Health business uses Sprintbase to build stronger communications team

A large health company teamed up with innovation consultancy Bridge Innovate in January 2020 to explore how its communications division could work more effectively together.

The challenge

This project brought together three communications teams, totalling 120 people, all with a different specialism – from branding and tone of voice, to corporate communications, to digital content. Together they’re responsible for communications activities across this large US-based health business, which has around 5,000 employees.

Whilst everybody in the division shared an overall vision for how they should be operating, in practice they were working in silos.

To help overcome this challenge and create a more effective and aligned communications and marketing division, they kicked off a design project to explore what the next generation of team work could look like. How could they structure the team more creatively and get better at communicating with each other?

How they did it

Bridge Innovate used a combination of in-person and virtual working to help the team develop solutions.

A core design team of 20 people sat at the heart of the project. Using Sprintbase, they engaged the entire division in the inspiration and field research component of the project.

The group ran four parallel sprints, each focusing on the challenge from a particular customer’s perspective. Around 15-20 observers were added to each sprint, forming an ‘inspiration’ team. They collected as much field research as they could in a short period of time, posted their findings on Sprintbase, and provided comments and feedback.

The team at Bridge Innovate used coaching check-ins to connect with the entire group, gather people’s views on what stuck out from their findings, and gave observers the opportunity to hear what each sub-team had found.

Bridge Innovate then ran a two day face-to-face design session. All the activities the teams went through in person – from empathy mapping, exploring insights, and brainstorms, were all posted on Sprintbase in real-time.

The results

Each of the four sprints led to prototypes, which were shared with observers. They then gave feedback, which helped each team mature their designs and narrow them down into more specific prototypes.

As a result of this project, a number of solutions to help the communications division work better together have been developed. They identified new ways of working, including a project-specific teaming structure to engage both clients and division members to generate a more efficient and effective output.

Using Sprintbase for this project made it possible: