Together with Swiss Re we presented the PULSE portal project at the Sitecore Digital Destiny Tour in Zürich. This article will give you a summary of the presentation and some impressions of the day.
The PULSE Portal presentation
Together with Victor Boardman of Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, I presented the experience we made while creating the PULSE portal. Swiss Re built this portal to better communicate with its clients through digital channels. The goal was to have an agile and client-centric portal.
Agile for us doesn’t just mean doing daily stand-ups and working with sprints, it means to create transparency, which allows us do inspection and based on that adaptation. This is done in an iterative way to constantly improve. Client-centric means to build the solution with the client perspective in mind and what he needs, not what we want to give him. The goal is to make the clients life easier, which sounds logic, but is hard to really follow through. It it also important to build the thing with high client-value and adapt to their changing needs. To have an agile portal needs a combination of approach, tools and technology, which supports to constant learning.
The portal was built with a cross-functional team with people from Business, User Experience, Design, Security, Architecture, Development and Operations. An MVP (minimum viable product) based on client research was built and rolled-out as pilot. With this early user feedback was possible, which brings a lot of value to improve the product. The technical architecture was decoupled to allow independent speed for the various involved system and with full CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) for the client facing parts.
Working agile in a non-agile organization poses a lot of challenges. Active communication with other teams and transparent management of external dependencies helps to still move ahead at high speed. Additionally creating transparency for clients is paramount and requires a cultural change. Despite the challenges, we believe it is the right approach and very positive client feedback supports that.
Impressions of the day
The day was filled with presentation about the new Sitecore 9 and its new features around xConnect, Forms, Azure deployments, Cortex (Machine Learning), Headless and Marketing Automation. In the morning giving an overview more from a business perspective and then more technical deep dives in the afternoon. In a parallel track there were many interesting customers cases by various partners.
Generally it was mainly a community gathering of existing customers and partners. Only few new faces from people interested in adding Sitecore to their Marketing Stack.
Here you find the presentation slides and a video about the PULSE Portal:
