Transforming internal communication in a 500+ people company

Introduction

Boreal Salud, its main coverage, assists more than 250,000 beneficiaries throughout the country.

The Challenge

With a team of over 500 people spread across multiple cities and offices, Boreal sought to create an internal space for collaborative work and communication.

The company had an intranet for several years, which not only became outdated in necessary functionalities but also in scalability due to the growth of the workforce in recent years.

We formed a product design and development team in conjunction with Boreal's Communication team and began to rethink the solution together.

Our Process

We started the process with an internal team of 3 people, working on: UX and Product, Development, and Infrastructure.

Due to Boreal's technological core, we chose GeneXus as the tool to build the product. We relied on GxPortal as the initial base and developed multiple custom components on the technology.

Discovery and Ideation

Together with the Boreal team, we began by auditing their current intranet flow by flow, while simultaneously analyzing the daily operation of the team in charge of it.

This way, we managed to bring to life the different key functionalities of the new version, some of them being redesigns of the originals, and others completely new.

We also worked on the visual direction of the new product, understanding the various brands that are part of the group, and the unique identity that the new intranet should have.

We concluded the Discovery process with a defined MVP, prioritized features, a refined backlog, and a clear direction to start creating the solution.

Design

We began the UX work by taking the user journey defined during Discovery and generating the first wireframes of the product.

With the main screens defined at a high level, we simultaneously proposed initial UI approaches to define the visual identity of the product.

Throughout various collaborative sprints with Boreal's design team, we concluded the first instance of the design process with a prototype that reflected the core of the product.

Before closing the design phase, we began implementing the first screens in GxPortal to deliver cyclically and iteratively.

Delivery

GxPortal is a no-code web app builder from GeneXus by Globant. With its visual editor, we started transferring assets and components from Figma easily to it.

Working through specific sections and flows, the delivery process was a back and forth between GxPortal, Figma, and the entire team.

During this process, we not only worked on visual aspects or feature implementation but also populated the intranet with various types of initial content, such as news, documentation, downloadable resources, among others.

The Delivery process also had an aspect of custom component development in GeneXus, such as a weather widget with geolocation, a widget for birthday and new hire celebrations, an interactive organizational chart with user profiles, and a list of work tools.

We concluded it with various testing sprints, support, feedback, and final iterations, while at the same time, the company provided access in stages to the over 500 users.

The Impact

The team in charge of the project from Boreal presented the product in a global meeting for the entire company, announcing the staggered onboarding and its main functionalities.

As the days went by, they completed the process of migrating users from the old version to the new one.

More than 500 people use Boreal's new intranet daily, receiving multiple daily news, notifications, and company announcements, updates from their teams, documentation, and work resources for daily operations.