A new way to build products at MHRA
government / healthcare / service designer / 1.5 years
Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is a government agency in the UK that is tasked with ensuring the Medicines and Healthcare products are safe to use. As part of their digital transformation strategy they wanted to be better equipped to deliver digital products and we were asked to develop a Delivery Framework to guide and enable the Transformation Division (TD3) to deliver technology products as their current state was tied in siloed teams and workarounds legacy tech products.
This is important for MHRA as the current landscape is seeing technology enabled teams to provide better and more efficient services across many industries, including government services. Failing to do this not only has great impact on the public accessing these services but also competing product and services to fill the gap in the market risking misinformation and loss of revenue to this government agency who has been self-funding for a large proportion of their services.
As a small team or Product Manager, Delivery Lead and Service Designer we were able to apply the Double Diamond of Design Thinking into redesigning a delivery framework for MHRA that is aligned around a set of principles and is driven by user research and cross functional teams.
Product Team
Framework Team
Our work included running extensive stakeholder and user research and service blueprint mapping to enable a good understanding of the current process. Through this we were able to hone in on our key focus areas which we co-designed solutions for with a working group that was formed across the different departments of product delivery. As well as the working group sessions, we ran a department wide design sprint for a week to share the methodology, and kickstart shared solutions.
This enabled us to share ownership and responsibility of making this task move forward. Through workshops we facilitated a shared vision, principles and a metrics framework that set us up towards a data driven approach, moving away from an opinion based, reactive culture of responding to the most urgent and loudest demand which left end users with unanswered queries. We also started creating connections with GDS to enable a transition into their service assessment for qualifying digital products.
This was one of the most stressful and impactful projects I’ve been part of in my career. Not only because it span across the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic, where we had to adjust to working from home, deal with global anxiety and had to adjust to changing staff availabilities due to emergency task forces being formed in the very agency that would lead the UK response to the pandemic, but also because it was in the middle of a lot of personal and professional change. I appreciated having a good support system with you at work makes life so much better, allows you to bring your best - and even if the best is slightly better than the day before-. It has reminded me of the power of a trusting relationship between employees and an organisation on have on wellbeing and the quality of work and readiness for change.
This project has also been the turning point for me to start focusing more on teaming and organisation design, and moving more and more away from designing products and interactions. I started getting into Self Managing Teams and the Future of Work and have learned so much in the topic since. The connections in between these product interactions are what make an experience smooth be it as an employer, as a client or the end user of a particular service.
Watch a video of the design sprint we ran with the Transformation Divison at MHRA
20200320 TD Design Sprint Week February 2020
Read more about our work with MHRA on the Red Badger blog