A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Cella-Flavia Buciuman
The foregoing is in fact the basic idea and somehow the starting point for the paper’s authors when
creating the presented Scrum framework. There are many similarities between how software projects
and the way marketing projects are developed. The usual Product Backlog from Scrum was
considered to be a Marketing Backlog from which before the beginning of every Sprint a Campaign
Backlog will be created. Traditional marketing planning may take six month to a year, but the use of
an agile methodology allows the marketing team to adapt to fast-changing market conditions and
respond immediately to customer needs. Instead of setting from the beginning the marketing plan,
marketers can start by setting the objectives and defining the KPIs for those objectives. The use of
Scrum in marketing may have many benefits most of the problems can be detected at early stages
and can be resolved quickly and with minimal losses. This is where the transparency offered by
Scrum occurs, each member of the marketing team is reporting the difficulties he is experiencing,
having in mind that this may influence the entire work group. Objectives or even marketing campaigns
can be improved from one Sprint to another without affecting the overall project development.
The paper outlined how can the particular roles and meetings used in Scrum for software
development can be defined for marketing projects development. In order to measure the progress of
the marketing campaign the authors defined several Key Performance Indicators and gave an
example of how the first iterations of the marketing project might look like (Figure 3). We find that the
benefits of agile marketing can be emphasized by the positive impact on the marketing budgets and
on the level of customer satisfaction. Costs can be kept under control by adjusting change from one
Sprint to another and not at the end of the overall project. Also customers receive an increment of the
product after every Sprint and thus gaining more confidence in a company’s marketing system. This
leads to a reduction of the financial risks imposed by any kind of project implementation. Marketing
managers may always switch from one campaign to another if after the first Sprint the campaign
seems to be unsuccessful without major prejudice to the entire marketing project.
5. Conclusion
As marketing projects have a high degree of uncertainty, organizations should look beyond the
traditional project management methodologies and try to adopt agile methods like Scrum. The Scrum
framework created in the paper represents the authors’ proposal of how an agile method like Scrum
may be applied also in other fields than software development. Considering that the research on
Scrum is still in its infancy in marketing, the presented framework can be used as a guideline in
managing a marketing process. The use of the present Scrum framework for marketing can make the
planning process much more flexible. Marketing plans based on Sprints are short-term marketing
plans and can be much more effective for a company. New ideas, goals or objectives may be
constantly added in the Marketing Backlog, to keep evolving the marketing project or campaign and
every performance report will indicate the progress towards the marketing objectives.
As the authors mentioned the effectiveness of agile marketing is reflected by the use of certain KPIs
but regarding this issue, every organization will individually define its metrics that will clearly reveal
the progress towards its marketing goals.
Future research is needed in this field in order to increase the confidence of companies for agile
methods for marketing. The proposed Scrum framework will be used to develop a larger prospective
study of using Scrum in marketing with comparability across several marketing projects.
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