Successful Change Starts with a Sprint - and an Agile Approach

The most successful introductions of Agile usually start with small teams. 

At Purdue, a quickly growing digital marketing team was having difficulty sustaining project development. It was evident that the chaos stemmed from all the requests pouring in daily with no prioritization. The group moved to an Agile sprint approach and worked on creating user stories to address the backlog. Now, every morning, team members meet to discuss the status and priority of the user stories in the sprint, with these short, time-boxed standup meetings focused on the completion of tasks necessary to bring the stories on the sprint board to fruition. By having everyone focusing on the sprint goals, initiatives are continually moving forward and being completed in a timely fashion, and the marketing campaigns are demonstrating a canvas of creativity and strategy. 

An example of the sprint board is below. Each team member has assigned user stories and the collaboration and sharing of information happen in the Jira ticket. This also allows for easy searching on prior stories rather than digging in email or slack channels for the conversation and attachments and allows for transparency amongst the team. The streamlining has increased the velocity of the team performance and it helps structure the workday effectively.

With the daily standups, the energy in the team transformed to positive team building through collaboration on creatives and an improved understanding of shared goals. The culture of trust and brainstorming is continuing to foster innovation and charter new digital marketing strategies for the university in a post COVID-19 world.

Agile approaches promote innovation and performance, and they help keep everyone engaged during situations of high complexity and change. Agile’s emphasis on breaking large problems into smaller components and prioritizing the completion of key tasks can make big challenges less daunting, drive steady, even rapid progress and lead to timely, successful completion of projects.

Learn more about Purdue University's online Agile Certification Course.