Neil Perkin has written a succinct post on Agile Marketing – basically applying the principles of agile programming.
Amongst other things he contrasts a corporate obsession with measurement, documentation and meetings with the agile approach of barely sufficient requirements and allowing for multiple iterations to get closer to the customers needs.
Agile says ‘just start and iterate along the way’, and welcomes changing requirements. Digital models are all about experimentation, rapid prototyping, optimisation, beta. The idea of lighting lots of fires, gaining feedback, and using it to adapt the allocation of resources, of chunking down big ideas and long timescales to smaller pieces which might adapt and change in response to a changing environment. Small, incremental fulfillment helps minimise risk, results in better control on costs, and allows for change. Beta is good but perpetual beta is better.
Good stuff. Neil heads his post with a classic Dilbert cartoon, about how “agile” might get mangled as a concept when put into a hierarchy. So let’s not get too stuck on the label agile – what I think we’re really talking about is working in the ways that are most natural to us as intelligent humans keen to learn and grow.
