The Royal Dutch Touring Club — commonly known as ANWB — is the largest travelers’ association in the Netherlands, with over five million members.
ANWB provides vehicle testing and repair, travel services, roadside assistance, and insurance, while also acting as a vocal advocate for sustainability. To achieve its goals of contributing to a more sustainable society and providing robust, reliable support for members, ANWB continuously devises new and improved ways of delivering its services.
Today, software sits at the heart of ANWB’s operations. The association recognizes that the faster it can improve and deliver innovative software and digital services, the better it can meet the changing needs of its members and society.
Bringing ANWB’s vision of rapid, sustainable digital innovation to life
To help foster and accelerate digital innovation, ANWB wanted to create an environment for engineers that encourages collaboration, improves communication, enhances code quality, and reduces time to market.
The association engaged Thoughtworks to help it investigate its software delivery lifecycle and workflows and identify any blockers that limit developer efficiency and engineering effectiveness. From the beginning, ANWB’s aim was clear: “to make ANWB the place where engineers do their best work.”
To help it achieve that goal, we created a bespoke Developer Experience (DX) discovery exercise that incorporated mixed methods research. Our teams started by conducting qualitative, in-depth interviews with developers, engineers, and relevant stakeholders from across ANWB.
These interviews helped us uncover several recurring problem areas and experience factors that multiple developers cited. To validate the qualitative findings, we conducted a quantitative survey to build up a complete picture of those problem areas and gain a deeper, more nuanced view of developer experiences across the organization.
With our research complete, we collated the findings and clustered insights together, ranking them by severity in terms of both their impact on developer experiences and their impact on the business. Our final, contextualized insights were then flowed into an “issue tree”, giving everyone at ANWB a clear, understandable view of what needed to change.
Tackling development inefficiencies at their root
By combining the findings from our mixed methods research, we were able to quickly identify and validate the root causes of the most common and impactful challenges faced by ANWB’s developers.
To solve those issues at their source, we recommended four key initiatives that will enable ANWB to improve developer experiences and accelerate delivery while driving progress toward the association’s strategic goals:
- Building an internal developer platform or portal to streamline daily workflows
- Embedding product thinking into ANWB’s operating model
- Defining and automating lightweight technical governance standards
Together, these initiatives will help ANWB improve overall developer productivity and keep up with the ever-changing demands and preferences of its five million members.
Across ANWB’s development teams, the response to our work has been overwhelmingly positive:
The Thoughtworks team was well-prepared, professional and experienced. Their halfway showcase felt like a master class. Thank you for bringing in your expertise and supporting us through this process.
That appreciation was mutual. “Working with ANWB was a really valuable opportunity to validate a lot of our thinking around developer experience and engineering effectiveness,” said Martijn Berrevoets, Head of Demand for Thoughtworks Netherlands. “We were able to provide the organization with valuable insights and direction, but we also learned a huge amount from them that will shape our approach to DX moving forward.”
