Agile methodology is an approach to project management that you tend to see predominantly with software companies, or as a way to manage software development projects. Fortunately, the benefits of this way of doing work are starting to spread.
During my time working for an agency, we didn’t necessarily have a precise approach to project management; clients had needs, we met those needs while juggling the needs of other clients. Simple!
But also exhausting, and disorganized.
Working for a bigger company now, the wider team approaches work utilizing an agile methodology approach.
I’d feel pretty confident in saying it’s better in just about every way.
Table of Contents
- What is Agile Methodology?
- #1. It helps teams accomplish long-term goals
- #2. It helps teams stay organized
- #3. It Makes Planning Easier
- #4. It Helps Prioritize Projects
- #5. It Can Help Motivation
- How Do I Get My SEO Team to Start?
What is Agile Methodology?
At its core, Agile methodology is all about breaking a project into smaller chunks and phases with a focus on continuing to collaborate and improve.
According to the Agile Manifesto, agile development has four primary pillars:
- Individuals over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
From there, the idea gets broken down into principles that are often used in Agile methodology, but that’s going a little too into the weeds for our purposes.
Here’s the main point: by adapting Agile methodology and changing it to fit your SEO needs, you can bring your SEO team’s work and results to the next level.
So now you’re intrigued about the idea, especially if it can help bring about better results; but how does this way of working actually help you and your team? Well, in my experience, this methodology offers a few different benefits
#1. It helps teams accomplish long-term goals
During my agency life where work was a bit more… loosely organized, it became easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks required for so many different clients.
Sure, these clients all had long-term goals set, but with such a furious pace and so many things to do, ticking tasks of the list to make sure everyone was taken care of became a distracting wrench in long-term plans.
Agile methodology by design helps to prevent that. In fact, with this approach, everything you do is working towards that long-term goal.
Theoretically speaking, as long as your sprints are properly planned, and the big task has been broken down accordingly, accomplishing that long-term goal will be a built-in feature of your planning, and a clear conclusion of your work in that area.
#2. It helps teams stay organized
In Scrum, a common Agile methodology for small teams, work is divided into periods called sprints. These periods can be any period of time that works for the team, but in my experience, two weeks is a great amount of time for a sprint.
A sprint is planned, priorities are assigned, and then typically a sprint kickoff meeting happens. Everyone is made aware of what they’ll be working on for that particular sprint, and then it’s off to the races.
Typically you’ll use some sort of project management software, like Jira, or Asana, to help manage these sprints.
But because you’re working in Agile methodology now, your sprint is made up of numerous tasks everyone will be working on, all of which are now neatly documented and accounted for.
This way of working inherently creates an organized record of the work done on particular projects, broken down by logical pieces that make it up. It’s a level of organized that’s truly hard to beat.
#3. It Makes Planning Easier
As you’re breaking down a particular project into its respective sprints, and ticking off the different pieces that get you closer to your goal, what you’re left with at all times is a list of the tasks remaining to accomplish your bigger goal.
As your team gets used to working in this sprint format, you’ll find it easier to gauge how fast each task will take to get done, and then how long it’ll take for whole initiatives to piece together after that.
Agile methodology is a godsend to planning and things like quarterly roadmaps, while still also allowing the flexibility to take on ad hoc requests as needed.
#4. It Helps Prioritize Projects
Working on the SEO team I do, a super useful side effect of Agile methodology has made itself clear: prioritization is easier.
We have a general rule of thumb: if a project takes longer than 30-60 minutes to complete, it should be turned into a ticket, which is then slotted into a sprint where possible.
By having this sort of rule, you force yourself to not only keep things orderly and organized, safe from getting sidetracked and impacting other projects, but you force yourself to prioritize. Ad hoc requests will be tackled of course, but you clear the deck with this methodology to focus on and prioritize the bigger goals at hand.
#5. It Can Help Motivation
Maybe this is just a me thing, but having an endless, unorganized list of things that need to be done is exhausting. There’s obviously plenty to do, and you know as soon as you finish working on something something else will be right there ready for you.
…But it’s also hard to feel like you’re really making any headway against an endless list of things to be done.
Breaking projects into sprints creates inherent start and end points. It creates a checklist of things that need to be done before the sprint is over.
If I finish 3 out of the 6 tasks allocated for this sprint, I know that I’m halfway through the work that needs to be done. That’s encouraging, and it motivates me to keep going.
How about the other side of things: a rough sprint. Rather than an enormous project that takes the wind out of your sails when things aren’t going quite according to plan, a rough sprint has a distinct endpoint, and it usually comes a lot sooner than the end of a project as a whole.
The structure that Agile methodology adds, for myself anyway, inherently increases morale compared to the endless barrage of projects that came working in an environment that didn’t use this approach.
How Do I Get My SEO Team to Start?
Some form of project management software will probably make this a whole lot easier, but that isn’t required. Very very simply, here’s what you’ll want to do:
- Choose a big goal; maybe grow a particular content library’s organic traffic by 20%
- Break that goal down into smaller chunks: publish x new articles, try an experiment to increase traffic, try a new feature, etc. Keep going until you’ve got a bunch of small, manageable pieces here
- Assign those pieces to members of your team
- Have a sprint kickoff meeting to set expectations, address blockers, and make sure everyone’s on the same page
- Start the sprint
- Repeat
Just like that, your SEO team is working with an Agile approach! Granted, this is a very, very simplified example, but even that just goes to show how easy it is to get into the general gist of the idea.
I know for my part, Agile project management is the route I hope to continue operating in, and the approach I plan to take leading teams in the future.
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