The challenge

When we first engaged with the Department of Education, they needed help consolidating and updating their collection of websites for the Literacy and Information Communication System (LINCS), which supports adult education practitioners in their goal of helping adult learners transition to post-secondary education and 21st-century jobs.

LINCS offers support to individual practitioners as well as U.S. community, state, and Federal programs that promote literacy, making it a unique resource for both individual educators and government-funded programs alike.

LINCS gives educators and learners access to resource libraries, discussion groups, and self-guided courses — but these were located on various websites that were outdated and confusing to navigate. LINCS needed to be restructured with modern, secure technical architecture. LINCS users also needed reliable, friendly support to resolve technical and login issues and get back to helping adult learners.

Client goal

To provide a valuable and secure learning platform for thousands of education practitioners, the Department of Education needed to:

• Update and consolidate numerous LINCS websites and resources
• Provide prompt helpdesk support for the large user community
• Improve site navigation with user-centered design
• Maintain a secure and reliable platform

Our approach

Our engagement with LINCS began as we transitioned the service’s website hosting to secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers, then used a modern Drupal content management system to consolidate the overabundance of outdated websites that LINCS had inherited from other departments. We used the U.S. Web Design System to make the updated websites easy to navigate and mobile friendly.

Our partnership with LINCS is ongoing — we now provide continuous improvements to their platforms using Information Technology Agile Development methods. We work closely with program managers to help them get the most business value from their IT applications. This includes the maintenance and enhancement of LINCS websites, web-based tools, databases, search engines, streaming media, content management, and learning management systems.

Provide a seamless experience

The main LINCS website serves as a central hub and brand for the Division of Adult Education and Literacy’s (DAEL) national leadership investments. To create a unified look-and-feel among the disparate supplementary LINCS websites, we did a visual redesign based on user research — creating a seamless experience for practitioners to access the resources they need.

Of late, our redesign has extended to information architecture, rendering global navigation more intuitive and informative, and revamping the way that site resources are organized and searched for.

Use helpdesk feedback for iterative improvement

Our support team provides fast, friendly resolution of technical and login issues for LINCS users, so they can get back to work quickly. Since our improvement of LINCS products is user-focused, we tie the helpdesk into the agile development process through daily communication between support staff and development teams. This ensures that system improvements are prioritized based on real user needs.

Increase efficiencies for cost savings

We implement automation and efficiency for the LINCS systems wherever possible. This helps prevent the buildup of technical debt and gives the Department of Education the most value for its investment in LINCS. We improve operations through DevOps practices including system administration, continuous integration, code standardization, lifecycle development, and quality control.

A recent highlight of this approach is our campaign toward Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, which automates the management and monitoring of our site architecture. IaC dramatically enhances the security, stability, and scalability of all LINCS sites, and increases both the efficiency and consistency of our development workflows. Following the IaC production deployment, we’ll be able to further consolidate our server and storage architecture, substantially reducing both their complexity and their cost. And following this, the next major phase of this initiative is the use of our automated tools and processes to process and monitor our Compliance documentation, boosting efficiency and scalability in this arena as well.

The challenge

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide healthcare benefits to millions of people every year. But the websites and digital tools that help people find and enroll in these programs were built on a myriad of aging technologies and were confusing to navigate. CMS needed to streamline and update its online platforms to improve the customer experience while establishing more efficient backend workflows for agency staff.

This is an enormous and complex task, involving the modernization of Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, CMS open data portals, and many other public facing apps that serve multiple user groups — including beneficiaries, caregivers, health providers, data professionals, and government stakeholders.

WECMS helps more than 100 million Americans every year apply, find, and enroll in healthcare programs. The information and tools provided are essential components in supporting CMS' goals of creating a truly consumer-focused, streamlined, efficient, and omni-channel experience for beneficiaries and their caregivers. The overall intent for this contract is to ensure continuity of operations for the Americans it serves and the WECMS program, which maintains, designs and implements open source software digital services for CMS’ flagship websites, tools, components and applications on Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, and 7 Open Data catalogs. In addition to engineering and design continuous improvements on these established websites, this contract provides security compliance, devops, system infrastructure, content strategy, information architecture, training, documentation, content editor support, public call center dev support, Section 508 improvements, mobile application development, and tooling and systems expertise.

Client goal

When this multi-year transformation is complete, CMS will be able to deliver on its mission more effectively. CivicActions is providing agile development, DevOps, and human-centered design (HCD) services to help the agency:

• Improve the content editing experience for staff
• Modernize legacy systems and tools
• Replace proprietary technologies with open source
• Support active, informed healthcare consumption

Our approach

Collaboration is the key to success in a project of this scale and complexity. With multiple partner vendors (including our primary partner Fearless) and disparate stakeholders across many organizational layers, we work hard to keep lines of communication open and be up-front about potential problems.

Balancing stakeholder priorities, user needs, technical complexity, and CMS deadlines, we created a roadmap that minimizes risk and maximizes opportunities for success. Then we went to work on “quick wins” — tasks we could complete right away that would make the biggest difference for users.

Address the holistic customer experience

We knew that each CMS application is part of a huge public-facing ecosystem of digital tools, with many touchpoints. To address the entire experience that a person would have in navigating the systems, we drew on the agency’s own knowledge of their beneficiary community, working with them to refine and document how each person interacts with CMS online. The resulting holistic view helped us identify how we could improve that experience iteratively.

Adopt a data-driven strategy

To make sure we built the right solutions, we immersed ourselves in the CMS mission from the operational, technical, and UX perspectives. We dug into existing user research, reviewed analytics reports, conducted stakeholder interviews — then created user personas and journey maps to refine the project scope and goals. All this data is managed in a shared repository of user insights and project knowledge, which we refer to as we prioritize the work to be done.

Replace proprietary software with open source

We are “reverse engineering” multiple custom-built Microsoft.NET applications (such as the Medicare Eligibility and Premium Calculator and the congressionally-funded Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Lookup Tool with modern, open source solutions. As we recreate all these applications in Drupal, we’re making guides and code documentation that outline the entire system — allowing CMS to maintain control of its own technologies and avoid vendor lock-in. We are also migrating CMS open data platforms from Socrata (proprietary) to an open source solution using DKAN 2.