Collaboration Designer at Afa Försäkring

Afa Försäkring is an insurance company owned by Svenskt Näringsliv, LO och PTK and is not profit making. The employees are insured via the collective agreement within the private sector, communes, and regions. Afa Försäkring also has business areas working with research and providing knowledge to prevent accidents and increase health at work.

INTRODUCTION

The problem

Afa Försäkring reached out to me because they primarily needed help to lead the acceptance and functional tests as well as help execute them on their new platform for the external web. The site is very content heavy, and it was important that the editors felt confident when working with this new CMS, Contentful.
The other challenge was that the team, consisted of 15 people who worked with the product from 30% - 90% of their time, were moving from a project phase to a maintenance phase.

The solution

Collaboration and communication were key. We had to constantly remind us about where we were and where we were going so that we were on the same page and went from there. To get value quick the whole team needed to focus on the same thing.

My role

My focus was to get the team to work together efficiently to be able to deliver with quality and on time.
That meant creating a space to gather important information about the solution and our way of working,  one common backlog in Azure Devops for the web site we were building and training the rest of the team on how to work with it. 
I also lead the acceptance and functional test. 

THE ASSIGNMENT

How did we start?

When I joined the team they had already built the external web on the new platform, Contentful, and it was time to verify the solution. The editors hadn't been able to participate as much when building the solution so it became more of a collaborative task. This was a good way to build a relationship with the editors which was very valuable in the long run. 

What did we learn?

Get the editors on board quickly. Content is a big part of the overall solution. If they don't know how to use the different content types it doesn't matter how good the design is in Figma or how solid the code is.
User testing one of the best ways for the whole team to get real concrete insights. Even though it takes a lot of effort, there's nothing that beats listening and talking to real users. In this case the real users were visitors of the web site, not only the editors creating content.

"I don't understand how to create content with this set up.”

Voice from the business

What did we do?

We released a beta version of the site , accessible for everyone at Afa Försäkring and some people outside of Afa Försäkring, I continued to work close to the product owner, editors, UX designers and development team helping them to gather insights, requirements and prioritize and plan them in our roadmap so that we knew we were doing the right things and what we focused on now.
We continuously made changes  after getting input from users and stakeholders and after a couple of months we released the new website.

THE CONCLUTION

Results and impact

We launched one month later than expected due to other large initiatives that got prioritized. The same competences were needed in all big initiatives at the same time.
I structured our backlog, set up forums and other  sources to share knowledge and to improve our way of working together. This was a key factor since our team was so big and it's something the team can continue to iterate on to be able to work efficient, asyncronic and structured.

Main challenge and lesson learnt

There's a difference between a team and a group of people. 15 people who don't work close together the majority of time will never become a high performing team. You often end up with smaller teams that don't always share the same goal.
Gathering the whole team often to talk about where we were going and have one backlog as a single source of truth helped a lot.

Next steps

The  team is smaller now and will continue to improve the site.  We put a lot effort in setting up the solution and our way of working to enable a user centric approach.