Project
Implement Agile Infrastructure
Services
Design Thinking, Business Strategy, Product Design, Development, Product Management, Content, Agile
From the Portfolio of:
Bradley Perkins
Product Strategist & Designer
Challenge
Setup an ongoing workflow between intercompany teams to support rapid digital iterations for site improvements and rollouts.
Project Timeline:
- On-Going project from yearly budget
Deliverables:
- Integrated Agile process and cadences
- Agile Tech Infrastructure
- Staffing Plan
- Budget roadmap
Initial Planning
Blue Shield of California approached the team after the development of their B2B group website and needed a way to continually improve the website with new content, experiences, features, components, and modules. We also needed a way to stay on target to spend the approved budget the company had laid out for the year.
The team crafted a custom Agile setup to help bring the BSC team into what would be a new method of working for them. We mapped out the weekly time availability for all team members, meeting cadences and who needed to attend, a tech stack to provide management support, and finally a training plan to get new team members comfortable.
Structure & Cadence
For our lean Agile team in consisted of two stakeholders, one digital product manager, one designer (additional as needed), and two developers (front-end and back-end). Our sprints were setup to run for two weeks. Inside a sprint, we had a backlog grooming meeting where we discussed upcoming needs and priorities, created acceptance criterias for tasks, and indicated what was ready to be inserted into a sprint. In the last week of a sprint we help sprint planning meetings where we prepared for the upcoming sprint(s) and finally a demo meeting where we documented our sprint tasks and presented the final results for stakeholder approval.
Process
While the team worked in Agile, a simple and rapid workflow was developed to support on-going priority changes but also support bringing in new BSC team members from time to time to help with tasks and initiatives. We broke things down in to 4 stages: Discovery, UX Design, Creative Asset Design, and Implementation. As needed, we would introduce a user testing stage for certain large effort changes such as a new lead generation experience. This added prototyping and user interviews into the process. This workflow allowed us to rapidly get important company initiatives to market in 1-2 months, an improvement on the average of 6-9 months as seen with non agile based projects.
Results & Impact
As the team progressed through the year running Agile with the client, we helped support the growth of the site through enhanced contact journeys, new campaign focused digital experiences, new product comparison calculators, enhanced information architecture, new site navigation with expanded offerings, and many other enhancements around the content management system, and updated client branding.
