Agile Best Practices Checklist: The Loops Guide for Creative Success

Every organization has a unique way of working, quirks and idiosyncrasies that have developed over time. Depending on the nature of those ways of working, an organization can more easily embed new approaches to use on a daily basis or for creative projects, like the agile process Loops offers, and some can’t.

Various agile methodologies and agile practices like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean have been successfully adapted by creative teams to enhance productivity and innovation. By incorporating agile best practices, such as effective team collaboration and iterative development, these teams can continuously improve and adapt to changing requirements.

There is no one-size-fits-all creative approach, and each business and creative agency will eventually establish what works best for them.

But what if there was a more efficient way to produce creative brand, client project, and marketing output that’ll fully capture your client’s vision?

The successful adoption of agile methodology by in-house modern marketing teams has streamlined creative projects and aligned them with business objectives, demonstrating the flexibility and effectiveness of agile marketing teams.

Adopting agile project management for creativity requires an open mind

For those who aren’t totally familiar with what we mean by ‘agile creativity’ or ‘agile process’, you can read part 1 of our agile creative mission statement here.

Agile creative development, like agile thinking, starts with having the right mindset. This doesn’t happen overnight and sometimes meets resistance. Yes, ‘agile’ can feel like another overused industry buzzword, but if you agree that the world is moving increasingly faster and that customer centricity is essential to success, it’s probably the best way to describe how to continuously react and win.

Agile development in software methodology offers rapid delivery of value, the same can be said for creative projects as well.

In developing creative projects and company designs, agile methods are a continuous loop of feedback, collaboration, sprint planning, problem solving, and testing, until the creative project’s final product or end goal is achieved.

Like anything new, seeing is believing. This is why one of our internal KPIs is speed to results. We know that getting through the agile creative development process to the data quickly is the best way to showcase value, which is why we offer a no-risk pilot project to demonstrate agile creative development in a real world context and in real time.

But, before starting a pilot project with us, we recommend looking over these simple, three-point checklists to get an idea if Loops is a viable fit for your organization, and making sure everyone is on the same page. The agile creative process thrives on a culture of continuous feedback, learning, and improvement. Agile teams recognise this but any team can learn to incorporate this agile methodology over time.

Checklist 1: The agile marketing culture & best practices

Your team members won’t be able to adapt to agile processes overnight - it takes time, but there are plenty of working software tools, like Loops, that can help speed up understanding and offer more insight. Agile principles provide a foundation for expanding visibility throughout the organization and support practices like Scrum and test-driven development. In order to achieve full agile creative success, you need to think on the core values of your company:

Agile values questions:

1. Is the business actively looking to transform how it delivers creative work, or are you only mildly interested? If you’re not fully bought-in, agile methodologies will feel like extra work and that friction will impact the potential of any agile marketing.

2. Are you eager to use agile frameworks to be significantly faster to market, and speed up decision making? As in three to five times faster?

3. Is design thinking and consumer centricity high up the leadership agenda? Do senior strategists and creatives genuinely value consumer data and keenly seek to incorporate it into the design approach, or is it usually an afterthought?

4. Do you incorporate cross-functional teams? This is crucial in an agile environment, as it enhances creativity and efficiency by bringing together diverse expertise to collaborate effectively.

Checklist 2: Getting sh*t done

The thing about agile creative development is that it changes the pace of productivity from a long jog to short sprints. Creative teams will need to work at a fast turnaround time in order to maximize creative output and embody the spirit of iterative campaigns. Agile project management methodology consists of five distinct phases: Envision/Initiation, Speculation/Planning, Exploration, Adaptation, and Closing. Each phase involves specific actions and goals within the Agile project management methodology.

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself, the project manager and your soon-to-be agile team about the agile approach:

1. Does your team have a ‘just do it' attitude? As opposed to holding too many meetings that debate everything and anything? Giving your team

   well defined tasks

   (a brief explanation is not sufficient!) and setting out exactly what needs to be done can help increase productivity and save time.

2. Is faster learning more highly valued than crafting and finessing at every step of the creative project? As in, do you buy that “perfect is the enemy of good"?

3. Are you confident setting tangible goals and trusting the system, but ok with not knowing exactly how things will turn out?

Checklist 3: People & permission

Before fully committing to the agile process, here's a few points about the higher-ups behind in your creative teams you need to consider first:

1. Is there a top-down mandate? Has someone in the C-Suite (ideally the CEO) put their backing behind implementing agile methodology? This is mission critical!

2. Can you trust those who want to adopt agile creative thinking into their way of work to do so without any sign off from seniors or clients? Removing blockers is likely to result in more progress than problems. Self-organizing teams are crucial in this context, as they are empowered to make decisions, divide work, and choose their own processes and tools, leading to efficient communication, collaboration, flexibility, and a sustainable pace within Agile project management.

3. Do you have an internal evangelist, someone relatively senior (and respected) who's championing all the above and on a mission to make this work?

Watch out!

Is there a Buzz Killington in the house? In any marketing team or creative team, there will always be team members who are resistant to change, who aren't content with consistent testing and no clear idea of what the final outcome will be. For complex projects, breaking them down into smaller tasks can help identify value and make the process more manageable. They need to be quickly won over, or removed from creative projects before they stifle it.

In summary

Achieving agile creative success is all about continuous learning and experimentation, and while there’s a lot of emphasis placed on iteration and making fast decisions in agile methodologies, it does carve out time for essential reflection and analysis. Agile projects focus on the methodology, approach, and success factors that include teamwork, communication, iterative development cycles, and the utilization of Agile best practices. Agile project management plays a crucial role in facilitating iterative and flexible approaches in creative projects, emphasizing teamwork and continuous improvement. It’s about consistently returning to the drawing board with your client’s feedback and user stories in order to figure out the next steps to reach the desired end goal.

Loops simply takes the iterative process of product design, and the agile approach from things like agile software development. Even though software development seems like the furthest thing from creative processes, it can be effectively applied to the creative process, thereby providing you with the easy-to-digest quantifiable data to help you improve the quality and value of your output and encourage stakeholders’ backing those big bang campaigns.