As a Marketing Consultant often serving as a marketing leader, such as a CMO Consultant or Fractional CMO, it’s important that the teams I lead are clear on priorities, and are moving along with tasks in a productive manner.
To ensure this, I work in sprints – time boxed periods to achieve a defined outcome. That’s right, sprints aren’t reserved only for tech or product people. They can be used effectively to project manage any kind of team, really!
Sprint Planning
Before any kind of sprint planning takes place, it’s important that organizational goals and strategy are clear to the team for the specific period. This might mean breaking down yearly or quarterly goals and strategy into month and weekly desired KPIs/OKRs.
Then, together, the group embarks on defining what the upcoming sprint will look like. I like doing this together as a team so that people are part of the decision making and feel accountable toward what they’ve committed to. During this planning phase, we identify all the tasks and dependencies needed to achieve the goal of the sprint, and put them into a Kanban.
Kanban
Tasks are categorized into the Kanban in columns of 1) backlog, 2) to-do, 3) doing, and 4) done. There are many platforms where your Kanban can live, but my favorites as a CMO Consultant are Notion or Trello.
At this point I also like to have a dialogue about hopes and fears, in and out of the team’s control. This opens up thinking and planning around uncertainties and scenario planning.
Daily Standups
Moving into the sprint, daily standups are a crucial part of the equation. During these standups, each person shares what they accomplished yesterday (moved into the “done” column), what they are working on today, any needs, and any blockers.
Daily standups can seem daunting or excessive at first, but these quick 10-15 minute check-ins make sure the team’s priorities are in order, that they are making progress and aren’t blocked. I see these quick meetings as mini investments to save on huge potential setbacks. As a CMO Consultant with short-term contracts, it’s important that issues are detected immediately so they can be dealt with as early as possible.
Weekly Standups
At the beginning of each week, it makes sense to do a bigger weekly standup to go over the last week, what’s on the plate this week, and, again, any needs and blockers. This weekly standup is more high level but a good way to gather everyone, start off the week on the same page, and learn from the past week. I also like to use the weekly standup to check in on those hopes and fears discussed in the sprint planning phase.
Retrospectives
Finally, at the end of the sprint, it’s crucial to perform a team retrospective, where together you look at what went well, what didn’t go so well, what needs to change, and what actions need to be taken for this change to occur. I like using easyretro.io for collaborative, fun, online retrospectives.
Conclusion
If you’re not already using sprints and Kanbans for getting your teams and projects organized, it’s never too late to start! Any new dynamic or way of working will of course take getting used to, but once things are running, they’ll be running smoothly 🙂
Looking for a Fractional CMO to get your team organized? Reach out and let’s chat!