Fostering Cross-Agency Collaboration on Continuous Compliance
Date
July-September 2020
Team
Mamiko Otsubo
Stefanie Owens
Amanda Kennedy
Methods
- Storyboarding
- Interviewing
- Journey Mapping
- Workshops
My Role
- User Researcher
- Service Designer
- Facilitator
The Opportunity
How do you help an agency deliver on its promise of modern design and development best practices through the adoption of a new compliance tool?
Summary
By conducting discovery research on the compliance ecosystem within CMS, the service design team uncovered the compliance needs and pain points of target primary users and supporting users of a new CMS Cloud service, Compliance as a Service (CaaS). This generative research helped us get rich data about what drives adoption and ensured continued use of solutions like CaaS in anticipation of the CaaS launch.
Approach
The service design team led a series of 14 remote user research sessions with participants via Zoom. Each session included open-ended questions and storyboarding probes to test compliance hypotheses, inform decisions related to CaaS and compliance content decisions, and generate new ideas about users' compliance needs.
An example of a storyboard that the service design team created and used during user research sessions to test compliance hypotheses.
The service design team had a bias toward action: We scoped three additional opportunities to share in-progress insights and recommendations to help the team make decisions about the CaaS offering and launch strategy. We also created shared understanding among team members by mapping out the end-to-end user journey for the first time.
We saw CaaS as fitting into the agency's larger promise toward more modern design and development best practices by introducing new practices around compliance alongside agile frameworks at CMS. We recommended that the CaaS team frame participation in the soft launch as the first proactive step toward continuous compliance at CMS. We also recommended that the CMS Cloud program educate application teams new to cloud so they could gain confidence and competency managing compliance of their application.
Outcome
By framing our research holistically and aligning collaborators around what the future of compliance could look like at CMS in the near- and far-term, the CMS Cloud program is now paving the way for cross-agency collaboration with CMS teams working on similar tools to address the gaps identified by our service design team. These efforts will also set up application teams adjust to the learning curve of managing compliance of their application thanks to CaaS.