2014: een actief jaar bij Philips

Com-Firm   |   19.11.2014

Afgelopen jaar heb ik samen met twee scrumteams verschillende projecten gedaan binnen Philips in het Activation domein. Als blijk van waardering richting de mensen die in de teams hebben gezeten, heb ik een artikel geschreven in InsideIT, een intern magazine binnen Philips. Lees het volledige artikel (Engels) hieronder:

An active period of activities within Activation

The past two years the Dragontails team, the longest existing IT Digital scrum in the Activation domain, has been dedicatedly working for the Personal Care BG on big CQ projects. Per November 2013 another team, Avanti, joined this exciting domain. The period before November 2013 mainly concerned change requests from the CL sector, but this changed drastically. Not only did we primarily start to work on CQ5.6 projects, we got to work on 12 projects from all sectors (CL, LI, HC and Group). 

With these projects we have made a significant contribution to Philips’s digital presence. From the further professionalization and standardization of our homepage and category pages to simplified registration forms in order to hopefully further increase sales, but also to advise visitors and attract the best people to further professionalize Philips. 

Also good things unfortunately come to an end. Due to less demand and a new delivery model Dragontails has recently stopped and also Avanti members have been assigned to other roles within Activation. As a matter of appreciation to the great dedication and hard work of both team(member)s Activation Manager, Paul ten Donkelaar, proudly looks back to 4 of the 12 projects that have been accomplished in this period. 

So a big thanks to all former members of the Avanti and Dragontails teams for the excellent job! Also thanks for the great cooperation and involvement of our Digital Services, Test Factory and other IT colleagues, (design) agencies and business stakeholders.

About a year ago…
November 4th 2013 I organized a kick-off meeting with the two Activation teams. Next to the roadmap of upcoming projects, business stakeholders from Domestic Appliances and Health & Wellness gave presentations. The tone was set and with a real Activation Peace Office (wink to the various war rooms on the floor) and the Activation Peace domain where the teams sat, we started/continued with challenging projects in a very dynamic environment

Some facts
From that time on we completed 12 projects and various RFC’s in nine months for 15 Product Owners from all sectors. Looking in the current web CQ component library over 1/3 of the “ready” component and 25% of the components that are in the pipeline are developed by both teams. I’m happy to see that we also had various satisfied colleagues from business. Dragontails had an average CSAT of 8,1 and Avanti an 8,6!

Below I would like to highlight “the big five” of projects we worked on namely MCC, Careers, Rebranding, PRF and Cypress. The first three were done by Avanti and the last two by Dragontails.



The First: MCC (Mother and Child Care)

The Mother and Child Care project (MCC) was the first project of the Avanti team. In this project we delivered the first and the biggest CL category website in CQ 5.6 for Philips Avent. This website went live in Germany literally 3 hours before the first TV commercial campaign ever for Philips Avent aired. Over a period of 4 months this page was rolled out in 15 different countries. These pages are using advanced components which gives different user experience for different devices and we also integrated with Insided forums. On top of that the website facilitates an integral landing for our CRM program to ensure lifetime value of our customers.

“The Avanti team had an extremely challenging task due to multiple unknowns because of dependencies with other projects, like SUJ and external suppliers. Although this resulted in many (confronting) discussions & frustrations of all parties within the process, the end result can be proven to be very successful."  Stefan van Lent, Product Owner Health & Wellness - MCC


One design fits all: Rebranding

 With the rebranding project we created a set of foundation tools/components that will be used across all CQ5 websites (Corporate, CL, Healthcare, Lighting). These components follow the new brand guidelines defined by Philips Design. As part of the rebranding "Theming" is implemented, this will able the author to change the colors of the site to a complete different set. Combined with changing images on the page, a new experience can be created with the same set of tools and components. Re-usability of components/tools was key in this project. Overall it was a complex and time critical assignment but with a long-lasting effect.

“The Avanti Team was a refreshing experience for us. We worked with a quality-focused group of professionals who sincerely wanted to add value to the rebranding project. Often we had good discussions on improving and striving for future proof components. The demos were neatly organized with actual content. We look back with pleasure working with Avanti and we hope to work more with the different individuals in the future." Bram Timmers, Product Owner Healthcare Demand Generation track & Digital Marketing Platform & User Experience Manager

The smoothest: Careers
The Careers website project was probably the project where all involved parties, Design (agency), Product Owner, IT and Digital Services seamlessly worked together. The fully responsive (working for all devices) website is about the webpages which have information on all career opportunities in Philips across the globe. All the jobs data is stored in Taleo, a third party application. We have integrated CQ5 pages with Taleo through a SOAP request call and retrieved the data and displayed them. The jobs content uses a Polling configuration in CQ5 that will pull the data from Taleo on a specified interval.

“The magic touch of the Avanti team combines dedication, pragmatism and good fun. Happy to see the team’s effort creating an amazing new career website in 40 countries that was launched on time.”  Tjeerd van den Berg, Product Owner & Digital Marketing Manager Philips Global Talent Acquisition


Simple but complex: PRF
PRF (Product Registration Form) is a simply and user-friendly product registration flow, from where a user can directly register his product after creating an account without having to validate the account first. The registration flow is fully responsive and can be customized to fit any campaign. As part of PRF there are also the services that can to be used on mobile apps to register products but also retrieve already registered products from a user. Although a simple flow for the user, the backend integration between CQ and Janrain was quite complex and caused the team quite some headaches. Although PRF was initially set-up for Personal Care, Coffee is also going to work with it. It will also be used by mobile apps, like iGrooming and Saeco.



From another planet: Cypress
The Cypress project was from another planet. Probably on purpose as the full project was concentrated on the new Shaver 9000 series where people can win a trip to space. It is a full blast campaign website containing integrations to different systems, like Janrain (for user creation and authentication), Eloqua (used to personalize the email campaigns) and CQ (to manage articles in MGEC).

MGEC stands for Male Grooming Experience Center. As part of the Cypress project we migrated MGEC from CQ5.5 to CQ5.6. The site is fully responsive using the latest brand refresh guidelines. This makes the experience center a neat topic page for male grooming, which can be personalized to known user of the experience center.

"IT and the Dragontails team have been an instrumental part of Personal Care, allowing us to rollout our (digital) campaigns and content across markets successfully. Over the last few years we have deployed multiple projects in collaboration, which are still the foundation of what we will do for years to come. Projects like the Male Grooming Experience Center are at the heart of our communication strategy moving forward and we could not have done this without the Dragontails team. Of course there have been challenges and issues, but this is normal within any organization that is trying to push the boundaries on digital activation. We want to thank the team for their hard efforts and supporting us in our requirements."  Willem Schüngel, Product Owner & Digital Campaign Director Personal Care


Other achievements:

  1. CHP is the corporate homepage and entry point for a Seamless user journey. Avanti created the Philips home page with new header, some teasers which link to detailed pages, videos and new footer. The project went live with the new Philips Brand Identity.
  2. Generic Country Selector (GCS) is a configurable country page that contains all the locales and links to the Philips homepage in that specific locale. If the user lands in a webpage with a different language, this page will guide him to his page in his language.
  3. The Advisors project is about suggesting a suitable product to the user based on his requirements. The user answers a set of questions and the application uses some logic to map his answers and suggest a suitable product. The functional and technical analysis/solution/documentation has been fully done by Avanti. Pity is that other teams will further continue.
  4. For the Figaro/PACE (iGrooming app) we created two different API’s. An article API to retrieve articles from the experience center and load them in the app. And a beard style API where the content about beards, the questionnaire and the comparison table to generate the beard style are all stored in CQ5.
  5. Various RFC’s for Automotive Lighting, SenseoUp, Corporate blog and Oral Health Care.