Situation
The Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) Information Systems Group (ISG), within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), aimed to enhance both user and employee experiences across its services and align with the White House’s customer-centric directive.
Obstacle
ISG had embedded human-centered design (HCD) and Lean UX since 2017, but lacked a unified method to measure how deeply these practices had been adopted across its teams and contractor organizations.
Action
- Developed a custom maturity model reflecting CMS and contractor contexts, assessing roles involved in UX, service, product, and policy design.
- Conducted behavioral interviews with HCD leads, Agile release managers, and CMS representatives to evaluate cultural integration of HCD.
- Synthesized insights via qualitative HCD methods to uncover themes and recommend improvements at team and enterprise levels.
Result
- Assessed numerous development organizations and scrum teams, providing a blueprint for productivity gains and improved customer experience through targeted maturity growth.
- Equipping ISG with a scalable framework to monitor adoption, guide continuous HCD evolution, increase user experience consistency, and drive cost-effective service delivery.
Reflection
This initiative highlighted the power of tailored maturity models to build organizational awareness. By translating qualitative insights into strategic actions, ISG embraced a structured path for ongoing design maturity—cementing HCD as part of its operational DNA. Since the initial assessment, the intrument has been modified to be collect as a self service survey and has been successfully applied to one Agile Release Train.
To learn more, download the white paper.