How Kanban can help Marketing Teams
Key problems faced by Marketing Teams
Marketing teams often face a number of problems relating to how they manage their work. These problems include:
- Managing different types of work – larger marketing projects often compete with small requests from around the business
- Overburdening – Faced with varying demand of different types, marketing departments can quickly become overwhelmed with work
- Visibility – marketing don’t always have full visibility of upcoming work coming in from various parts of the business which makes planning difficult
- Context switching – Switching between different clients and different aspects of the law causes a drain on time and capacity
- Dependencies – there are so many people you need to coordinate with – including sales, product management, legal which often means work is sitting idle waiting for input
- For managers, maintaining staff levels and avoid high staff churn
- Predictability is also problematic due to all of the things above – making it difficult to keep commitments
COVID has exacerbated many of these things – with the changing market, more requests are being placed on the marketing team to help communicate with customers.
How Kanban can help
Kanban uses visual management create greater transparency in the work so that we can “see” all that invisible demands that will be coming into the marketing team. We use cadences to ensure we’re taking on the right amount and the right type of work – keeping the team in the “Goldilocks” zone. They also assist to ensure that it flows back out to clients to meet their expectations. Kanban can help you create a more predictable system, even in complex environments with different type of demand. This ensures that you can keep the commitments to your stakeholders and help win clients.
How to get started
You can learn about Kanban and how to start it with your marketing team. Whether you’re a small team or larger, our training has been tailored to the needs of these specific practices for those in marketing. If there are just one or two of you, you can participate in public training or if you have a group, please contact us below for a private training session.
- Team Kanban Practitioner – get started with the basics
- Kanban System Design – learn how to create your own kanban system for your team / group
We also offer consulting to support you in a number of ways:
- helping to get your started with the method
- checking in along the way to make sure you keep focused on the right things and deal with any issues as they arise
- examine how it can fit with existing tooling or introduce new tooling to enable better practices and behaviours
- coaching for marketing managers on how they can successfully lead changes to reach the desired outcomes
