Immigration Services
A large-scale digital transformation for a G7 country’s federal immigration department, consisting of planning, implementation, team-building, and coaching across:
7 “Digital Labs”oriented around high-value programs and client-backed journeys
A “Digital Talent Engine” to attract and maintain high-calibre talent
A “Centre of Excellence” to drive continuous improvement and provide operational supports
I was responsible for building and coaching design teams across each lab, advising on recruitment and retention strategies and activities for the Talent Engine, and identifying a roadmap and coaching design leaders in the Centre of Excellence. Given the paucity of design talent in the department as we helped them grow, I also served as a capacity booster, contributing to research, design, and testing activities as well as hosting workshops and routine meetings with key stakeholders (legal, ops, policy, programs, IT, etc.). I coached members of the design team continuously over the 3 year period and continued offering occasional and ad hoc coaching for several years afterwards.
My responsibilities:
Service design
Design coaching & leadership
Building & scaling DesignOps
Project length:
45 weeks over 3 years
17
Designers hired, trained, and coached
30+%
Reduction in end-to-end time for clients in targeted journeys
20+%
Reduction in back-of-house processing times for targeted journeys
+9
“Digital Labs” and support teams formed and coached
Context
Facing increasing immigration targets, funding restrictions, and legislated maximum fees for processing applications, this G7 country’s Immigration department was facing a burning platform of rising costs and application volumes with no easy way to close the gap. They had had very little success establishing a digital product/service organization in the past, had little to no exposure to human-centred design methods, and were an incredibly siloed organization. In the face of these challenges, they embarked on a digital and analytics transformation to improve the client experiences while improving the productivity of the department by delivering reimagined digital client experiences through a new way of working.
Digital Labs
We worked with the department to stand up a series of “Digital Labs” - cross-disciplinary teams of designers, developers, policy and operational experts, and a host of supporting subject matter experts. Each Lab worked in an agile manner to deliver new, digitally-enabled experiences against one end-to-end client journey. We guided each Lab through several structured phases to simultaneously deliver a working solution and a team capable of operating at steady-state moving forward.
Baselining | 6-8 weeks
Establish a shared understanding of the current state from three complementary lenses: business, technology/operations, and experience (client & staff).
Key activities
Build the team
Generative user research
Map current state journey, pain-points, processes, and architecture
Assess in-flight initiatives
Develop quantitative and qualitative baseline of the current state journey
Dream & Design | 4-6 weeks
Imagine and align around an ideal future-state vision for the Journey. Use this to define a ”minimum viable product” (MVP) that can be built in ~12-16 weeks.
Key activities
Define ideal future state (Zero-Based Design Workshop)
Define Minimum Viable Product (Minimum Viable Product Workshop)
Build business case
Identify risks and dependencies
Tech/design tool set-up (Sprint 0)
Delivery | 12-20 weeks
Deliver a working product that offers immediate value to clients and employees and continuously iterate/ refine it through real-world monitoring.
Key activities
Define backlog and user stories
Conduct testing with clients/users
Bi-weekly, iterative delivery towards Minimum Viable Product
Hold sprint Planning and sprint reviews (demos)
Push product features to production
Support capabilities
Alongside the labs, we stood up two core support capabilities to help the Labs grow and sustain impact over the long term.
Digital Talent Engine | Launched alongside Lab 2
Hiring processes at the department were extremely slow and HR didn’t even have role classifications that mapped onto the sort of skills needed by the Labs. The DTE addressed these gaps and became an exemplar for improved recruiting across the department.
What the DTE provides:
Clear role classifications for critical capabilities for Labs
Role assessment and progression arcs to enable accurate assessment of candidates and Lab team members and offer opportunities for advancement
Interview guides and ability tests, integrated into a structured recruiting and hiring program to enable consistent evaluation and faster decisioning
Expanded outreach and targeted recruiting efforts to identify and attract high-impact talent
Agile HR backlog approach to ensure timely hiring of talent to sustain Labs as they grow
Lab “Centre of Excellence” | Launched alongside Lab 4
As the number of Labs grew, maintaining standards and ensuring dissemination of emerging best practices became harder to achieve organically. The CoE in effect served as a centralized Ops capability across Agile, Product, Design, and Technology, coordinating activities of the nascent functional guilds and communities of practice we started alongside Lab 2.
What the CoE provides:
Enabling capability to develop assets and tools to support higher-quality work by Labs (e.g., research repository, coded design system, etc.)
Leadership for capability development and professional development for Lab team members
Facilitation for sharing insights, best practices, and standards (e.g., review cycles for new design system components, leading research share-outs, etc.)
How I delivered impact
Teaching them to fish: Capability building as the “product”
While we were committed to helping the department deliver impactful experiences across the journeys owned by the Labs, our core value proposition was in strengthening the department’s ability to do this sort of work without consultants or contractors. As product design was a particularly weak area for the client, this was even more critical for my work stream. I developed training materials for everything from how to use design tools to heuristics of interaction design to conducting and analyzing research to engaging with developers and product leadership in an agile environment. I tailored those materials to support a wide range of team members, from seasoned policy analysts who were being asked to go out of their comfort zone to support product design to novice designers who had just left school. Beyond formal training, I:
Ran design charettes to get people comfortable with rapid iteration and ideation
Used pair design to encourage critique and thoughtfulness about design decisions
Hosted weekly mentoring time with each designer to better understand their personal and professional goals
Contributed as a team member, owning stories and delivering production-ready designs to developers to demonstrate best practices
Cultivating growth: Guiding development of design ops at scale
To support the Labs’ growth, I developed both formal and informal operational processes. As part of this effort, I introduced a ‘design guild’ framework, enabling structured research sharing, peer learning, and product/service strategy development. While I coached and guided these activities, I paired with Lab designers in co-creation sessions and gathering feedback to ensure the team had a strong sense of ownership. Over time, I transitioned responsibility for coordinating Guild activities to interested design team members, ensuring ongoing development and sustainability.
After establishing 4 active parallel Labs, we launched a “Centre of Excellence” with the department. This centralized ops capability supported Agile processes, development, technology, product strategy, and design. As a coach for the design CoE team, I emphasized servant leadership and an agile, responsive approach. I assisted the new Design CoE Lead in managing challenges faced by Lab teams and ensuring continuous progress. Additionally, I guided the Lead in conducting feedback and mentorship sessions with Lab designers to enhance their processes and engagement.
Above (left to right): Visual used in Design Guild share-outs about balancing future work and current sprint work, breakdown of CoE responsibilities and value proposition, and sample one-year roadmap for a new design ops function.
Enabling inclusive research: Improving access and formalizing safeguards
I addressed the lack of client engagement mechanisms within the department by collaborating with stakeholders across the department to establish viable channels for qualitative research with external participants. I codified participant safeguards, and ensured participant confidentiality by preparing a data management plan that worked with government data retention requirements. Additionally, I advocated for a distress protocol to support participants who might feel discomfort as a result of sharing their experiences.
Enabling a culture of design: Coaching across the organization
Designers weren’t the only team members with capability gaps, however, and it was also important to coach product leadership, operations, technology, and other stakeholders about how to work together more effectively to deliver great experiences and effective tools. I also created training materials and briefings for product owners, developers, subject matter experts, and senior departmental leadership to help them understand what to expect from design and how to engage with it over the course of product development. In advance of important working sessions, I had one-on-one coaching sessions with these team members to help contextualize the session and structure out any areas of concern they might have to ensure they could be addressed productively.
Through these activities, I was able to help the organization develop and nurture a human-centric design culture - senior leaders went from thinking of design as something in the realm of fashion or physical products alone to seeing it as an important problem-solving framework and mechanism to identify and drive step-change improvements.