Human-Centered Design Maturity Model

Assessing Human-Centered Design Adoption in the Enterprise

Challenge

The Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) Information Systems Group (ISG) is pursuing a strategic goal to improve both the user and the employee's experiences by designing, aligning, and optimizing operations to improve customer experiences. In addition to ISG's divisional goals, the White House has set forth similar expectations in OMB Circular No. A-11 (2020) Section 280—Managing Customer Experience and Improving Service Delivery. The guidance specified establishes a more consistent, comprehensive, robust, and deliberate approach to customer experience across government.

ISG incorporated human-centered design (HCD) as a process and mindset in 2017, along with the use of SAFe Agile. An essential part of Agile is continuous improvement, which requires continual investment in time and reflection to improve.

Solution

ISG partnered with the Human-Centered Design Center of Excellence (HCD CoE) to assess CCSQ IT Product & Support Teams (CIPST) to help inform where they are using HCD and evaluate the level of adoption of specific behaviors and process improvements.

Ideally, this initiative aims to measure design value and impact at scale, not only towards products but also towards services and policies. The adoption of HCD is the shared responsibility that traverses contracts, contractors, and federal employees alike in this public ecosystem at CMS.

Approach

• Develop a custom maturity model. Requirements included designing a model that will fit the unique context of CMS and its contractor partners. The maturity model encompassed stakeholders' roles surrounding user experience of products, services, and policies. As a scalable model, it can apply when assessing design adoption within product development teams or the customer-centricity of a large organization like CMS. 
• Complete assessments with stakeholders. As part of the evaluation, we interviewed CIPST representatives to provide insight into the degree of cultural adoption and application of HCD. In most instances, we met with three people from each team: the HCD lead, the ADO point of contact, and the CMS point of contact.
• Identify insights and share them with teams. We applied an HCD synthesis methodology to make sense of the qualitative interviews. The synthesis process identified insights, themes, and identifying opportunities for continuous improvement at the team and enterprise levels.

Result

Now that the assessment is complete, teams can use the findings to become more productive, adjust behaviors, and plan for continued growth to be more successful. As an enterprise, ISG can leverage the framework to understand organizational opportunities better and improve the usability and cost-effectiveness of its products, processes, and customer experiences.

Future outcomes may include:

• Increasing the predictability of a positive user experience for products and services across CCSQ.
• Using the assessments as a baseline and method to meet the ISG goal of continuous improvement.
• Launching an annual assessment to determine if any changes were successful and to continue process improvements.