Kanban for Marketers

Multitasking, just like being a team player and always meeting deadlines, is considered a merit for many companies. However, it can result in time wasted due to human context switching and apparently causing more errors due to insufficient attention. Ideally, a person will be able to meet the demands of several different stakeholders without losing control. The danger in multitasking is that effectiveness can be compromised if the person tries to carry out too many tasks at the same time.

So, how about monotasking?

Monotasking is the practice of dedicating oneself to a given task and minimizing potential interruptions until the task is completed or a significant period of time has elapsed. In a marketing team, you are facing the challenge of meeting strict deadlines and executing urgent tasks on a regular basis. Each project requires several levels of attention since you are dealing with publicity and any mistake can harm the company's image. Hence, you should be both careful & fast at handling several tasks simultaneously: setting up new campaigns, planning events, managing social media accounts, creating content and shaping your marketing strategy in general. Let's face it; it is a chaos!

However, there are ways to visualize all the marketing activities as part of your strategic goals and the assignees involved in each step of completion. Breaking down your work creates an organized system of tracking your progress on all levels and focusing on the big picture. The agile framework that will help you prioritize your work according to your team's velocity of completing tasks is called 'Kanban'. Sounds interesting, isn't it?

Before you start implementing Kanban, it would be prudent to review the way you collaborate with other departments inside your organization. In what stage you take over complete control of work and where do you hand it off to another team or department? In that way, you will have a clear big picture of what is expected from your team to deliver and when, what kind of bottlenecks you usually encounter (approvals, reviews, etc.)

How Kanban works?

Human brains process visual information much faster than text, hence Kanban helps you visualize information about your daily work using sticky notes on a whiteboard.  At its simplest form, a marketing Kanban board can start with three columns: To Do, In Progress, Done. This simple board can act as a 'master board' where you can track the status of all projects your team is currently working on or has worked on in the past. It can become a reference for your team to track the overall cycle time of an entire project and all the details regarding the process that you followed.

However, putting a bunch of cards on a board does not mean that you are using Kanban; you should also commit to limit the work-in-progress (WIP). WIP works as a rule to limit the amount of work to be done based on your team's capacity. For instance, your team (consisted of 4 members) cannot have more than 7 stories in the “In Progress” column at one time, that would be your WIP limit.  When first setting up your Kanban board, don’t be too restrictive with the WIP limits you place on each column; make them a little higher than you need. As opportunities for improvement become clear, you can reduce WIP limits. Experiment with your WIP limits and document the outcomes, to ensure that your Kanban system functions at its highest possible level.  

Once the 'master board' is in place, you can experiment and create a more detailed board which better represents the way your team is working, including further columns like 'In Review' or 'Waiting Approval'. Keep in mind that your Marketing Kanban Board is meant to reflect your way of working, not the ideal process for completing work. 

Assign tasks to individuals, not groups.

Tracking who is responsible for what is often a problem in large marketing teams since usually more than two people collaborate on a single task. Hence the is danger of overlooking accountability is evident. To avoid it, each individual bottom level task should be assigned to one of your team members. If necessary, you can use software to create a breakdown of your work and assign different permissions and roles to your team members. Hence every individual is accountable for a specific task and a project manager can monitor the whole team or process making sure that everything runs smoothly.

Tracking your time is essential.

The marketing teams should know how their time is being spent and where it was allocated to be able to optimize their performance. Using Kanban, you can track the time for individual tasks and sub-tasks so you can make estimates about future projects and also measure your efficiency for each specific task. You can then visualize in a graph how long it takes to your team to complete the tasks and focus on the reasons behind it.

Stand-ups and After Meetings

The stand-up meeting is an integral part of Kanban. If done correctly, the Kanban board can accurately represent all the work in progress, which eliminates the need for team members to give daily status updates. A facilitator 'walks the board', reviewing the tasks and querying the team members for a status update if needed. The ritual is focused on identifying blocked items or tasks that haven't changed status in several days. In that way, even a large team of 20 members can complete these kinds of stand-ups in under 15 minutes, which is impressive.

Some Kanban teams also engage in 'After meeting' which basically is an informal gathering of team members who are collaborating on their own projects. There, they can discuss further a blocking issue or a process-related issue. Hence, After Meetings are ideal for generating ideas to improve existing processes.

Bringing it all together, Kanban assumes that you already have some form of work-management process in place that you want to continuously improve. By breaking down your marketing campaign on a visual Kanban board and taking a Lean approach to managing its execution, you track the way you work so that you can get even better at it. This process of continually improving the way your team performs is what will set you apart from other marketing teams aiming for the same results. Thus, whether your team is thinking about trying agile marketing to better communicate with your development teams, or to simply produce more, faster, there is still a lot to be learned for applying agile principles to marketing projects. But the only way to know if agile marketing works for your team is to try it out.

Good luck and stay agile!