Managing Large Marketing Teams With Agile

At ProductCamp recently in my panel discussion on digital transformation both the audience and panel members discussed the topic of how to manage larger teams with agile processes. I asked David Quinn of EMC, and head of Agile Marketing at EMC a few questions about this issue.

John: If you have a larger team working on a project maybe 10-20 people how do you manage the organization of that many people using agile? Plus, if you are using agile for a larger project that works across silos, how do you use agile across those teams?

David: We do that ALL the time here at EMC….in fact I would tell you it is the norm rather than the exception.   We manage those situations all the time and find the greatest difficulty is getting all the items covered in stand up.  Our solution is to divide up the functional areas and cover the higher prioritized items in each stand up and plan to cover some of the lesser items in the next one.  We ensure that EVERYTHING is covered but we prioritize what we talk about in any given meeting.   Also our work plan, that is transparent to everyone, is flexible enough such that we can accommodate many functions at one time and we tie them together so folks can relate backlog items to functional orgs and individuals.    And MOST of our projects work across silos and we have become experts at breaking them down and forcing folks to see the larger picture, goals and objectives.