Building a Human-Centered Prioritization Process for Product Changes

It’s a common challenge in government agencies, one we see in states we work with across the country: too many projects and not enough resources. Say you’re working on an integrated benefits application, and your list of potential improvements is growing by the day. Do you go for the change that has immediate impact—like increasing file size limits to allow more clients to upload documents for eligibility with fewer errors—or one that will enable more long-term structural impact—like building a native mobile app version of the application in addition to the existing web version? Do you fix the issue that’s causing a minor inconvenience for a larger population—like allowing clients to set finer grained communication preferences—or the one that’s causing a major inconvenience for a smaller population—like allowing family and friends who fill out the application on behalf of clients to create accounts so those authorized representatives can manage future application updates?

When we use human-centered technology to make government work better for everyone, we have to grapple with questions like these. To answer them, we gather data about pain points that clients experience as they interact with government and use that data to evaluate potential solutions and help government agencies make decisions about which challenges to tackle first. 

We like to think of effective prioritization as a form of self-care for government: it’s a sustainable acknowledgement that time and resources are finite. 

The roots of prioritization challenges

Many government agencies struggle with a lack of resources. But there are other key prioritization challenges we’ve observed from working with government partners over the years. These include things like:

• Unclear problem definition: Governments often receive numerous project ideas from stakeholders without a clear articulation of the specific pain points they aim to solve. 
• Competing priorities: Governments face many competing priorities but often lack the structure to make informed decisions about which to focus on first.
• Lack of structured decision making: Without a clear prioritization framework, agencies tend to make decisions based on the loudest voices in the room, the project that impacts the most people, or fiscal considerations, often overlooking the outcomes for those directly affected.
• Rigid processes: Governments are often constrained by business requirements and rigid processes dictated by government contracting, preventing them from adopting more agile, client-centered approaches.
• Siloed team roles: Government teams are often staffed with primarily business analysts, while cross-functional roles are siloed across different departments or teams. Without collaboration between everyone involved in the process of making change, it’s hard to see the complete picture and evaluate impact.
• Technical role gaps: Government teams without the appropriate technical roles may make assumptions about a project’s technical effort without seeking input from relevant disciplines.

We like to think of effective prioritization as a form of self-care for government: it’s a sustainable acknowledgement that time and resources are finite. 

Building a prioritization calculator

The roots of prioritization challenges also lay out some clear ways to make prioritization efforts more human-centered. A government agency faced with a list of potential projects can improve how they approach prioritization by focusing more on enhancing both the client and staff experience. We believe the way to get there is by collaborating across disciplines, adopting shared terminology, and building an objective framework to evaluate projects.

When prioritizing projects, we often see teams use some version of “impact vs. effort.” But impact and effort are usually described in broad strokes, and there might not be a standard definition on the team. To make impact vs. effort considerations more human-centered, teams have to leverage the right mix of quantitative and qualitative data that clearly illustrates the problem, and pay extra attention to underserved groups, with a focus on the client experience and the tangible outcomes for these individuals. We recommend using the following defined, holistic criteria that take into account process, tools, technology, and human impact.

For impact:

• Severity: How big of an issue is this for clients? Is it inhibiting their ability to complete a core task like submitting a document or receiving an accurate determination?
• Magnitude: What percentage of clients are impacted by the problem? Will a fix affect a lot of users, a small segment, or somewhere in between?
• Caseworker impact: How much strain is the problem causing for caseworkers and other support staff? Will a solution result in staff spending more or less time on manual processes?
• Equity: How does this problem impact certain vulnerable groups? When we think about groups that are already disproportionately facing barriers to accessing services, will the solution make a big difference for them?
• Urgency: Is a problem causing policy violations, legislative or financial risks, or creating a situation where clients are blocked from receiving benefits?

For effort:

• Product effort: What is the technical complexity of the solution required within the government’s existing product?
• Change management: How much effort will the solution require to change internal government processes?
• System integrations: How many technical systems or external stakeholder conversations are required to implement the solution?
• Data integrations: How much effort will be required to integrate data between additional systems outside of the government’s product system?

For each of these categories, we use distinct scales represented in a spreadsheet calculator that teams use to score potential solutions and compare those scores to inform prioritization efforts. The calculator serves as prioritization documentation that can be saved, shared, and revisited across multiple projects. Government teams also don’t have to use our exact calculator criteria to move this work forward. Agencies can tailor the definitions of the criteria to their context and iterate on the process of using the calculator for information gathering, discussion, and decision making.  

The calculator in action: Colorado’s prioritization process

We recently partnered with Colorado to support the rapid growth of their integrated benefits application product team, PEAK, at a critical moment in their evolution. At the start of our partnership, the PEAK team was moving from a scale of around five modernization projects per year to more than 30 user experience-focused projects per year. At the time, the PEAK team’s backlog was largely solution-driven—focused on implementing suggestions rather than understanding whether the proposed changes would actually address root problems. With enhancement requests coming in from a wide range of stakeholders, managing expectations and communicating priorities had become increasingly difficult. The team needed a way to strategically evaluate, compare, and sequence work based on both user needs and organizational capacity—so we worked together to develop a calculator. 

Their custom prioritization calculator enables the PEAK team to assess and score all UX enhancements in their backlog based on standardized criteria and quickly evaluate new suggestions. They’ve started using Qualtrics as a feedback mechanism to validate pain points users experience within the application—which has enabled the team to pinpoint specific issues at the page level and tie those insights directly to potential improvements. They’ve been able to move quickly on urgent priorities and deprioritize low-impact projects. They also developed a standardized form to collect feedback from various points of contact across benefits programs—ensuring backlog submissions are better structured and easier to assess.

The calculator works well because it’s a tool built by and for a collaborative group. Pairing the tool with their collaboration between an internal user experience workgroup has deepened their understanding of user problems and strengthened the connection between research, strategy, and execution. 

Colorado’s human-centered prioritization framework is helping the PEAK team drive meaningful improvements for the client experience. Learn more about how we built a prioritization calculator with Colorado.

Human-centered prioritization is possible

Prioritization is ultimately about people—clients and their families, frontline staff, and government teams. Building a consistent, human-centered prioritization process involves fostering meaningful discussions about both the client and staff experience, gathering the resources required to implement a process change, and enabling teams to assess solutions and make informed decisions about where to invest their resources.

Like we said earlier, effective prioritization is a form of self-care for government. Applying that ethos of care to ongoing prioritization efforts can lead to a better centering of client and staff needs, and ultimately push forward the solutions that make the most impact for the people who need it.