Marketing in Healthcare During a Crisis with Agile
In early March I trained the marketing department and helped launch an agile pilot at Premier, Inc., a healthcare company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Just days later a pandemic was announced, their major trade show was cancelled and the physical office was closed indefinitely.
The marketing team had a really tough job ahead of them—continuing to deliver value and insight to executives during the biggest healthcare crisis anyone has ever experienced, all while learning to work as a remote team for the first time ever.
“Agile is an amazing way to keep people engaged in a virtual environment,” said Kaycee Kalpin, Vice President of Strategic Marketing.
“Agile is an amazing way to keep people engaged in a virtual environment” — Kaycee Kalpin
Piloting Agile Marketing with COVID-19 Communications
The agile marketing pilot team had a new mission—to provide near real-time communication around COVID-19 breaking news and solutions to healthcare clients at a rapid pace. For a large company that was accustomed to months of planning leading up to campaigns, there was no better situation than this to test their ability to be agile.
The team met at least once, sometimes twice a day during the first few weeks for stand-ups to organize around work, break down work into small chunks and size work using story point estimation. They worked in sprints to rapidly test and learn from their assumptions, iterating as data and feedback became available.
“I thought our pilot was really, really impactful. The data suggests that our core audiences continued to meaningfully engage, even during the pandemic,” said Kalpin.
Kalpin said that the agile training couldn’t have come at a better time because the team had a lot of tools in its tool belt to be able to work remotely. “Everyone defaulted to what they learned in the training. Let’s write it down, put it in a sprint, see how much we can handle in a week. Because of that we got a lot more done,” she said.
Learning from the Agile Pilot
An agile pilot is not meant to be perfect, but to learn what works (and doesn’t) in your organization.
The team saw many benefits during the pilot, such as better collaboration and communication, improved teamwork, getting work released more quickly and being able to better respond to an ever-changing healthcare crisis, while providing clients with real-time information.
Efficiency in getting the work done has been one of the major benefits that came from running the agile marketing pilot.
“We’d sit for weeks and weeks and weeks,” said Kalpin. “Everything is changing by the minute. We can’t have an editorial calendar and follow the plan. Agility and efficiency into getting things to market vs getting it perfect has been really great for us.”
One of the biggest learnings that came from the pilot was the need for teams to be fully dedicated to the work of the team, rather than having to support other projects. Some of the pilot team members were only able to commit to 20 percent of their time, while still being expected to do other work.
The pilot team also experimented with different tools for managing their work, beginning with Microsoft Teams, but finding that Monday.com better suited their needs.
As with most agile transformations, some people were onboard with the change, whereas others had a difficult time leaving behind old ways of working, especially when it came to working in areas beyond someone’s specialization.
Scaling Agile Marketing at Premier
By taking a ‘nail it and scale it’ approach, Premier’s marketing organization was able to take what worked for them and scale beyond the pilot team to three self-organizing agile marketing teams.
The biggest change they made was to move from organization by internal function to setting up teams by customer segment. Rather than a broken customer experience because they were getting communications from multiple departments within the company, customers now receive seamless communication that’s highly targeted.
Each team manages a backlog of work and every team member is now 100 percent dedicated to that work, allowing them to have very focused, streamlined marketing that’s customer-centric.
Kalpin allowed each team to choose the agile framework that worked best and the teams are all doing a hybrid of Scrum and Kanban, some leaning in more heavily on one than the other. The teams don’t keep a consistent sprint cadence, but lean on sprint time boxes for specific initiatives.
Creating a culture of cross-functional skills among team members has been rewarding. “We’re seeing a lot of cross-pollination. Newer members are stepping up to lead and grow in new ways—skills I never knew existed on these teams,” said Kalpin.
Advice to CMO’s
Having experienced this change first-hand, Kalpin has some pretty great advice to any CMO that’s looking to transform their organization from traditional to agile.
“Educate yourself and understand what it means for you and how it works before you start socializing and training the team,” said Kalpin.
She adds that without a firm commitment, people will see the transition as optional, but everyone needs to be a part of it to make it work.
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