CWS-CARES Public Library

Holistic Design in CWS-CARES

Tuesday, 31 Dec 2024

What is holistic design?​

The holistic design approach considers the larger Child Welfare ecosystem in which the product exists, and the relationships between functional areas of the product. With holistic design, milestones will be grouped into Process Areas, so that reviews of the CWS-CARES system are conducted in the context of overall business processes. ​Overall, holistic design improves how we build and deliver CWS-CARES Version 1.

Holistic design allows the Product Team to:​

  • Identify dependencies across business areas, design, downstream requirements, and user feedback earlier.​

  • Conduct analyses across business areas to reduce the likelihood of unexpected findings earlier.​

  • Gather Core Constituent feedback earlier and at multiple stages of design and build reviews.​

  • Streamline the user experience with a holistic view of all needs within a process area.​

With holistic design, Core Constituents are being involved in the pre-build review of a larger portion of the system. The Product Team demonstrates how the system would function and can gather feedback prior to building the system, making it easier to address feedback. Holistic design aims to provide a more robust user experience for Core Constituents by gathering and addressing their needs and expectations early on, in part by collecting feedback across four Extended User Scenario Testing (EUST) phases and sharing prototype demonstrations.


Originally published in the CWS-CARES Explorer.

Product Features