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Leveraging Design Thinking to Help IRS Better Understand Their Users

Our approach to service design always starts with users and their desired outcomes. Since the heart of this project was to improve decision-making, we connected directly with decision-makers to understand why their procurement function is critical to IRS, what decisions are critical to moving the mission forward, and how they use data to make and communicate those decisions to key stakeholders throughout the agency.

At the same time as our qualitative discovery, we reviewed existing documented policies and practices within the agency and did some preliminary exploratory analysis on their existing data assets. We discovered, like many federal agencies, IRS was collecting sufficient, high quality data already but struggled with transforming that data into information that helped decision-makers tell a compelling story. Our Data Science team took some immediate actions to help decision-makers further trust the credibility of the data by validating data sources and formalizing relationships with data owners to ensure OCPO could reliably access key data sources.

As our confidence in understanding the mission and data, Technical Assent’s Data Science team turned their attention back to the users and the key mission decisions they needed to make. In this phase of the work, we use a Build-Measure-Learn approach to model the decisions with key data, create interactive visualizations, and work with users to evaluate how the visualizations aided their decision-making process. We matured the visual dashboards quickly and were thrilled to see users respond as they saw their intuitions backed by real data.

“Just had to tell you that I wanted to say ‘Drop the Mic!!’ after you made that statement about not everything being equally important. We need that statement reiterated over and over so that we can stay focused on what matters – aka ‘keeping the main things, the main things.’ That is at the heart of many of our struggles around here. Thanks for the wisdom and clarity!!”

Positioning Our Client for Long Term Success

Technical Assent worked with the agency to strengthen OCPO’s in-house capability – the tools, technology, and talent – as customer demand for more data-driven insights grew. We recommended business processes for managing intake of new customer requests and criteria to help manage the backlog based on mission priorities. We also documented our approach and transferred that knowledge to the government team, including proven best practices such as CRISP-DM, CMMI, and ITIL practices to ensure IRS staff can sustainably deliver relevant and reliable data services to their internal customers.

By combining HCD, agile methodologies, and quantitative data analysis we helped the IRS understand how to better visualize their data and put it to work for them in making better decisions. We did this WITH a growing IRS team, empowering them to reuse the blueprint we co-created and sustain the efforts in the future. And we’re confident the products are of immense value to decision-makers because they were included in every step of the process and saw their feedback become part of the final solutions.

How do you help equip your clients to make better strategic decisions? 

Breaking the Status Quo

In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the “Reimagining Veteran Healthcare” project set out to not only study what has changed about health care for Veterans during the pandemic, but also investigate what might change to better anticipate Veterans’ needs of the future. This inflection point was an opportunity for VA to drastically rethink how to meet evolving patient expectations and a changing population of Veterans.

This vision for the 20-year future of VA emerged from research with Veterans, Caregivers, front-line staff, healthcare experts, and VA leadership. Starting with the core users of VA services yielded a web of opportunities spanning from discovery and design to technical development, prototyping, piloting and implementation —utilizing the full range of Human-Centered Design (HCD) methodologies, tools, and approaches. 

While VA has several ongoing and near-future transformational programming in the works, there is a large gap when considering truly transformational future opportunities. This is where Reimagining Veteran Healthcare stepped in. Our team from Technical Assent and Deloitte had a goal of developing breakthrough, nonlinear innovations of service delivery models to create or capture markets, services, products, and customer segments that have yet to exist.

Putting Veterans at the Center

To keep Veterans at the center of our work, the team conducted ethnographic research with 100+ stakeholder interviews (virtually and in-person) with Veterans, clinical providers, familial caregivers, subject matter experts, and other key VA staff members. These helped the team ​​uncover pain points, bright spots, and/or validate our assumptions about the current state of Veteran healthcare, understand the post-pandemic priorities and behaviors of different populations of Veterans, and inform several transformational opportunity areas. 

“[I define health as] having the ability to accomplish all the things that I want to do in my life […] without any hindrance from medical or monetary or any of those things that naturally get in the way. The quality of things I am consuming in life. It’s the total of all those things.”

“If I could just visit one entity, one website, have everything available to me on ONE Dashboard or profile. If it was tailored to me and what I went through it would be so much more helpful.”

“It’s symptoms first, then based from symptoms, give prescriptions that alleviate those symptoms. The immediate question is always ‘What can I give you?’ Well, I don’t want a medication. I want to solve why it’s hurting in the first place.”

Developing Customer-Driven Solutions

Based on the insights that emerged from conversations with 250+ stakeholders –including Veterans, caregivers, and front-line staff, consensus was found around three critical priorities for VA’s future:

1. Redefine Veterans’ initial encounter with VA – VA has a critical opportunity to elevate health as a priority with Veterans during and following transition. Connecting proactively with personalized tools can create a seamless transition for Veterans to join the VA following active duty.
2. Deepen ongoing customer service efforts and engagement – Veterans feel the fragmented nature of the VA. By creating a backend system that puts Veteran health records, feedback, and preferences in one place, VHA can provide a more seamless front-end experience while empowering employees to own each individual interaction and overall health journey.
3. Extend the envelope of care – More than ever, Veterans expect care when, where, and how they want it. COVID-19 highlighted an opportunity for VA to extend care beyond its walls and broaden its definition of health and healthcare delivery.

Across these three central opportunities, 11 solution concepts were developed that allow VA to create transformational change for Veterans. These solution concepts are rooted in the Veteran experience, taking an outside-in look at what’s needed for VA healthcare delivery. Currently, the team is partnering with VAMCs to pilot and iterate on the solution concepts and help Veterans access VA care when and where they want it in the future.

How do you keep your customer at the center of your work? What opportunities are there to think outside the box to anticipate future customer needs?