Higher quality & faster work with less stress

Quotes

• “I’m a Co-Founder of Agile Sherpas. We train marketing teams on how to translate agile principles and practices to work in our unique environments.” - Andrea “We love agile as a concept but we’re aware that it needs some adjusting to work for marketing since it first showed up in software development.” - Andrea “Agile is all about the focus. It's about doing the right work at the right time and having a process that really forces you to identify what that impactful work is and then go execute it to completion in the most effective way possible before moving on to the next thing.” - Andrea “It consists of doing the high-value work quickly, but agile also means building into the process the requirement to revisit that work and to evaluate its effectiveness, or lack of thereof.” - Andrea “Pre-agile world tends to focus on up-front planning. It doesn't take into account the inevitable volatility and change of the digital world we live in.” - Andrea “It all starts with visibility. What are we working on right now? Is this the right stuff? All of that can be a simple backlog.” - Andrea “Once we have a backlog, we move on to the workflow visualization. What’s currently in progress, what stages are we going through, where are things getting stuck, etc.” - Andrea “We begin with the annual vision and then we start trickling down to smaller pieces until people can start executing them.” - Andrea “We coach teams to implement something that we call WIP or work in progress limits.” - Andrea “At Agile Sherpas we have a core team of four people. Each of us has a WIP limit of two. We can only be doing two things at any given time.” - Andrea “Our philosophy comes from the Kanban framework - it forces us to stop starting and start finishing.” - Andrea “Agile world is also famous for sprints - short little time boxes of work. It is similar to setting WIP limits. For example, for the next two weeks, you can only focus on creating content and until it is done you won’t be taking any new projects.” - Andrea “Sprints create a focus within the team. Paradoxically, it allows them to do more by committing to less.” - Andrea “Sprints are typically short - they are only one to two weeks long.” - Andrea “In marketing, it's vital to have a group of people looking at that strategic mid and longterm point of view.” - Andrea