Case studies
A few select experiences of mine
Case study: From I to WE
Case client
SVT Play
Background
The 7 platform teams within SVT Play had grown apart, building different experiences. Hence, stronger collaboration and alignment was needed.
Assignment
I was assigned to help out with aligning the team around a common roadmap and build a strong culture of collaboration. I quickly saw that there was disarray within the platform teams apart from the obvious and natural disarray between teams. The focus on solo-work and even trench wars in some cases required a shift of mindset. This made the approach two-fold. Firstly, I coached the platform teams into becoming more collaborative within and being good at expressing that collaboration outwards, i.e. making their work more transparent and focused. I had help in the shape of a central collaborative team who acted as advocates. Secondly, I introduced a temporary but specific way of working structure that would force collaboration between platform teams and support the overarching SVT Play roadmap. This way of working was a necessary step to take on a maturity staircase, because the teams saw themselves as and needed to be two steps up from were they actually were.
Activities
- Attained comprehension through stakeholder interviews, one-on-ones and observation
- Promoted awareness through simulations of a maturity staircase mental model
- Boosted ownership through coaching individuals and separate teams in Agile collaboration, so that they could naturally scale Agile in the whole SVT Play group
- Developed competencies through individual mentoring and group lectures around roles and skills in Agile teams
- Facilitated barrier removal through working with managers, managers’ managers as well as adjacent teams
- Catalysed improvement through challenging the assumptions of what was an Agile way of working and what steps needed to be taken to get there, by constantly repeating the maturity model’s mantra to get a mindset shift in each and every person.
Delivery and Client benefit
I laid the groundwork for a strong collaboration culture within the whole SVT Play group (perhaps soon calling themselves one team), by transforming them from individual teams with a strong sense of ”I” to a shared sense of ”WE”. The strong way of working structure introduced to catalyse the transformation was later changed to a more sustainable version by a colleague of mine. Today, the teams have a clear and effortless way to do SVT Play-wide work. There is harmonisation between teams, platforms and also user and software interfaces through alignment around a roadmap.
A mid-transformation (6 months in) evaluation of the SVT Play group,
showing a little bit more stress, mainly due to the tough way-of-working structure, but greater focus, happiness,
sense of meaning and engagement
Case study: Developing a team
Maturity mapping using the Collaboration Model
Case client
SVT Mixat
Background
To be able to improve, it has to be obvious what the starting point is, what the landscape of change looks like and what the end goal could be. It can start by raising awareness of the current state.
Assignment
SVT Mixat wanted help improving their way of working. While we were talking, they realised the importance of mapping out their maturity in different areas and invited me to teach and workshop with them around the topic of improvement.
Activities
- Teaching both incremental change and mindshifts through a suitable mental model for the audience to get a grasp of the current effectiveness, collaboration level or organisational maturity etc.
- Teaching a shared language to base our further discussions on
- Facilitating current activity mapping
- Identification of what activities need to be improved upon immediately, which ones that require a lot of work (mindshifts) and which ones that can be easily improved (incrementally).
Delivery
- Visualisation of the current state and the actions towards a future state on a board to easily follow up the improvement work.
- Insights gained in the organisation
- A shared language to base discussions on
- Setting up a structure for continuous improvement around maturity
Client benefit
The shared language around improvement probable gave the most impact in the team, giving birth to fruitful discussions in adjacent areas as well as acting as a catalyst for change within. The structure for continuous improvement based on maturity levels helped build a great foundation for even bigger improvement steps. The team found new practices that helped them raise the quality of their deliveries. Today, the previous members of this team are advocating for change in their new teams.
Case study: Guiding through the playbook
Playbook for the team at King
Case client
King
Background
A team whose mission was to build and maintain a game operations platform for operators and developers in a large gaming company had realised a year back that they needed some developer tools for building applications for that platform. This realisation came through feedback that it was hard to start creating applications, regardless of the knowledge and experience of the developer. The idea for tooling and support for the platform developers to fulfil their needs was born.
Assignment
I was assigned to help out with the second stage of the project, when the team had understood there was a great need for deeper discovery to make sure they built the right thing. Since I was meant to help out over a longer period of time, the playbook I made was just shared briefly as a concept to the team, and then I gave them one part of the map at a time so not to overwhelm them.
Activities
- Discussions with the team to understand the product and process needs
- Creation of a playbook together with the team while we together performed their needed Product Discovery. We did this so that the team could use the playbook after I was gone from the project
- Using the Holistic Product Discovery Framework as a structure, which was something everyone in the team understood after sufficient training.
Delivery
- A way-of-working with ideas and problems of all risk-levels, including high risk discovery in the form of a playbook
Client benefit
The employees learned the mindset very well along the way and could change the playbook when needed on their own.
Case Study: Towards efficiency
The GfK NORM team practicing effective retrospectives
Case client
GfK Norm
Background
The CTO at GfK NORM had understood that his team was more in chaos than in order, and especially not working in an Agile fashion. He needed the team to become way more efficient to tackle the delivery problems they currently had.
Assignment
I was assigned to structure the process for the team, focus the delivery efforts and make sure that the team stayed motivated.
Activities
- Attained comprehension and promoted awareness through facilitating a situation assessment with the team, so that everyone had the same view of the problems and opportunities, including me
- Boosted ownership through defining a preferred future state, together with the team
- Facilitated barrier removal through setting subgoals / work themes together and found actions to realise them. We worked especially with creating a well-oiled continuous improvement process, so that the team could easily follow-up actions, and be able to assess whether or not the actions had or would led them towards the subgoals
- Developed competencies by coaching the group in solving their own problems together as a team
- Catalysed improvement through being there for them whenever questions arose and following up / re-assessing the situation every other month over a 9-month period.
Delivery
- The team got a clearer path towards the future
- Some team members matured with the task and got increasingly motivated
Client benefit
The team could work autonomously analysing their own process problems and easily identify which problems that they could solve and which they couldn’t. This information helped the CTO to restructure his work force in a more efficient way.
Case study: Setting structure and culture
A continuous improvement session with the mob programming team Sportmobben
Case client
SVT Nyheter
Background
SVT Nyheter faced the challenge of discontinuing the Sports news app (which was done by a third-party) and placing the sports content in-house and somewhere fitting in their digital environment. The development manager recruited a cross-functional team, looking specifically for collaborative people wanting to work with problem and solution discovery as well as delivery.
Assignment
I was assigned to coach the team in mob programming (collaboration) and Lean UX (discovery and delivery) in addition to getting the team running smoothly. I spent a total of 90 hours over 2 months with the team, establishing a culture of communication and innovation, a collaborative and empirical way of working, including a continuous improvement process. In the end, that helped deliver an innovative and user-centered integrated Sports solution in the News app and organisation.
Activities
- Facilitating team setup (Team agreements, Team board, Competence mapping, Strengths and Motivations, etc)
- Coaching team culture and communication with stakeholders
- Teaching models (Collaboration model and Spiral Dynamics), principles (Agile, UX, Balanced team), methods (Mob programming, Product discovery, LeanUX, etc) and techniques (Core protocols, Impact feedback, Retrospectives, etc)
Delivery
- A benign and genial team culture including efficient, effective and motivated team members
- An innovative, collaborative, sustainable and self-healing process for the team, without aggravating lead times
Client benefit
The development manager stated that the team managed one of the smoothest product release in the lifetime of SVT, after the goal “News and Sport — One Service, One Experience” that the team set up was reached just in time for the World Cup 2018. He also noted that the team could solve any problem thrown at them, by working as one entity, for instance to solve a sudden problem with a presentation software during a demo. Some of the team’s practices also went viral in the organisation, turning the team members into mentors for others.
Several team members were happy with the mob programming method specifically and a blog post was written about it:
100% of the team in a mob for 12 months — taking mob programming a couple of steps further
Case study: Assessing the organisation
1-on-1 interviewing to understand the context
Case client
Genero Solutions
Background
The organisation had identified some potential areas of improvement. If these areas were a few persons’ opinions or the whole organisations’ pain points needed to be discovered.
Assignment
I was assigned to do an organisational transformation based on these potential areas of improvements. To start, a full assessment of the organisation was needed.
Activities
- One-on-one interview sessions with all employees (this is a small-sized company) to elicit the underlying needs and problems
- Thematic analysis of the data from the interviews, finding patterns and common behavioural structures
- Presentation of the insights
Delivery
- 12 insights, summarised as 3 improvement areas, that created the foundation of the transformation journey ahead
- Specific findings in different parts of the organisation that required transition and/or transformation
Client benefit
The leadership and the employees understood the common problems of the whole organisation and could begin to understand their role in the upcoming transformation.
Case study: Developing Competencies
Teaching Lean Startup and Lean UX methods
Case clients
Qwaya and Snow Software
Background
The organisations needed expert competence in Product Discovery methods, such as User Research and Lean UX. At Qwaya, they did a lot of quantitative analysis but had understood there was a qualitative component missing. At Snow Software, they had very explicit focus on Business and Technology aspects of their products, but lacking competence in how to tackle the Experience.
Assignment
I was hired as an expert coach, training people in the organisation in Product Discovery through different focused activities over a longer period of time, at both Qwaya and Snow Software.
Activities
- One- to three-day tailored workshop-based courses for different parts of the organisations in Product Discovery, User Research and Lean UX
- Advising teams on how to build an innovative culture based on Product Discovery methods
- Individual coaching centered for instance on interview techniques (i.e. sitting next to an interviewee during an interview and giving feedback on the techniques used afterwards)
- Follow-up individual and team mentoring for specific questions
Delivery
- Knowledge and skills
- Experience from training
- Material such as process maps and checklists
Client benefit
The competencies development at Snow led to a change of view in the company as a whole, starting a transformation journey towards a more customer-centered organisation. The training at Snow gave them enough skills to perform qualitative research complementing it with their previous quantitative and through that finding new business opportunities. At Qwaya, a greater understanding of their users/customers helped focusing the product development and gave a lower churn of users.