GENOMICS ENGLAND
Facilitating the definition of vision and strategy for scalable Biopipelines services in Genetic Research
Impact: Turnaround time shortened from years to days, clear strategy and technical design, massively simplified backend, shortened time to delivery, shortened time to deliver on client requests.
Applied Design Thinking • Sprint Facilitator • User-Centric Product Development and Strategy • Leadership
Summary
PROBLEM
Biopipelines are at the core of Genomics England's genome analysis service.
There is an increasing demand to analyse genomic data for new science cohorts.
It was taking ~2 years on average to deliver data for life science cohorts, and it required several handoffs between 5 squads.
We needed a better, faster way to enable new use cases to run and adapt pipelines to their needs.
CONTRIBUTIONS
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Led a highly technical, cross-functional Design Sprint with Principal Engineers, Service Owners, Group Product Managers, and Bioinformatics engineers
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Worked closely with key stakeholders on defining scope and prep requirements
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Liaised with C-level executives and Directors on delivering insights and feedback
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Ensured everything was on track and the right deliverables were created at the end of this process.
IMPACT
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Turnaround shortened to days instead of years
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Excellently guided collaboration between principal stakeholders and senior leadership resulted in alignment on vision, implementation, and product and engineering plans
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Streamlined process
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Enriched genomic datasets
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New capabilities added for research engineers
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De-risked databases and minimised incident thanks to technical redesign
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Future-proofed scalable designs ensured flexibility and adaptability of the product for future use cases
THE CHALLENGE
Adapting the Biopipelines to scale for future use cases and self-service capabilities in a streamlined process
Process: Collaboration + Engineering Design + Design
COLLABORATION
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This project spanned 4 time zones and 5 teams, therefore — collaboration was key
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I believe that focused, in-person collaboration is the best way to solve complex problems and boost team camaraderie. Therefore, I initiated and led in-person summits and workshops rooted in best design thinking and design sprint practices, as well as regular remote working sessions
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Through collaboration I ensured alignment on requirements, focused scope, and buy-in from all stakeholders
Working session on untangling the processes.
ENGINEERING DESIGN
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The new design reduced the turnaround time from years to days
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Moreover, the new design was more secure as data stayed within its own environment
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Handovers between teams were eliminated
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As a result of this sprint, a complete rollout plan together with PRDs and engineering docs was produced in alignment of all key senior stakeholders.
Key output: The before and after high-level schematics of the backend design (redacted).
DESIGN
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The user journey initially was complex because the underlying technological and business processes were complex. That's why a single data request could take two years to be fulfilled.
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Through the process of inquiry, we redefined user needs in simple terms and redesigned the backend with the user end goal in mind. Because of this the team was able to come up with a beautifully minimalistic UX design serving exactly the needs of research users.
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n.b. I was not the designer on this; my role was that of a sprint organiser and facilitator.
This process was untangled and reduced to 4 simple steps.
To simplify the process, we needed to understand what was involved and what happened in the manual parts of the journey.
The final design was fully scalable, self-service, and accomplished user goals in 4 simple steps.