Situation
Our customer Atupri, a renowned Swiss health insurance company, wanted to initiate a further step of an ambitious digital roadmap with the realization of a self-care customer portal of the highest quality for their customers.
Time was of the essence though, as October is an important milestone for health insurance in Switzerland, with tariffs for the next year being made public, and the timeframe for changing health insurance starting. 9 months was the hard constraint for the blueprint and development phases together.
Despite Agile not being widespread in the development approach of our Client, we applied our Agile Methodology and helped Atupri fast track the launch of its customer portal within these strict time and budget constraints.
Approach
1. Blueprint with focus on User Experience
Open Web Technology started its Blueprint phase by interviewing as many internal stakeholders as possible, from all possible business units and locations (Bern, Zürich, Fribourg, and Luzern). Not only would it enable our team to acquire knowledge, but it would act as onboarding process for the internal stakeholders as well.
After just more than 1 week, we drafted a first Functionality Matrix with more than 80 functionalities clustered. We iterated and refined it for the next 7 weeks during Deep Dives Meetings with business experts, where Use Cases and Wireframing were created, and a clickable prototype brought to life. High transparency was achieved by introducing a Kanban Board on the wall of the project room, next to the coffee area, thus progress and currently being addressed themes were always visible to any employee.
In parallel IT meetings were set where the feasibility of the API contracts we defined went challenged and the definitions refined in an iterative mode.
2. Agile development and coordination of 4 teams
Before kicking off the development, we invested effort in creating the best possible roadmap for the 8 planned sprints. We took into account dependencies between all development teams and planned some capacity in the backlog for iterations and feedback loops, which is key to our methodology.
At each sprint delivery, a new increment of the customer portal - fully functional, tested and integrated - was delivered to our Client to test by their team and raise valuable feedback.
It resulted in our team incorporating 80 feedbacks and improvements coming from stakeholders after sprint deliveries, as well as raised during an external, independent Usability Test at mid-project.
Although the focus was set on business functionalities, special attention was given to Performance testing and optimization, as well as Security - both aspects being important for our client.
Thanks to the work of Open Web Technology, our Client was able to launch its first fully responsive customer portal within time, budget and with the expected scope.
Their customers can now access their invoices and reimbursement at any hour of the day, send medical bills to their insurance by taking a picture on their smartphone, or display their insurance card on their smartphone if they left it at home.
