Agile workflow is a project management approach that uses iterative cycles for a more dynamic workflow based on increased collaboration and feedback.
Since its launch in 2001, it has become a mainstay in project management. Today, around 70% of organizations use it to optimize their work.
However, we’re still regularly seeing team managers and agency owners discussing how best to use agile workflow. How can it save you money? What will it cost? How can you best implement it? And what are the downsides?
In this post, we’ll clarify the facts, review some of the best Agile workflow solutions, and demonstrate how they can streamline your work processes.
You’ll learn the Agile project management workflow principles and check out some real-life tools that apply the Agile workflow methodology in motion.
Key Takeaways from this guide:
- Agile workflow is a project management methodology that brings improved collaboration, transparency, regular output, and adaptivity.
- Agile uses short iterative sprints to deliver results faster, while adapting to regular client feedback.
- Agile can use frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban to implement the principles.
- A resistance to change, undefined roles, client expectations, and scaling up are common problems new agile teams need to solve.
- Workamajig offers the use of an Agile/Kanban workflow approach to allow fluid and flexible task management, alongside integrated real-time data. It allows for fluid task management, with emphasis on task statuses and priority, instead of due dates and predecessors.
What Is Agile Workflow?
Agile workflow is a flexible project management approach that enables fast-paced changes, collaboration, and adaptations to customer feedback.
Originally developed for software development, agile workflow has since become a game-changer for marketing and creative agencies that need to flexibly manage multiple projects, tight deadlines, and evolving client demands.
Agile workflow is based on four core values and 12 Agile principles. Knowing these can help you better understand the purpose of an agile workflow:
Agile’s 4 Core Values
Agile follows four core values that prioritize teamwork, flexibility, and customer satisfaction.
- Individuals: Human interactions are valued over processes and tools.
- Working Deliverables: Such as drafts and mock-ups, and over-documentation.
- Client collaboration: To provide increased customer value, instead of negotiations.
- Responding: The ability to adapt to changing requirements, rather than following a rigid plan.
Agile’s 12 Principles
In its foundational guidelines, 12 agile principles were listed to help achieve these 4 core principles. They are:
- Customer satisfaction is the priority: The number one priority is to satisfy the clients through early, continuous delivery of value.
- Embrace changes: Even late on, to gain a competitive edge.
- Deliver working assets frequently: With a preference to short timescales, such as weekly instead of monthly.
- Collaboration: Team members must collaborate daily.
- Build around motivation: Create the support and environments to help the team succeed.
- Face-to-face conversation: The belief that this is the most efficient route to information flows. In today’s world, this could be video calls.
- Deliverables are the measures of success: The primary metric of success is its completion and impact, not hours logged.
- Promote sustainable pace: Progress pace should be set so that it can be maintained for long-term output.
- Continuous attention to excellence: The belief that always striving for the highest quality will boost agility.
- Simplicity: The art of deliberately focusing on essential tasks and removing unnecessary tasks.
- Self-organization: The belief that the best results come from self-organizing teams.
- Regular reflection: At regular intervals, the team should reflect on how to become more effective and adjust accordingly.
Waterfall vs. Agile
Let’s clarify how Agile is fundamentally different from the Waterfall methodology, as you may see both used in an agency context:
Waterfall is the term for the use of the traditional linear management methodology, where each phase (planning, design, execution, testing, and delivery) must be completed before moving to the next. This makes it rigid and slow to adapt.
It’s the “norm” in most creative agencies, as it suits fixed-scope projects or compliance-heavy projects.
The agile approach, however, is the opposite in philosophy and shines for dynamic, evolving work. It focuses on flexibility, iteration, and real-time collaboration.
Agile is iterative, meaning work is done in short cycles with constant feedback and adjustments.
In recent years, agencies have begun to see the downsides of Waterfall’s rigid format and have begun blending the two approaches.
At Workamajig, we’ve built our project management software in a way that allows it to accommodate multiple scheduling methods, including Agile practices. We understand that it’s a crucial need for creative agencies to be able to work with deadlines that can be adjusted as needed in order to accommodate delays while still keeping to a deadline.
How Agile Workflow Works
Agile workflow lifecycle operates around short iterative sprints, which allow teams to deliver usable work while adapting to client feedback on a regular basis.
A standard agile sprint cycle can be broken down into 4 key steps:
- Planning: The team selects prioritized items from the product backlog, estimates the required effort, and defines sprint goals.
- Execution: The team develops deliverables with daily stand-ups to track progress, address blocks, and share feedback collaboratively.
- Review: The team demos completed work with stakeholders for feedback.
- Retrospective: The team reflects on what worked, what didn't, and plans what process improvements can be made for the next sprint.
Standard Agile Practices
The standard agile practices that most teams and product managers use to meet their business needs can be broken down into work items such as ceremonies, artifacts, and techniques.
Agile Ceremonies
‘Ceremonies’ are corporate talk for meetings that are used to fuel each sprint cycle. In agile practices, you can expect to use:
Sprint planning: Where the team decides which items to focus on in the sprint.
Daily stand-up: A daily brief, where you discuss progress and blocks.
Sprint review: Where you present the work to the stakeholders and take feedback.
Sprint retrospective: Where the team improves their processes and reflects upon the sprint.
Agile Artifacts
Artifacts are the documents or tools that can be used to track, prioritize, and measure work. It makes abstract things, like progress, easy to visualize. They form the backbone of any agile sprint and often include:
Product backlog: A dynamic list of everything that might be needed to complete a project. It’s the go-to for knowing what to work on next.
Sprint backlog: The items that have been selected for a particular sprint. It defines what you’ll be working on and aiming for.
Increment: The sum of all the Product Backlog items completed across all sprints. These items have been tested, reviewed, and are ready to be finally delivered.
The Key Benefits of Agile Workflow for Marketing and Creative Agencies
Adopting an Agile workflow can transform the way marketing teams and creative agencies operate. Here’s how:
- Improved Collaboration: Its principles and tools encourage a focus on collaboration through daily standup meetings, shared progress tracking, and open feedback loops. Instead of individuals reporting to each other, maybe once a week or fortnight, it starts to become a key part of daily work.
- Increased Transparency: Agile workflow tools, like kanban boards or sprint demos, encourage alignment and progress updates, which make work much clearer to clients than monthly reports.
- Faster Project Completion: By working in short iterations, teams can deliver results more quickly. This can help you get a competitive edge.
- Enhanced Client Satisfaction: Clients are kept in the loop and able to leave feedback on a continuous basis, reducing the chance of costly, large revisions at the end.
- Better Adaptability: Agile’s flexible nature helps teams pivot quickly in response to industry trends or client needs. You’ll be able to quickly adapt to client feedback and avoid getting stuck in rigid thinking.
Agile Workflow in Action: A Marketing Agency Case Study
An excellent case study published by Agile Alliance really hits home. Alm Brand, a Danish financial institution established in 1792, transitioned to a "Spotify-inspired" agile setup with 25 scrum teams across two tribes.
The shift led to challenges such as role confusion, coordination bottlenecks, and stakeholder misalignment.
To address these issues, they switched to autonomous scrum teams, introduced temporary Delivery Leads to manage cross-team dependencies, and implemented events like Big Room Planning and Value Area Meetings to improve alignment and prioritization.
Alm Brand’s journey shows the true power of Agile principles when they are applied with simplicity and clarity.
The 5 Essential Steps to Implement an Agile Workflow
To implement any type of agile workflow in your team, you can follow these five essential steps:
1. Define Your Agile Framework
Credit: Businessmap
Before implementing Agile, decide on the right framework for your team. This will be used to implement the practices listed above in different ways. Popular options include:
- Scrum: Scrum structures work into sprints with defined roles, events, and artifacts. It is one of the most widely used methods for creating value through iterative project management.
- Kanban: A visual framework that focuses on continuous improvement via kanban boards, work-in-progress limits, and pull systems. It brings high-quality results efficiently.
- Scrumban: A hybrid approach that blends Scrum’s structure with Kanban’s visual flow, for teams that need predictability and flexibility. It’s perfect for creative teams that want planned structures with the ability to handle rushed changes.
Whichever methodologies you choose to work with, you can use Workamajig’s project management software to combine both structures and flexibility into your daily practices within one system.
2. Build Cross-Functional Teams
Creating cross-functional teams is essential to agile success, as it breaks down isolation and encourages fast decision-making.
By creating a cross-functional POD (product-oriented delivery team), you can ensure that daily stand-ups naturally spread information sharing and efficiency.
Ensure each team includes members with diverse skills, from designers and copywriters to strategists and project managers.
3. Plan and Prioritize Tasks
Creating and ranking a product backlog is a key part of agile project planning. Your team can do this collaboratively using the ‘MoSCoW’ technique, where items are ranked by:
- Must-haves: Essentials to client satisfaction and contract requirements
- Should-haves: High ROI and proven success
- Could-haves: New experiments that can give some shine.
- Won’t-haves: Low-impact tasks that can be turned to later, but are the lowest priority.
During this phase, you should also estimate the time required to complete each. View this as a way of providing additional context, rather than setting time limits.
4. Use Project Management Software
Comparison of Agile Project Management Software
Any agency will benefit from using automation-enabled project management software that supports creative workflows for Waterfall and Agile methodologies. This will allow you to visually understand the workflow.
It’s important to find something that suits your needs. In the table below, we’ve compared the key features and setbacks and given our report about which companies tend to use which tools.
These differences are important as freelancers will have different needs than software companies, and project managers will have different needs than the financial team.
5. Continuously Improve Through Feedback Loops
Agile is all about continuous improvement.
Holding regular retrospective meetings allows teams to assess what worked, what didn’t, and how they can optimize future sprints. Without them, your team may end up making the same mistakes.
You can hold sprint reviews on both the client-facing side and team side, capturing feedback for next time.
Potential Issues When Switching to an Agile Model & How to Overcome Them
Switching to an Agile model can bring significant benefits, but it also comes with challenges. Here are some common obstacles agile teams face and strategies to overcome them:
Resistance to Change
Many team members may feel uneasy moving away from traditional project management methods. This is especially true in creative agencies, where creative control is a motivating factor for anyone’s work.
To prevent that, you can provide Agile training sessions, workshops, and real-world examples of success. Start with a pilot Agile team before expanding, showing how much faster delivery becomes. How much less dramatic the revisions are, and how much happier the client became.
Lack of Clear Roles
Agile gets rid of rigid hierarchies. But that can cause some confusion about responsibility. To avoid people losing any clear understanding of roles, you should define roles up front.
For example, with a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Development Team Members.
Difficulty in Managing Client Expectations
Clients who are used to fixed deadlines may struggle with the iterative nature of an Agile workflow. It can feel unpredictable, and you may even face some pushback at first.
To get around that, you can use a hybrid approach that uses waterfall for the pitch and agile for the execution. Or you can hold a client workshop, educating them about Agile’s benefits, such as faster feedback loops and higher-quality deliverables.
Scaling Agile Up
Agile is often designed for small teams, and scaling it up can lead to inconsistencies. So, what do you do when your team is growing?
One solution is to consider frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) or LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) to maintain alignment across multiple teams. Or, to use a system like Workamajig, which uses a dashboard for planning, resource allocation, and profit tracking that all team members can access in real-time.
Facing an Increased Workload
As the focus is now on faster delivery, you need to make sure that your team isn’t swamped by an increased workload. Switching to an agile workflow process requires a conscious effort not to start too many tasks at once.
You can get around this by limiting work in progress (WIP), by setting strict WIP limits that encourage completion over initiation.
Tracking Progress & Measuring Success
Finally, without traditional milestones, some teams struggle to assess progress.
Implementing Agile metrics like velocity, burndown charts, and cycle time can help you measure efficiency. By using a tool like Workamajig, you can access real-time tracking and reporting to make this simple.
How Workamajig Supports Agile Workflows
Workamajig’s built-in functionalities support multiple workflow approaches, including an Agile/Kanban hybrid.
It allows for fluid task management, with emphasis on task statuses and priority, instead of due dates and predecessors.
Using Kanban-style pages, tasks move fluidly through stages, so you can track progress without the need to complete them in a set order.
The system is designed to be collaborative and intuitive, so that team members can work on shared boards, adjust backlog prioritization with ease, and prevent overcommitment. Templates make each new sprint cycle easy to set up, too.
And that’s all integrated alongside the real-time project management workflows any agency needs to thrive - from billing and reporting, to messaging and time tracking.
FAQ: Common Questions About Agile Workflow
What’s the difference between Agile and Scrum?
Agile is a methodology for project management that brings flexibility, team collaboration, and iterative delivery. Scrum is one of the frameworks that can be used to implement those values.
How do marketing teams benefit from Agile?
Marketing teams will benefit from the increased flexibility and iterative approach, which allows for better communication, delivery, feedback, adaptation, and reduced inefficiencies.
How do you track progress in an Agile workflow?
You can track progress through visual tools and key metrics. Workamajig offers built-in Agile tools like customizable dashboards, Kanban boards, and automated reporting, making it easy for agencies to track progress.
What are the phases of Agile Workflow?
There are four key steps in any agile workflow: planning, execution, review, and retrospective.
What are common examples of Agile Workflow?
Agile workflows can be found throughout creative fields and product development, for example: In software development, which requires constant feedback on user experience; in marketing campaigns that need to adapt to engagement metrics; or in content creation, where the team needs to adapt based on audience response.