Getting to Project Zen

Taking your marketing project from chaos to zen

by Lenka Davis

In this article:

• Why Now

• Benefits

• Marketing Agile Method

• Three Steps to Get Started

• Expectations

• Tools to Start Using Now

Why Now

Covid. Zoom. Distributed teams working from home. All of these and more have accelerated the need to change the way marketing projects are handled. If you are a startup with 1 to 2 people or even if you are a bigger organization, you are seeing or feeling (with a noticeable pain in your gut) a pull to work differently, virtually and digitally. 

Now is the time to begin to move into an agile method of working. The time investment will pay off in the long run. The benefits of small teams using Agile is that they have the right sized teams, meaning a small team, these teams usually can adapt faster and they can make decisions on where to spend their budget throughout the year instead of the yearly pre-planned budgeting that limits the ability of the team to be flexible on what to work on each week.

How exactly can a startup do this without a lot of time used against training and education and with minimal cost?

Benefits

Focus on your daily work tasks and get them done. Have a clear plan on what is going on today with your team and the rest of this week’s tasks. Your whole team knows what the business priorities are. These are just three of the benefits of getting your work tasks organized with an easy to understand method, the Agile method, plus your choice of a free app, listed below, to keep it all in one place. The results are that you will know what to work on, what everyone else is working on and what the main priorities are for your business.

Marketing Agile Method

Basically, Agile will bring organization, prioritization, along with transparency, flexibility and the ability to deliver your project more quickly. Try doing one project with your team as a pilot to test out the process.

The Agile software development values, which can be applied to project management and marketing projects, are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

Get an overview on Agile methodology and how it applies to managing marketing projects. Check out the derivatives of Agile such as Scrum and Kanban and get more details on Marketing Project management.

Three Steps to Get Started

1. Commit to adopting Agile at all levels of your startup
   It will take time to adapt completely, but it is easy to understand.

2. Sign up for a free tool and use it for a pilot project
   There are three suggested tools listed below.

3. Get your team educated on the basics of Agile
   Of the three articles listed above, start with Agile Project Management

Expectations

Do expect that the agile methodology is easy to understand. Also, do expect that your team will take some extra time to absorb and convert their way of working. 

Think of it as a home remodeling project, it seems easy (that’s the Agile method), a plan is made (these are the tasks), but unexpected issues happen that will slow down the adoption and completion (this is unplanned work). So will your team's conversion to working fully agile. A full transformation to using Agile will take longer than you thought, but you won’t be able to live without it once it is done. Once the transformation is done you will see the benefits, as you would with a newly remodeled kitchen, for example. You just won’t understand how you executed projects before without the agile tools you now use. 

Do you have several to-do lists lying around? Is your life run by your calendar and email inbox? To begin, set up your tasks in one of these free app tools and start with a pilot project. Plan 50% of your time to allow yourself to be flexible to handle any unplanned work during the other 50% of the time.

Tools to Start Using Now

1.Trello.com

Trello has a simple look and feel that is not too intimidating for the first time user. It’s main method is a column format much like an Excel spreadsheet so you can move your tasks from one end to the other as they progress through the workflow. It allows you to add your team members and even other organizations or vendors to see the project board. Trello is a web-based Kanban-style list making application from Atlassian. It was released in 2011.

You can sign up for a free version of trello.com right off the bat. In fact many people use it for their working and personal projects. 

2. Monday.com

Monday has a wide variety of templates including many for different types of marketing groups and projects. It’s main layout is to group projects with a row for each one. Each row is a project that has columns for the status or state the project is in at the moment.

To get to the free version of Monday.com you will need to sign up for a 14 day trial period and then when that is over you will have the option to select the free version. The free version has limitations of 2 users and 1,000 items. These limits are not an issue for very small teams such as early stage startups or consulting companies.

3. Jira

Jira is a good choice for you to use if you have a software team that already uses Jira. Jira is primarily used for software development and has project management capabilities. You can use the free version of Jira. Jira will work when you have some familiarity with Agile and how to set up large projects, or Epics, and also how to add in individual tasks, or Stories. The format is in columns and the tasks move from left to right as the tasks go from the To Do list, to In Progress list to the Done list. The free version is for 1 - 10 users, unlimited tasks and unlimited projects and 2 GB file storage. Jira is a proprietary issue tracking product developed by Atlassian that allows bug tracking and agile project management.

Fun Fact

Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary of the Scottish economist Adam Smith (author of Wealth of Nations), with plenty of productivity theories of his own, put forth what might be considered the first “to-do” list in 1791. The productivity measure in Franklin’s list of tasks included wash, work, read, work, put things in their places. Franklin’s assessment was simple: Start the day asking what good shall be done, and at the end of the day evaluate based on what was accomplished.