Scrum for Social Media
The ’shelf life’ of many social media projects may be short lived. According to Google, 20% of the top Internet searches for a given month disappear from the list within 90 days.
Translation: Content this is relevant TODAY will be less relevant TOMORROW and could be irrelevant in the NEAR FUTURE. The longer it takes to implement a social media tactic, the less effective it will be.
Effectively managing social marketing projects requires unparalleled agility. It requires an adaptive method of project management.
It requires scrum.
Scrum (not an acronym) is a project management process with less planning, more prototyping and faster turnaround. Taken from agile software development process, scrum is easy to learn; requires little effort to start using; and works ideally for social media projects. Scrum begins with a classic story:
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?”
The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?”
“I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved.”
The purpose of scrum is to empower committed members of the team (pigs) so they can get things done without being slowed by other stakeholders (chickens). Scrum projects are segmented into smaller subprojects, called sprints, that can be completed within 30 days. During each 30-day sprint, each day begins with a 15-minute scrum status meeting where pigs share their status and plans with one another. Chickens are invited to participate in scrums as listeners — but they aren’t allowed to speak. Work continues in this fashion until the sprint is completed.
At the end of each sprint, meetings (of pigs and chickens) are held to review results and plan the next sprint. These teams store ideas for upcoming projects and sprints in backlog documents and a create a burn down chart to measure progress for the upcoming sprint.
Scrum seems ideally suited for social media projects because it is an ongoing process driven by a series of integrated, short-term plans. Teams work quickly, take responsibility, and adapt as needed to achieve the desired results. During a recent visit to New York, I had the opportunity to admire the scrum room used by teams at Razorfish. They’ve achieved great results since initiating scrum processes in 2008.
After the visit, I’m inspired and optimistic. As I integrate result-driven scrum processes into our digital marketing projects for 2009, only one question remains: As a team’s digital marketing manager, “Am I a chicken, or a pig?”
Show and Tell: Interested in learning more? This eight-minute show created by Hamid Shojaee promises everything you everything you need to know about scrum to begin using it in 10 minutes. Enjoy!
Oink.
This video is a great overview of scrum. It sure seems like a proven, result-driven process.
I like the idea of dedicated team members focusing on projects at hand, and not jumping from one project to another, which is what often happens in a corporate environment, and slows down development.
Some aspects remind me of the days when I worked on interactive media projects with the Human Element/Allen Interactions. A studio (group of team members) focused on my projects, using rapid development, prototyping, and usability testing of parts of the project – parts that were representative of the whole project … to confirm design and interaction met the goals… before implementation through-out the project and completion.