A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Cella-Flavia Buciuman
� Measurability: agile marketing teams can run tests or get feedback from users investing more
time and resources in the most valuable projects. Feedback may also be obtained by measuring
the most important performance indicators for marketing known as Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs) for marketing. Key Performance Indicators are usually defined as financial or non-financial
metrics used to help an organization to measure its progress relative to its objectives. KPIs are
the most important metrics within an organization (Rasmussen et al., 2009). Measuring marketing
KPIs helps organizations to spend more time on the activities that increase the marketing
performance and less on those that are not as relevant.
By going agile in marketing, customer needs are met more quickly as in a traditional approach and
customer satisfaction tends to increase.
3. The Scrum framework for measuring marketing performance
The leading role of marketing is to improve the performance of an organization by developing
profitable relations with its clients.
The Scrum framework in marketing can borrow almost all the elements used in software
development.
First, one of the most important things before transitioning to Scrum is to ensure that the people in the
marketing team are willing to try it in order to reach the goals and objectives of the project. Transition
to Scrum requires changing the entire marketing system in the organization. Marketing teams need to
learn about the agile environment. For most companies, changing the beliefs of the employees might
be the most difficult thing (Accardi-Petersen, 2011). Second, the budget assigned to the project or
campaign is an important factor that will influence the objectives of the project.
By transitioning to Scrum as (Sutherland, 2010) presents, a number of roles must be defined, as it
follows:
� The Scrum Master: one of the key stakeholders. The team must have only one Scrum Master. He
will be the person that runs the Daily Scrum meetings. The Scrum Master role will be assigned to
the marketing manager.
� The Product Owner: he represents the client and he is the person that clearly defines the goals
for the marketing project or campaign. He develops the Marketing Backlog and he is the person
responsible for the performance indicators.
� The “development team”: is represented by the marketing team, which cannot exceed nine
members, depending on the complexity of the marketing project. The team must be selforganizing
and cross-functional and consists of marketing specialists in each of the marketing
areas that will be addressed in the project.
The Scrum framework developed in Figure 2 starts by defining the Marketing Backlog. Two situations
may occur:
� In case of product development: the features of the future product may be obtained through
market research, using market surveys, questionnaires, focus groups or workshops.
� In the case of a marketing campaign: the project’s marketing objectives are established and also
a list with the most relevant Key Performance Indicators for measuring the performance of the
project.
This first step is just for shaping the vision of the client and creating the Marketing Backlog. The
project or campaign is usually broken into Sprints based on the needs of the business.
After the Marketing Backlog is ready, the duration of the Sprints must be decided. In agile project
management, the work is usually broken in smaller tasks. At the beginning of every Sprint, its goals
must be set.
The first Sprint is always the most difficult. Usually the team cannot yet estimate very precisely the
amount of work they can complete during one Sprint. Before starting the Sprint, tasks in the
Campaign Backlog must be discussed and broken in smaller parts if necessary.
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