Logistics

Here are recommendations for forming teams and planning the work.

1

Have a clear scope of work and objectives

• Identify root causes of payment errors.

• Propose technical and operational recommendations by expected impact versus level of effort.

• Provide recommendations to track payment accuracy improvements.

2

Form a small working group with people from different perspectives

• Form a five to seven person team that includes folks from policy and eligibility, operations, systems, IT, and county or regional leadership to meet regularly on payment accuracy initiatives.

• Gather or hire experts in human-centered design in roles like user research, product management, and software engineering.

For pro-bono Talent help, reach out to USDR’s Talent team.

3

Perform detailed prep

• Plan for four to six weeks of preparation before a four-week sprint.

• Develop a data share agreement, scope of work, and research operations plan.

4

Take a mixed methods approach

Use this simple template of questions to guide understanding at the beginning.

Research with frontline staff like caseworkers should be done without risk of repercussions or penalties. The person/s conducting the research with caseworkers should not be a supervisor or authority figure over the caseworkers.

Method	Description
Shadow caseworkers processing cases	Include staff with different amounts of experience — from the new to veterans. Document tools, processes, decision points, and quality challenges faced when working cases.
Analyze QC and QA data	Analyze quantitative QC and QA data to identify the most significant error categories, frequency, and case characteristics.
Meet with QC staff	Interview QC supervisors and analysts to understand their workflow, tools, and evaluation methods.
Meet with other stakeholder teams	Interview systems, IT, and field stakeholders to understand planned changes and the effort required to make new changes.
Review policy	Review state policy documents and recent changes to process.
Interview leadership	Interview state leadership to understand systems and policy context.

Example timeline

This is an example timeline for how the work can unfold for a discovery sprint.

None of this work is possible in four to five weeks without detailed operational planning leading up to a formal kick-off with a state in Week 1.

The most valuable parts of this prep include

1. Getting a data sharing agreement between a state agency and a technical assistance or research provider in place.

2. Scheduling qualitative interviews with all subject matter experts and frontline staff prior to kick-off.

3. Weekly touchpoints with core state partners.

For USDR’s research, we shared our early findings as soon as we had begun interviews, so that our partner could distribute these to relevant teams. We also adopted flexible ways of working — USDR adjusted our interview guides as we went to make sure we were getting to the root causes of errors and also understanding bottlenecks affecting quality.