A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Cella-Flavia Buciuman
using standardized metrics; but this is not also available for marketing that suffers from credibility on
this regard.
In the study conducted by (O’Sullivan and Abela, 2007) was shown that the ability to measure the
performance for several marketing activities has a positive impact on firm performance and CEO
satisfaction with marketing. Cohn (2010) considers that one of the main reasons a company should
consider transitioning to Scrum is that time-to-market is reduced and every two weeks to a month the
client can see a valuable functionality of the actual project and decide to release it as it is or continue
to enhance it for another Sprint. This can be associated with an increased customer satisfaction and
indirectly with an increased CEO satisfaction so a transition to agile could be benefic.
Accardi-Petersen (2011) emphasize that the marketing activity should be the concern of the whole
company not only of the marketing department. She considers that in order to respond to the
demands of the customer and to facilitate the movement to agile, as a starting point the focus should
be on the participants, basically on the marketing team. The team must work towards a common goal
and must be totally involved in the process, and this can be achieved by using the 3C approach:
communication, cooperation and clarification.
The present paper is focused on identifying how the Scrum tools used in software development can
also be used for marketing. The authors believe that the specific meetings and roles usually used in
Scrum can be also be used for a marketing project and that’s why they present how these activities
can be conducted on this situation. A model of the first four iterations was created to highlight the
starting point for such a process. This model was developed considering that the marketing
measuring process is an iterative one because Key Performance Indicators and marketing activities
must be constantly adapted according to customer’s feedback. The effectiveness of the Scrum
framework will be emphasized by defining some Key Performance Indicators required to be
measured.
2. Agile development
As in (Kerzner, 2009), marketing projects require the ability to identify and pursue business
opportunities in the market. A traditional approach in marketing project management is more
appropriate and proven effective for simple marketing projects.
Rico, Sayani and Sone (2009) suggest that new product development methods represent the direct
antecedents of agile methodologies. New product development methods used in their early stages
were considered as “push methods” for product development because manufactures wanted to wield
on the market their technology to an unnamed market segment, without any market research. In this
manner a consistent link with the marketing discipline was created. Customer collaboration,
adaptability, iterative development and teamwork, emerged from the new product development
values. The process of new product development involves two directions: one refers in identifying
market trends and the second one refers to idea generation and product design, detail engineering
and testing.
In other areas than software development agile development methodologies are also known as
flexible product development and refer to the ability of changing the developed product without being
disruptive and giving a great flexibility to the development process. In contrast with traditional project
management techniques focused on following the initial plan, agile or flexible methods use several
techniques allowing a low cost of change.
2.1 Scrum overview
Scrum is an iterative, incremental methodology for project management usually seen in agile software
development. Scrum framework is structured to support complex product development. Scrum implies
the use of several rules and of some predefined roles. Each component within the framework serves
a specific purpose and is essential to Scrum’s success and usage (Schwaber and Sutherland, 2011).
As in any other type of project, a Scrum project starts in the same manner. First, the objectives of the
project must be defined. In Scrum this is called Product Backlog. The Product Backlog is a prioritized
list with the features of the product. The difference from traditional methods of project management is
that in Scrum, the Product Backlog, is not seen as a final list of functionalities and can change several
times during the project. The tasks in the Product Backlog can be reprioritized before every Sprint.
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