Scrum Examples For Creative Agencies

Scrum is a project management methodology that promotes incremental progress and constant feedback loops. It encourages teams to self-organize and prioritize their tasks to move quickly and efficiently toward their goals.

One of the most common examples of scrum is in software development, where teams can rapidly develop and deliver new software features. Using scrum, the team can break down the project into small, manageable tasks, prioritize them, and develop them over sprints.

Marketing teams can also use Scrum. By breaking down larger projects into smaller tasks, marketing teams can better align their output with the needs of their users. They can also quickly adjust their strategies based on feedback from their customers. This allows them to navigate ambiguity and ensure that their marketing efforts meet their users' needs.

Let’s talk about using Agile Scrum in your creative agency.

Benefits Of Using Scrum In Marketing

Scrum is an effective tool for teams of all sizes and can be used in various industries. When used in a creative team, the Scrum methodology can aid in prioritization, clarity, innovation, and output quality.

Identifying High-Impact Activities

Scrum is an excellent tool for marketing teams as it encourages a focus on high-impact activities and drives the team to prioritize their workload. It helps break down complex projects into smaller, more achievable goals and offers an iterative approach to allow for more flexibility.

For example, the team can identify and prioritize the most impactful activities when planning a sprint. This can include creating content, running campaigns, and testing new marketing strategies. The team can continually evaluate progress through the sprint planning process and adjust their focus as needed. As a result, marketing teams can efficiently identify and execute the activities that will most impact the project's success.

Clarity On Deliverables

For a creative project to succeed, the team must be on track, and everyone must work together to reach the same goal.  Scrum forces clarity on the results the team needs to deliver per sprint, which helps to ensure that the team's efforts are unified. 

In sprint planning, teams are pushed to identify tangible results from their work. This makes it easier to determine which tasks need to be completed and when so that the team can focus their efforts on what needs to be done to get the desired results. This helps to keep everyone accountable and ensures that there is no wasted effort.

Additionally, it helps to ensure everyone is on the same page concerning the project goals and the timeline for completion.

Feedback And Refinement

Engaging with your audience is essential to marketing success. The more you interact with them, the better you get to know them, understand their needs and desires, and develop strategies to meet them. This is why Scrum is such an effective tool for marketing teams. It allows teams to adapt to changes and continuously refine their work quickly.

As teams interact with customers, they can use this information to understand their journey and refine their messaging and marketing strategies. With each iteration, they can learn more about the customer and build on their successes. They can also use their insights from customer interactions to refine their messaging or identify other opportunities. With each project, the team can build on the lessons learned from the previous one.

Scrum provides an iterative process that allows teams to learn from their customers, build on their successes, and continuously refine their work. This helps teams to stay ahead of the competition and keep up with ever-evolving customer needs. The ability to quickly adapt to changes and customer feedback allows marketing teams to stay on top of their game.

Room For Innovation

In Scrum, two powerful tools are used to help the team identify tasks that would fulfill the project goals: user stories and scrum epics.

User stories are short descriptions of a feature from the user's perspective. User stories typically start with the phrase "As a user, I want..." and define the features and functions that the user needs to complete a task. For example, on an e-commerce website, a user story might read, "As a user, I want to be able to search for products by category." Epics are longer descriptions of a feature or function that provide a more detailed picture of the project scope.

Using user stories and epics in Scrum allows team members to think outside the box and brainstorm creative solutions to their project goals. Because results –not tasks –are identified before working on the project, the team members have room to be creative in finding solutions and approaches to completing the tasks. 

User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature or work that needs to be completed to achieve a project's goals. These stories are written from the user's perspective, and they give the team a clear idea of the task that needs to be completed. They also allow the team to be creative in finding solutions and approaches to fulfilling the project’s requirements.

What Are Examples Of Scrum In Marketing?

Many marketing initiatives can benefit from the Scrum methodology. Here are a few Scrum project examples of Scrum projects from which your creative team can benefit.

Website Development,

A company's website is an important aspect of its digital presence. It can help to create an overall impression of the company and can be used to showcase products, services, and more. As such, ensuring that the website is intuitive, usable, and has a good design is important. Using Scrum in web development can help you to ensure that the website meets these goals. 

For example, using Scrum in web development tasks such as user interface design, coding, and content creation can be broken down and managed in an organized and efficient way.

You can also use Scrum to create a better customer experience. As your team interacts with customers, they can use this information to understand their journey. With each iteration, they can learn more about the customer and build on their successes. 

Event Production

It can be daunting to plan events, as there is usually a lot to consider and organize. However, with the help of Scrum, an event can be broken down into key elements and acted upon systematically.

You can use the Scrum framework to identify and prioritize tasks when organizing an event. Create a project backlog with tasks such as finding a venue, creating a budget, and booking speakers. These tasks can then be broken down into smaller tasks and assigned to team members. The team can hold regular sprint meetings to review progress and ensure the event is on track.

Scrum also encourages collaboration between team members. With scrum, team members can communicate their progress, share information, and coordinate tasks. By working together, the team can ensure that everyone is on the same page and that tasks are completed on time.

Scrum also helps eliminate any confusion or misunderstandings that may arise when multiple people are working on the same project.

Video Production

Oddly, constant feedback-gathering in the video production industry is rare, unlike in standup comedy and theater. This increases the team's pressure to get it right the first time. Applying the Scrum methodology in video production can offer an alternative method that encourages a more creative process and constant feedback solicitation.

The concept of retrospectives and sprint reviews can be the most beneficial scrum events for video production. At the end of each sprint, the team can take a step back and reflect on what has been done so far and what can be improved. The team can get feedback from stakeholders, customers, and other teams to ensure that the video project is successful. This allows for better decision-making, and the team can make changes quickly.

By utilizing Scrum, video production teams can work together to achieve their goals faster and with greater success.

Social Media Management

Social media marketing is a fast-paced and ever-evolving field that requires frequent changes and timely responses to customer sentiment. It can be difficult to keep up with the changing landscape of social media platforms and user preferences. That is why Scrum can be especially beneficial to the success of a social media marketing team.

One of the ways that a social media marketing team can benefit from Scrum is through the concept of sprints. Sprints are short, focused periods where teams focus on specific goals and tasks. A sprint is normally 2-4 weeks long and is followed by a sprint review where the Scrum team analyzes results and action plans to improve them. 

Sprints can allow marketing teams to respond quickly to customer sentiment and identify trends they can maximize on social media platforms. It also allows teams to be more agile and makes it easier to make changes as needed.

How To Apply Scrum In Marketing Projects

Identify Goals And Objectives

Using Scrum as a framework for project management can greatly increase productivity and achieve better results. The first step to doing this is to set goals and objectives. These provide a roadmap for the project, making tracking progress and measuring success easier.

Goals should be realistic and achievable, and objectives should be actionable and measurable. For example, suppose a project aims to increase customer satisfaction. In that case, one goal might be to increase customer reviews by 10% in three months, to increase customer reviews through targeted online campaigns.

Knowing your goals and objectives can help you identify which tasks need to be prioritized and how sprints can be organized.

Create Epics And User Stories

Epics are large-scale tasks that can be broken down into smaller user stories. For example, suppose the epic is to create a website. In that case, user stories can be related to users being able to navigate the home page and users being able to send inquiries to the organization through a contact form. Each of these user stories can then be broken down into smaller tasks that can be assigned to team members. 

When creating epics, keep them broad and easy to understand. For user stories, including all the necessary details and tasks to complete the story is important, similar to the Scrum user stories examples below.

Scrum user story examples and user story examples:

It is also important to include acceptance criteria: a set of conditions that must be met before a user story can be considered complete. By following these steps, teams can ensure that they are using examples of Scrum effectively and efficiently.

Identify Sprint Length And Plan Sprints

Sprints are time-boxed work sessions that usually span 2-4 weeks. Deciding the sprint length will affect the deliverables you can fulfill during that work period.

Also known as the heartbeat of Scrum, sprints have specific goals that allow the Scrum team to achieve the project objective incrementally. When planning which user stories of working on first, consider your goals and objectives and work on the most impactful activities first.

Effectively planning your sprints will allow your team to focus their efforts on a specific problem at hand and produce good results.

Do Daily Standups

Daily standups are short meetings that take place each morning and involve all team members. They are designed to bring everyone up to speed on the project's progress and allow for any issues or blockers to be raised.

During a daily standup, each team member should provide the following information: 

• What they worked on the day before
• What they plan to work on that day
• Blockers they may have encountered

This can be done in person or using a virtual platform. It’s important that the meeting is kept short and focused, as anything longer can quickly become unproductive.

Daily standups help keep the project on track, provide a platform for collaboration, and ensure everyone is motivated and focused. By utilizing these daily meetings, teams can ensure that their projects are completed on time and to the highest standard.

Review Sprints And Conduct Retrospectives

Reviewing sprints and conducting retrospectives help you better understand what works and what doesn’t, leading to more successful project outcomes.

After every sprint, gather your stakeholders to review the work you accomplished during the sprint. Discuss how well your output achieved your sprint goal and how effectively it contributes to your project objectives. You can also identify issues and brainstorm solutions together. By reviewing the sprints, teams can become more efficient and improve their results in the next sprint.

Retrospective meetings are also a key part of the scrum process. During a retrospective, team members reflect on how the sprint went, what worked well, and what didn’t work in terms of how they collaborate. This helps team members better understand the team dynamics and identify areas where they need to focus their energy to succeed.

Track Tasks With A Scrum Board

A scrum board, also known as a task board, is a visual representation of the tasks that need to be completed to finish the project. 

You can find scrum board examples as physical or virtual boards. Workamajig allows you to create virtual scrum boards you can easily share with relevant stakeholders.

It’s a physical or virtual board divided into columns. Each column is used to represent a different stage in the project. For example, the first column might be labeled “To Do”, while the next column might be labeled “In Progress”. You can move tasks from one column to another as the project progresses. This is a great way to keep everyone in the team up to date on the project's progress.

Once the board is set up, assign tasks to team members and keep the board updated. This can be done manually but can be easier to manage and scale through software like Workamajig, the only project management software built for creative teams.

It is important to keep the board up to date so that everyone on the team knows which tasks are currently in progress and which are still to be done.

Wrap-Up

Scrum is a great way for marketing teams to ensure that they are focused and organized and achieving their goals. It helps to clarify the results the team needs to deliver per sprint, which helps keep everyone accountable and on track. It also helps identify potential issues early on and ensures that the team is motivated to keep working towards the same goal. 

Scrum can be a great way to help marketing teams reach their goals and deliver the desired results.