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