build the strongest tower possible, starting with the foundation and building each iteration on top of it. There’s no point in installing the door handles if the doors aren’t installed. Gypsum boards cannot be installed if the electrical wiring has not been passed through the walls.
Each task is also evaluated in terms of difficulty or time. This allows for better prioritization of tasks and to be able to assess the team’s actual ability to deliver for a given period, also known as an agile sprint.
The sprints
Rather than focusing on a long-term end goal, the agile method focuses on short-term goals, usually over a period of 2 to 4 weeks. These periods of work are called sprints and their purpose is one of these partial deliveries.
These sprints, or iterations, form loops that repeat until the final project is completed. Cutting a project into smaller bites ensures constant adjustment and regular feedback. This makes it easy to identify what’s wrong (and what’s working!) in the development, testing, and deployment of a project element.
Scrums
An integral part of a sprint, the scrum is a very brief daily meeting, usually about fifteen minutes maximum, which aims to answer three questions: what did you do the day before, what are you going to do today, and what did you encounter as a blocker.
This makes it easy and quick to identify what may be hindering the progress of a task, and the stuck employee can discuss the problem with the project manager… After the Scrum, of course! Indeed, the scrum should not be used to discuss problems, but only to take the pulse of the team, to make sure that everyone remains aligned on the short-term objectives and to indicate their need for help.
Many retrospective steps are also part of the process. In these discussions, the focus is on the work process, not the product. Problems and deviations are therefore identified as quickly as possible, and major consequences are avoided! The teams and customers are all the better for it.
Agile marketing
While the agile project management method is very common in web development, this approach is encountered a little less often in digital marketing. However, it is a management method that lends itself very well to web marketing campaigns, as this industry shares several points in common with web development.
For example, rapid iterations, or sprints, allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing elements on a smaller scale rather than launching large-scale campaigns that risk missing their target.
We also focus on doing concrete and practical tests to generate analyzable data rather than basing our decisions on opinions, established conventions or theories. Digital performance marketing is a fast-paced and evolving environment, and data is an essential tool.
Small experiments allow you to follow a very simple methodology: see far and start small. This allows you to determine whether you need to pivot and explore another avenue or stay the course and persevere, depending on the results obtained.
Agility in performance marketing
In marketing, the agile method makes it possible to accelerate the production of campaigns by relying on data analysis. For example, it allows you to build on campaigns that have worked in the past and replicate it with a few simple adjustments.
With constant feedback, data and short-term goals, you can quickly adjust your course and add new elements when the first tests are successful. This is when you can consider complicating the campaign, adding geolocated content, breaking down according to several consumer personas, etc.
The agile philosophy, with its focus on delivering value at every stage, flexibility and speed of adaptation, is proving to be an essential ally for performance marketing. This type of marketing carries particular risks for companies and agility allows them to be mitigated as much as possible.
To ensure the profitability of performance marketing campaigns, you often have to adapt very quickly to changes in the type, quality and behavior of the web traffic you receive. This speed of reaction is essential in order to protect our profit margins, but also to protect the commissions of our media buyers and those of the affiliates who are members of our network.
A lack of responsiveness in performance marketing can result in a significant decrease in profitability or even cause financial losses if the campaign costs more than it brings in.
Adopting an agile marketing project management philosophy helps to avoid getting bogged down in campaigns because you insist on “following the plan” when the right strategy is to change the plan or even, sometimes, abandon the plan. Since the initial plan has been split into several iterations that all deliver value, benefits (monetary, technical, knowledge, etc.) can be derived even from abandoning a project.
Agile methods are ultimately a very logical and humane way to manage our projects to maximize their impact and ensure that we are doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. More than methods to be put in place, it is a real culture to be put in place in order to gain in efficiency and strengthen the synergy between the different departments of a company.
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Do you already have an agile mindset and want to grow in a fast-growing company? Crakmedia is currently recruiting several positions in development, data science, graphic design and accounting. Apply directly on our Workday platform: crakmedia.com/carreers
Missed our first article in the AI series? It’s here: Design and visual creation
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