I’ve been doing UX work at BCBSM for 4 years now and I wanted to show what a typical sprint looks like.
Grooming:
During grooming we meet as a larger group to go through which tasks are ready for work and assign story points and hours to them. This is great cause everyone gets to see projects at a higher level and see what everyone else is working on.
Kickoff/Brainstorming:
After projects have been assigned that’s when I get to work. I usually start by checking the task cards in jira to double check information and requirements. I also like to start reaching out to other resources if needed, cause we all know it can take some time to get responses back.
I really enjoy brainstorming, gathering info, researching, documentation, collaboration, throwing ideas on the wall seeing what makes sense, what falls off. There are a lot of moving gears and a lot of people working together, this can really make a lot of progress for a project if this stage goes well.
Standups:
Scrum leaders start getting a pulse on all the projects development, seeing and helping fellow team members with problems and issues is really satisfying. You get to see other career specialties that I often don’t think about. It’s cool seeing all these differences bring a project to the life.
Wireframes:
Ah wireframes, my preferred form of documentation and in my experience it’s preferred by most people. Through the years I’ve used In-vision, balsamic, axure rp, sketch, figma and even illustrator for my wireframes, but it always comes down to trying to portray an idea with lines and text boxes.
UserTesting:
At BCBSM we utilize usertesting.com for our user-testing needs. I’ve been pushing for more testing to be done at different points in the projects life-cycle. You win some, you lose some, but it’s definitely a win when you get to do more testing. Fun little story, we include competitive analysis in our research. You should have seen the look on my teams face when I suggested we user test our competitors sites. No laws saying we can’t. You’re welcome!
Here is a more in-depth look at some of the usertesting I conducted: BCBSM Usertesting
SME/Business Review:
First impressions leave lasting marks. It can be difficult to get up in front of people to present a project that you have been working on all week just to have it miss the mark. Setting expectations is something I try and put a lot of work into. You can meet expectations, surpass expectations, but if you miss expectations then you have to go back and fix something. This is a crucial stage in the life cycle of a project. You can have a killer solution that meets all the criteria, but if people are still left unsure, confidence falters, and a team needs to feel confident in the work being done.
Handoff:
Fantastic! The business and teammates gave their approval! The project moves onto the next stage and will be developed into a live portion of the public site! All hours burned, in-progress changed to complete and tasks closed. I like to follow up with the members of the development team to see if they have any questions or if they’d like me to walk them through the wire frames one more time.
Select projects during my time with BCBSM:
