“What they built isn’t what we agreed on.”

“The Project Manager told us the rest of the features would be added as enhancements in future sprints. That was three months ago.”,

“Users visit once and don’t come back. We have no tracking because the tags were left out to reduce page weight. IT can’t fit the tag fixes or a user survey into a sprint for another eight weeks.”

Agile is presented to Marketing teams as a win-win. We’re told we’ll get our software delivered faster, and we’ll have more input into the development process. While nobody likes change, that sounds like an enticing promise – so we get on board. When the reality consistently doesn’t match the expectation, the seeds of backlash are born.

Note the use of the word “consistently”. An occasional disappointment, handled nimbly and with emotional intelligence by both teams, can actually do the opposite. Marketing can become Agile proponents.

However, if Marketing is consistently fed a steady diet of “not what we wanted.”, we will first grumble, then commiserate, then, sometimes, revolt. A predictable IT response to this negative feedback is that Marketing’s requirements must have been faulty or incomplete. Gaah! This response feeds right back into the trust issue.

What’s the one thing those huge “things-that-go-thump” Waterfall requirements documents offer the stakeholder? Accountability. We can show Section F, Bulletpoint 14 to the PM and say “See? It’s right there in the requirements”. Marketing doesn’t have that safety cushion in a lean documentation environment. So the blame falls on lean requirements, and eventually on Agile itself.

I once heard someone say, “I am going to actively campaign to bring back Waterfall.”. She found it impossible to get software built to specification in the Agile environment. Her perception was that the Dev team hid behind lean requirements every time they didn’t want to do something or wanted to substitute their own vision for hers. It was the wrong conclusion, but it was arrived at in desperation because she had learned not to trust the process.

Marketers, if you don’t trust your Dev team, do not tiptoe around the subject. Don’t sit through meetings silently, then bad mouth your colleagues when you get back to your own department. Get some bosses involved. Sit down and hash it out. Uncomfortable? Yes. Necessary? Hell yeah. Lack of trust will cause more than a backlash – it can cause chaos. And inertia. You can’t afford either one.