Agile Planning<br />July 2011<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/<br
/>

neilperkin.typepad.com<br />@neilperkin<br />

This is not about promoting
a new process<br />“There is no singular process” John Jay <br />

A Perfect Storm<br />

Accelerating change<br /><ul><li>Organisations not only
felt bombarded by change, but that many are struggling to keep up.

8 out of 10 CEOs
saw significant change ahead, and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006</li></ul>http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/gbs/html/ceostudy<br />

The relentless digitisation of products,
services and communications<br />Disintermediation & disruption:<br />A journey away from linear, one way, interruption, frequency, inflexibility …towards what?<br />http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/04/beta_tees_and_l.html<br />

Experiences not messages<br />“I suspect
2011’s Cannes Lions festival may be looked back upon as the year advertising and technology agreed to meet and get married on the beach.” Mel Exon, BBH <br />

"The internet is a the
great dis-intermediator – it connects everything to everything else…Previously mass media aggregated attention and brands bought it. To earn your own attention you have to do things, create content, that people elect to spend time with.” FarisYakob<br />http://blog.marketing-soc.org.uk/tag/digital/<br />

Big isn’t necessarily better<br />Broadcast
rules don’t apply<br />Advantage doesn’t always come from scale<br />“My job is to help brands remember what it was like when they were small. Because on the internet they are.” Bud Caddell<br />http://little-people.blogspot.com/<br />

The Changing Role of Media<br
/>= Attention<br />Content<br />= Attention, participation, interaction, content <br />Content, tools, services<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/wespionage/<br />

Media As Facilitator<br />“Media is
less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals, and more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups” Clay Shirky<br />

“The other guys think the purpose of communication is
to get information.We think the purpose of information is to foster communication.”Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/danarah/<br />

A massive opportunity to have
a different relationship with your customers<br />Co-creation, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding<br />

The Data Explosion<br />Marissa Mayer:
it’s ‘bigger than Moore’s Law’:<br />Speed (real-time data)<br />Unprecedented scale built on unprecedented processing power<br />New data (uploaded from sensors and objects - the internet of things)<br />"Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating” Eric Schmidt <br />

Real-time<br />Content creation is quick
and easy<br />Cultural latency is reducing<br />“There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes for information to be transmitted, the amount of time it takes to have an effect, and the corresponding cultural decay rate. The real-time web of twitter and facebook has brought the cultural latency rate down to almost zero. In response, companies must act faster, responding in real time, to keep apace with its customers.” FarisYakob<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/bright/<br />

http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/engagement/<br />

The more interconnected our social
graph becomes, the faster new ‘parasitic’ applications and new ideas spread <br />

Struggling to get his 2-year-old
daughter to sleep, Mansbachlet off some steam in the form of a status update: "Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, ‘Go the — to Sleep.' <br />

Hit Number 1 on the
Amazon best seller list one month before release – due largely to a pirated PDF version <br />

So what Is Agile Planning?<br
/>

So what Is Agile Planning?<br
/>…not a new process, more a set of guiding principles<br />

7 Principles…<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/<br />

But first, a little context…<br
/>The Agile Manifesto (Redux)<br />Individuals and interactions<br />Processes and tools<br />over<br />Working outputs<br />Comprehensive Inputs<br />over<br />Collaboration<br />Contracts and hierarchy<br />over<br />Responding to change<br />Following a plan<br />over<br />http://agilemanifesto.org/<br />

1. Ideas From Anywhere<br />

Porous Enterprise - Chance favours
the connected mind<br />The Eureka Myth – the myth of the lone-creative genius with a spark of sudden inspiration<br />Ideas take a long time to mature, sometimes laying dormant (in the form of 'partial hunches' or half-ideas) for years. <br />It is the collision of these half-ideas that enables breakthroughs to happen. Rather than being a single thing, ideas are networks, or new configurations.<br />

Porous Enterprise - Chance favours
the connected mind<br />The great driver of innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity between us that creates infinite possibilities for ideas to be swapped<br />Agile enterprises that understand this create and enable spaces (physical and virtual) where ideas can mingle (in the way that coffee houses did in The Enlightenment)<br />

Porous Enterprise<br />Employees who increasingly
recognise the value of being connected to the interesting ideas in their own and related markets<br />Employers who encourage their employees to connect<br />http://thisisindexed.com/<br />

Porous Enterprise<br /><ul><li> Connected employees
bring new thinking into the organisation

Allows for innovation at the
edges – non-core thinking

Relationships seen as valuable assets

Flow of ideas into and
within organisations

Companies less reliant on ‘stocks’
of knowledge, and more connected to ‘flows’ of knowledge</li></li></ul><li>The Networked Enterprise<br />A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers<br />“…fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”<br />https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Strategic_Organization/The_rise_of_the_networked_enterprise_Web_20_finds_its_payday_2716<br />

No silos<br />We compartmentalise creativity<br
/>Try to control it, set targets, apply rules<br />Make it the domain of particular job titles<br />Or box it into brainstorming sessions<br />“The longer you work, the more people want to put you in a silo so they can define who you are on their terms – our job is to never let anyone determine who we are by their terms” John Jay<br />

Creative Culture…<br />Creative process involving
a large number of people<br />Often from different disciplines<br />Marshalled around a vision<br />Working as a team<br />“The notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.” Ed Catmull, President of Pixar<br />

Creative Culture…<br />"We say we
are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say 'we are not following'.” Ed Catmull<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/daviddelarosa/<br />

Engineering Culture…<br /><ul><li> Resourcing for
projects is purely voluntary

Project leaders pitch developers to
generate interest

Engineers decide which projects sound
interesting to work on</li></li></ul><li>Agile Development is often centred around the belief that the best results come from self-organising teams.<br />What if we worked like that in communications?<br />

Agencies as incubators<br />Tech startups
get:<br />$18,000<br />Office space<br />Access to industry mentors<br />Access to big brands<br />W & K get:<br />Access to startup talent & pixie dust<br />

The rise of talent networks<br
/><ul><li> An influx of highly talented individuals into the market equipped with the ready means to turn that talent into real value

The need for organisations to
be far more flexible with structures / overheads

The opportunity for organistaions to
work in a new way is properly viable

Networks are highly efficient: broad
talent base, new thinking, flexible costs</li></li></ul><li>A 'brand studio', like a movie studio - pulls in talent to work on specific projects, facilitates a good result, and provides the environment and the infrastructure for effective collaboration<br />"teams are formed around individual client needs, and when those needs are satisfied, the team is dispersed"<br />http://www.cocollective.com/<br />

2. Users at the centre<br
/>

“There are two ways to
get bigger as a company – look at what you’re good at…or start with the customer and work backward…even if it requires new skills" Jeff Bezos<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/legendmedia/<br />

Observation in context<br />Not out
of context (like a focus group)<br />Actual experience <br />Learning from UX?<br />Google Firestarters – Design Thinking in Planning<br />http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2011/06/firestarters-2-design-thinking-in-planning-the-event.html<br />

Challenge The Question – Find
The Problem To Solve<br />“Marry the problem, not the solution” Dan Greenberg, Sharethrough<br />

3. Not a single solution
but lots of choices<br />

“Path dependence explains how the
set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant”<br />"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” Clay Shirky<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/benheine/<br />

Abductive Thinking<br />Business schools tend
to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence)<br />Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible.<br />Helps challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.<br />

Creating and curating choice<br />What
if, instead of generating one solution to one problem, our job was about creating as many choices and options as possible for clients?<br />Tom Hulme http://vimeo.com/14138667<br />

4. Test and learn<br />

The Lean Start-Up Movement<br /><ul><li>
Disruptive innovation is everywhere

Every company, regardless of size
needs to act like a start-up

Combine of the use of
open-source software, agile development methodologies and ferocious, customer-centric, rapid iteration. </li></ul>"My own definition of a start-up is an institution asked to create something new under conditions of high uncertainty…This has nothing to do with company size.” Eric Ries<br />http://startupquote.com/<br />http://madebymany.com/signals/the-lean-startup-movement<br />

Agile working practices<br />“It is
not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”<br /> Agile processes are becoming more and more central to how content and services on the web work<br />Advantage from responsiveness and adaptability rather than scale<br />

Failure is useless unless you
learn from it<br />

Traditional ‘Waterfall’ Approach<br /> Concept<br
/>Detailed<br />Design<br /> Build<br />Ford Motor/Razorfish agile principles <br />http://www.slideshare.net/razorfishmarketing/razorfish-ray-velez-and-laura-fraga-ford-motor-on-agile-processes?from=ss_embed<br />

Agile Processes<br />Agile processes are
based on a continous process of Design it, Build it, Test it, Ship it<br /> Concept<br />DetailedDesign<br />DetailedDesign<br />DetailedDesign<br />DetailedDesign<br />Build<br />Build<br />Build<br />Build<br />Sprint<br />Review<br />Sprint<br />Review<br />Sprint<br />Review<br />Sprint<br />Review<br />Design with vision, optimise with feedback<br />Ford Motor/Razorfish agile principles <br />http://www.slideshare.net/razorfishmarketing/razorfish-ray-velez-and-laura-fraga-ford-motor-on-agile-processes?from=ss_embed<br />

Test and Learn<br />“We absolutely
believe we couldn’t build one of the best loved internet brands in the world without consumer science at the core of our product development methodology.” <br />John Ciancutti, Netflix<br /><ul><li> Allows for a ‘test and learn’ approach

Iterative approaches, prototyping

Not just crafted big pieces,
but smart combinations of smaller executions

Better end product through flexibility
and collaboration

Agile content changes to reflect
user feedback and interaction</li></li></ul><li>Zynga - Ghetto Testing<br />Hundreds of concurrent tests to small groups of users<br />“Not using metrics is like flying a plane in a cloud with no instruments” Mark Pincus<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/chutney_bannister/<br />

Making Stuff Hackable<br />Research by
M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management: over a three year period the amount of money that individuals spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product R & D.<br />…it doesn’t need to be perfect<br />

5. Always On Marketing<br />

Speed Bumps<br />Less emphasis on
campaigning, more on continuous communication<br />

Build brands from the bottom
up rather than the top down<br />Be useful, interesting, entertaining and playful in the service of people<br />Think about what communication strategy can learn from UX design<br />Do something and interesting things will happen<br />Build a culture of experimentation not planning<br />Realize perfection is the enemy<br />Be rewarded for good behavior<br />Small ideas build long ideas<br />http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/2011/05/how-to-think-and-make-small.html<br />

"ideas as unfolding stories, a
stream of iterations and interactions that invite people into the process”<br />“Do stuff and learn from it rather than learning and doing.” Gareth Kay<br />http://www.slideshare.net/garethk/think-small-7958212<br />

Bonfires and Fireworks<br />John Willshire
http://smithery.co/<br />http://www.slideshare.net/gamages/what-is-media-planning-7502182<br />

Converse Domaination<br /><ul><li> Using Google
as a window onto Converse's audience, Identifying keywords that they were performing but that no brands were buying

PPC in relevant, non-competitive environment
leading to a continuous series of content microsites, connecting with the audience in playful, informal ways.

On a slim budget of
$100,000 over 600,000 unique visitors, beating a traditional cost/visitor by 2600%</li></li></ul><li> Participative, Spreadable Ideas<br />VW Brazil sponsored the biggest music festival in Sao Paulo, the Planeta Terra…<br /><ul><li> Promotion for their coolest small car the Fox, through a mashup of Twitter, Google maps and real world prize locations.

VW hid secret tickets across
the entire city, and then displayed them on a microsite using Google Maps. The only way to zoom in was to have the community band together using the #foxatplanetaterrahashtag

A race in the real
world to get to the location first. Ran day and night for 4 days.

In less than 2 hours,
the campaign #hastag became the #1 trending topic in Brazil, where it stayed for the length of the campaign.</li></li></ul><li>

Fiat Mio – Crowdsourcing A
Car<br />Fiat in Brazil asked people to contribute ideas for it’s new model – 17,000 did<br />Refining the brief, entering into a dialogue with Fiat’s designers<br />Brought to life as a concept at the Sao Paulo Automotive Show, November 2010<br />http://www.fiatmio.cc/en/<br />

<ul><li> Ford revealed its 2011
Explorer on Facebook, connecting people pre-launch

The first time a major
car company has forgone an auto show for a new car reveal

The day the car was
revealed online, searches for Explorer more than doubled

Compared to a typical double-digit
increase seen after a Super Bowl ad</li></ul>http://mashable.com/2010/07/26/ford-explorer-facebook-reveal/<br />

Local Motors<br /><ul><li> Open-source, distributed
car company

Community of 3,600 contributors submitted
44,000 designs

Build and sell through network
of local centres

Development cycle 5 times faster
than traditional car manufacturers

A process which is 100
times less capital intensive</li></li></ul><li>6. Smart collection and reapplication of data<br />

Business value will come from
not only breaking down the silo's between our people, but in joining up, and opening up, our data.<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxymcslick/with/3180482810/<br />

Catalysts for Innovation: The Open
Web<br />A total of 1,019 APIs were added to the Programmable Web API directory, that's double the number added in 2009.<br />http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/01/weekly-poll-new-apis-doubled-i.php<br />

Joined up marketing<br /><ul><li> Data
often remains in silo's, un-optimised, not joined up

Smarter use of data =
the better digital based services can get at delivering personal value

Offline/online single customer view creating
real customer centric experiences

Generate better models for value
attribution</li></ul>http://www.flickr.com/photos/22158928@N00/2941827863/<br />

Turning Data Into Wisdom -
The DIKW Model<br />a more useful form of knowledge or evaluated understanding, that adds value, that requires judgement<br />information that has been processed, organised or applied in some way<br />Information has some degree of meaning, structure and purpose applied to that data or stimuli<br />discrete, objective facts, observations, readings, stimuli that have no meaning or value<br /><ul><li> Companies sitting on huge amounts of value

Data that can deliver the
kind of intelligence & insight that can transform business performance</li></li></ul><li>Aggregating and Filtering<br />

Scrobbling<br /><ul><li> Originated by Last.fm
– building a detailed profile of each user’s taste by recording details of the content they consume

This can be displayed on
profiles, or shared through widgets

And used to power content
recommendation</li></li></ul><li>Zite – The iPad’s Intelligent Magazine<br /> Learns from your everyday reading - what kind of stories you click on, how long those stories are, how long you’re reading them for<br /> And the stories you don’t click on (to give you less of those).<br />

Professional + Social Curation<br />

Data Driven Services<br /><ul><li> Offers
consumers recommendations for restaurants, retail outlets, based on an analysis of the activity of over 25 million Citi credit card holders (about 1 billion transactions a year)

Referencing information like how many
times people visit, return and how much they spend. By comparing an outlets prices the service can point to locations that are better value.

Intelligence for outlets - a
breakdown of where customers live as well as average incomes of the residents in that area. </li></ul>http://www.bundle.com/<br />

Social Recommendation Services<br />A movie
recommendation service built on top of twitter<br />Moving beyond ratings/reviews to sentiment analysis driven recommendation<br />

Data + Social + Gaming<br
/>Designed to let fans interact in real time with the action in the UEFA Champion's League<br />A game that syncs automatically with the TV, and allows you to predict what will happen in the game<br />

Using data to deliver better
user experience<br />“A visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment”<br />

Google Prediction API<br />Provides pattern-matching
and machine learning capabilities<br />Categorise, analysebehaviour, power recommendation<br />

Twitter can accurately predict future
box-office takings of big release films<br /><ul><li> Hewlett Packard study studied 3 million tweets about 25 movies last year,

Taking account of the rate
at which messages were posted about it could predict the box office takings before the film opened.

Sentiment analysis on the content
of messages could similarly foresee the ongoing degree of success or failure. Both with a high degree of accuracy.</li></li></ul><li>Can Tweets Predict The Stock Market?<br /><ul><li> Indiana University Bloomington studied 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters

Measuring the mood of the
'twitterverse' on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 %</li></ul>http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball<br />

Predicting the Present <br /><ul><li>
Latest Bank Of England Quarterly Bulletin (PDF) described how it can use search data as an economic indicator, benchmarking areas such as housing, tax, benefits and unemployment.

Official economic statistics are generally
published with a lag. Search data is very timely; it's a by-product of everyday activity as opposed to survey questions after the event; it provides continuous collection of data on an extremely broad number of areas; and it can be effective at helping analyse issues that arise unexpectedly.</li></li></ul><li>Predicting the Present <br /><ul><li> Upload your own data, see a list of the search queries that most closely relate to that real-world trend or pattern

Or input a search query,
converted into a data series of searches over time, and this time series can then be put through the same process in order to identify a list of correlated queries over time.

Or identify how your time
series or search query behaves across geographical areas, see patterns by location, and upload data by region.</li></li></ul><li>7. Free your mind (and your budget)<br />

Having Fewer Boundaries Can Be
Counter-Intuitive<br /><ul><li> Shared Space is an urban design concept that integrates use of public spaces for the benefit of all, removing traditional devices that segregate

Far from leading to more
accidents, behaviour is more positively affected by the built environment and human interaction than through rigid controls and artificial regulation.

Individuals reduce their speed, are
more aware of their immediate surroundings, seek out eye contact with other road users.</li></ul>Makkinga - Netherlands<br />Ref: Martin Thomas ‘Loose’<br />

…a bit like budgets<br />"We're
losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour...The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles.” Hans Monderman<br />

Unplanning<br />Plans are rigid, set
far in advance, take up huge amounts of management time<br />Assumptions and predicted outcomes are out of date<br />Detailed plans are the enemy of adaptability<br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/82202517@N00/<br />

A Way In To Agile…<br
/>McKinsey :`Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment’<br />Recommends brands spend 80% of their budget on banker strategies and tactics, and 20% on learning through well structured tests. <br />https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Boosting_returns_on_marketing_investment_1602<br />

Thank you<br />neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/agile-planning.html<br />@neilperkin<br />

Appendix: Resources<br />Books:<br />Steven Johnson
– Where Good Ideas Come From<br />The Game Changer – AG Lafley, Ram Charan<br />Martin Thomas – Loose<br />Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody<br />The Power of Pull – Hagel, Seely, Brown <br />Blogs:<br />Paul Isaakson… http://paulisakson.typepad.com/planning/<br />John Willshire… http://smithery.co/<br />Mark Earls… http://herd.typepad.com/<br />Gareth Kay… http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/<br />MadebyMany…http://www.madebymany.co.uk/<br />FarisYakob… http://farisyakob.typepad.com/<br />Ian Sanders – Unplanning http://www.scribd.com/doc/27810926/Unplan-Your-Business<br />