Case Study

Summary

Nava previously partnered with a federal agency and other vendors to help architect, build, operate, improve, and standardize the agency’s cloud infrastructure. The resulting multi-cloud environment is the largest civilian cloud platform in the federal government and powers several critical programs and services. Through human-centered design practices, Nava helped the agency build buy-in for the cloud while ensuring the technology is scalable, resilient, and cost-effective. This work helped ensure success for tens of thousands of developers that use the agency’s cloud platform, and it laid the groundwork for future projects that deal with vast amounts of data. 

Approach

Nava maintained a human-centered approach throughout this work, allowing us to deeply understand stakeholder needs. In this case, our users were developers and internal agency stakeholders. 

Our approach included user research and co-design with diverse stakeholders, design for developer experience (DevEx), and helping the agency build out robust communications to maintain transparency. We also helped the agency set up critical, human-centered shared services, platforms, security tooling, stakeholder reporting, and process/workflow design.

Through all of this work, we practiced agile development — the process of rolling software out in small pieces — to reduce risk and continuously gather feedback from stakeholders. This approach aligned our team’s decisions with stakeholders’ needs and expectations, which built trust and supported the agency’s long-term success. 

Outcomes

By taking the time to understand stakeholders needs, we helped the agency improve their systems and business efficiency, which in turn supported buy-in for migrating to the cloud. Improving program efficiency was crucial because the agency foresaw a fourfold increase in cloud-hosted applications, but could not afford the same increase in operational costs.

We helped the agency build: 

• An internal, self-service information hub that developers and other stakeholders can use to get critical cloud support and download key tools.

• A robust communications program — engaging around 20,000 subscribers — to support widespread cloud adoption through shared language and resources. 

• A streamlined cloud onboarding process. Our modern engineering approach helped reduce one onboarding step from two months to 48 hours. We also used human-centered design to help the agency give personalized support to users migrating to the cloud. 

Process

Connecting application teams to the right services 

Through user research, co-design, and iteration, Nava helped the agency conceive, design, and develop a self-service information hub for cloud customers. This resource contains all of the information, tools, and support customers need to successfully migrate an application, build a new application, or operate in the cloud.

To make the service as useful as possible, a team of Nava service designers worked with the agency to conduct user research with hundreds of stakeholders. This enabled us to identify diverse perspectives and help align teams on shared language and common challenges. 

Our service design team also partnered with the agency to document all of the tools that were already approved within the cloud ecosystem, enabling application teams to easily find and leverage approved tools rather than building their own or getting a new one approved.  

Our human-centered approach resulted in measurable customer-focused outcomes and an 85% satisfaction score.

Preparing for scaling with communications

Adopting cloud services requires a cultural shift—one that must be reinforced through coordinated messaging and consistent, transparent communication. For large organizations, effective communications are all the more important. That’s why Nava partnered with the agency to build out a communications program aimed at promoting effective change management while delivering business and user value.

We worked with the agency to develop core messages and marketing language for communicating programmatic changes to the cloud community. We also helped them build new communication channels, such as a newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, and we helped host office hours for cloud customers. These initiatives ensured that stakeholders received personalized help and remained informed, up-to-date on security protocols, and empowered to make smart choices for their contexts. 

By standardizing communications through shared language and consistent messaging, the agency is more prepared to scale.

Automating how teams onboard onto the cloud

When we started this work, onboarding application teams onto the cloud was an effective but highly manual process. Working collaboratively with the agency and a number of vendors and contractors, Nava’s team helped to standardize and ultimately automate these processes, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes for their cloud accounts to be created from months to hours.

We approached this work with engineering and service design best practices. Our first step was to pair with subject matter experts to understand the process of helping teams onboard onto the cloud. From there, we helped the agency create a centralized playbook for onboarding onto the cloud. This ensured that all teams would receive a consistent onboarding experience.  

Once the playbook was in use, we worked with the agency to design and implement an automated process for creating and closing individual support ticket requests from onboarding application teams. Creating this workflow required close collaboration across the entire cloud platform team to identify the most efficient methods for routing requests. We helped build this system accounting for how much this environment continually changes, creating a strong foundation as these processes evolve.

From there, we worked alongside the agency to remove repetitive manual work. This improved the developer experience for onboarding application teams and allowing them to get on and use cloud technology faster.

Laying the groundwork for application teams

Our work on this project — from rearchitecting the agency’s cloud environment to providing robust network connectivity — laid the groundwork for application teams that deal with vast amounts of data. To ensure the agency’s long-term success and resilience, we helped build out robust data governance controls in compliance with federal standards. This will help future application teams whose work affects tens of millions of Americans. 

Conclusion

Maintaining a human-centered approach is essential to meeting peoples’ unique needs, even for highly technical products. In our case, leveraging human-centered design best practices enabled us to help a federal agency build tools and workflows that contribute to a more resilient, adaptable, and future-proof program.