It's great that Agile development is so successful that it's sparking ideas across the company. I think there are parts of Marketing that could naturally benefit from a sprint model, and others that won't. IMO a sprint model is most valuable if the Marketing team isn't already managing closely to deliverables and timelines and intermediate milestones.

For the production-oriented activities (web updates, lead gen, collateral), sprints could be a great way to keep the focus on deliverables. Getting a few things done-done in each sprint can reduce some of the thrashing that we do in marketing, and gives the marcom team permission to put some new requests "into the backlog." 

A few things to watch out for:

- most marketing activities take weeks/months of sporadic effort, rather than one burst. For instance, an event may take many months to plan and execute. Dividing this into "stories" or elements for each sprint can easily create lots of overhead if you get too consumed by the process.

- much of marketing (especially product marketing and sales-related activity) is heavily interrupt-driven and time-sensitive, with lots of different task threads to be handled in a given day. Your internal customers grade you on responsiveness. That means setting aside large slices of time for field/interrupt handling in your sprints, or assigning only a few hours each day to planned tasks.

- "done" is more subjective for marketing materials, since there's no objective "test" other than the experience and opinion of the team. You'll need to resist the temptation to declare things "done" just to meet your sprint.

Overall, the general application of the agile practice of value-based prioritization is useful and most marketing teams do this, but perhaps they could do it more openly or agilely? It would make the team more accountable and its work more visible. However, if these aren't problems that you're already having, then changing your management approach just to impress higher-ups may not be required.

Answered By Rich Mirnov