Agile methods for planning - from software to market research - have evolved to a buzz/hype laden, heavy, and bureaucratic burden. At least in many shops that have too many people bearing spreadsheets and too few creating unit tests.
In practice I've restricted Agile/RUP/XP/etc to the minimum applicable elements necessary to get the job done consistently and humanely. Typically this means a basic sizing/risk estimate for discrete stories (oops my 1990's XP training is showing), pushing the high risk elements into early prototyping, burn/build tracking and iterative assignments.
Generally it gives our teams what they need - projects that have the features and functions it needs, clear visibility, ability to change scope and assurance of date/budget delivery.
Applied to planning (advertising / product or research) a recent book eschews the mythos and hype around agile and boils it down to simplified experimentation. I read a good review that simplified it even further:
It's about doing the minimum amount of work needed to get to, or inspire, an idea. It's about cutting down the waste - things like deliberating adjective soup and brand vegetables for 3 months.
It's about generating hypotheses that can be tested, not sitting in an ivory tower with a damp towel on your head waiting for the answer to appear like divine inspiration.
It's about making stuff that can be tested in the real world, not running weeks of focus groups to hear people talk about how they think they think or might behave.
It's about making as few charts as possible to explain a strategy or idea - get to the work
It's about understanding that strategy has to evolve and morph over time (whilst being aware there's a danger that this could become an excuse for superficiality).
It's a bias to doing over thinking.
It's about doing stuff to learn stuff.
It's more like experimentation than planning as we know it.
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