Design Operations #DesignOps Managing In-house Design Demand

Design Operations #DesignOps Managing In-house Design Demand

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need" - Mick Jagger, You Can't Always Get What You Want.

There are numerous challenges that an In-house design team can experience. A clearly defined project demand process is crucial to managing internal expectations and ensuring your team focuses on work that precisely delivers on enterprise-wide objectives and initiatives.

The workload may increase while the in-house team could face economic setbacks and staffing challenges. This article discusses the importance of a sound operational demand management process to help teams manage individual burnout, set proper expectations with stakeholders, and prioritize work that aligns with your corporate pillars, initiatives, and objectives. Business priorities will shift for a variety of uncontrollable reasons. Teams will have to be able to reprioritize with agility without disrupting morale. ?

• Is your team prepared to deliver on business commitments with the right resources at the right time?
• How would you rate your demand management organizational readiness??
• Are you working on the appropriate assignments to help with current workstream priorities that will make a meaningful impact?
• Do you have an efficient demand management or intake process to help you manage expectations?

These are all great questions for any design team of any size, from the more established to those just starting to mature. Designing an effective demand management process can help you ensure that you get the information you need from your internal requestors while setting clear expectations and, of course, asking the What, Who, Why, How, and When questions are essential, but what about user/consumer impact, business impact, IT impact with technical feasibility, brand experience, risk, and the good old return on investment (ROI). Then how do you track your process and manage proper expectations? In addition, measure your impact that produces internal value - your business value.?

What is Design Demand Management??

Design Demand Management strategically manages the demand for design services within an organization or company. It involves assessing the organization's design needs, determining available resources, and prioritizing design projects to ensure that the most critical projects receive the necessary priority. The more you know about your business objectives, the better you can assign the right resources, determine the right approach, and complete a solution that is likely to succeed.

The process involves gathering all necessary information from an internal client or stakeholder before starting a design project or assigning resources. It is a crucial step, ensuring that everyone involved in the project understands its objectives, scope, priority, and business requirements. It can also help organizations better manage their design budgets and avoid unnecessary costs associated with duplication of effort or low-priority design projects.

The Design Demand Management process can help design organizations improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their efforts by ensuring resource allocation alignment with key business goals and objectives. By managing the flow of your design assignments, you can create a system for tracking and managing design requests, prioritizing projects based on their strategic importance, and coordinating design efforts across different lines of business to better serve your stakeholders and executives.

In addition, effective Design Demand Management can help organizations avoid overloading their design resources with too many requests while ensuring that essential projects are delivered promptly.?

Design Demand Management Framework

My Design Demand Management Framework can be deciphered into four layers.

Layer 1: Start here…What, Who, Why, How, and When

This is relatively straightforward and is in a typical project brief document. However, could you get as much information as possible to assess the first level of estimates adequately?

• What: What are we trying to accomplish or solve? You need to work with your requestor to define a problem statement or the problem(s) the need to solve or uncover. You need to know enough detail to understand the ask or need from the requestor.
• Who: Who is this for? Know who your requestor is and all stakeholders, executives, and lines of businesses involved. And most importantly, who is your target audience, consumers or end users?
• Why: Why are we doing this? In some cases, the five why's are needed. If not, fantastic! Capture and move on.
• How: How can we accomplish the request? Would you have the right resources needed, and are they available? How will we measure the success? How will this generate high growth and returns?
• When: When do you need this? Communicated milestones, dates, dependencies, etc.

Layer 2: User/Consumer, Business, and IT Feasible Impact

• User/Consumer Impact: What is essential to the end user? Why would the user care? Will the user see the value of the experience? What is the impact of not getting it right or missing the mark?
• Business Impact: Do you think this is aligned with your crucial enterprise initiatives and strategic business goals? Will this drive new revenue or increase revenue for the company? Will this reduce our costs and expense? Is this initiative that will improve our brand in the marketplace? Is this a new CEO or executive-driven project?
• IT Feasible Impact: Do we have the resources in place and the platforms for this work request? Do we have the skills necessary to drive the final product? Is this aligned with our IT pillars and goals? Can we deliver based on the current infrastructure, systems, tools, and platforms?

Layer 3: Risk and ROI

• Risk: What is the confidence that risk/compliance requirements are known and addressable? How does regulatory and organizational readiness impact the ability to deliver potential projects and initiatives?
• ROI: Identify that your ROI is quantifiable and attainable that meets the enterprise's expectations.?Do we have an idea of the current budget or expense expectations? What are the current business metrics that can set a benchmark?

Layer 4: Enterprise Experience Impact

Updates to design systems and policy changes. Will this have an impact positively or negatively on any Enterprise-Wide Initiatives or programs? Will this change other areas of the enterprise?

Example of a Project Intake Canvas

Here are some tips you can take to establish an effective Design Demand Management process:

Determine the purpose and objectives of the request.?

• What information do you need to gather from a requestor??
• What are the critical business goals??
• What's the problem you're trying to solve or define the problem statement? Who will benefit from the request?
• What outcomes do you want to see?

Clearly define the goals and objectives of the project. Discuss the timeline, budget, and resources needed for the project.

Identify the key players involved.?Identify the project sponsor(s), known business partners, and other team members. Who will approve the project deliverables, timelines, and budget, and who will be your direct contact? Who will be responsible for what areas and what metrics? What are the expected communication channels?

Identify your target audience, research data, and gather project information.?Collect all the necessary information about the project, including the target audience, requirements, constraints, and design preferences. Next, you need to identify the individuals or groups. Doing this will help you design a strategy tailored to their needs and preferences.

Do your research and ask questions:?Conduct research to identify current industry trends, competitors, and best practices. The goal is to inform the design decisions and ensure that the design meets the target audience's needs and business goals.

Create a design or project brief:?Summarize all the information gathered in a one or two-page outline. This document should summarize the project goals, target audience, requirements, budget, scope, and design preferences. Review the design brief with the client or stakeholder to ensure everyone is aligned and understands the project clearly. Finally, have your executive sponsor and project owner sign off on the initiative.

Some Helpful Operational tips

Develop clear guidelines and procedures.?This might include creating a standard form or checklist, outlining the steps needed during the intake process, and establishing your response timeline. This could be an internal page on your intranet site or created in Excel. The goal is to make a more formal way of capturing the demand to scope the work properly.?

Ensure that your process is straightforward and accessible.?Be clear and communicate with your team and stakeholders. Communicating your demand intake process to stakeholders or project requestors is good practice to ensure it's clear. Get them involved in the process to elicit feedback and ask them how you can improve so your team can deliver their request more efficiently. Ensure that they know how to access the intake process and that the process is easy to navigate and understand.

Train your team on the process.?Ensure everyone understands the guidelines and procedures and is effectively communicated. Have this a part of your new employee onboarding process, and conduct regular training sessions with your team and other groups and departments within your organization.?

Monitor and evaluate the intake process over time.?Collect feedback from your stakeholders and staff and use this feedback to make improvements to the process.

Example of a Design Operation Project Intake Process

Forecasting UX design projects can be challenging due to a variety of factors.

Here are some common issues and challenges that can arise when forecasting UX design projects:

• Limited resources:?Design demand can fluctuate greatly, and allocating limited resources to meet your request can take time and effort. This can result in project delays, missed deadlines, and increased costs.
• ?Unclear project requirements:?One of the most common issues with UX design project forecasting is the need for clear direction. With a clear understanding of what must be done, estimating the time and resources required to complete the project is easy.
• Project prioritization:?Organizations often have multiple design projects competing for limited resources, making it difficult to prioritize tasks and allocate resources effectively. This can lead to delays in critical or low-priority projects, taking up resources that could be better used elsewhere. In addition, are you working on projects that roll up to big rocks or enterprise goals??
• Communicate, communicate, communicate:?Effective communication is essential for a successful demand management process, but it can be challenging when multiple stakeholders are involved. Miscommunication can result in misunderstandings, errors, delays, budget impacts, and misallocating design resources.?
• Managing your talent:?Finding and retaining skilled designers is critical for successful Design Demand Management. The designer wants to work on meaningful work and likes to see how their work positively impacts business. However, talent competition is fierce, and attracting and retaining top designers can be challenging.
• Managing change and scope creep:?Design projects can be complex, and modifications may be required during development. Managing change can be challenging, and failure to do so can result in delays, cost overruns, and quality issues. Ensure a way to correct the course without impacting your deadlines and milestones. Scope creep when the project requirements change or expand beyond what was initially agreed upon. This can happen due to changing business needs or new ideas during the design process. Scope creep can make it challenging to forecast project timelines and budgets or future projects accurately.
• Balancing creativity and business objectives: Design projects must balance creativity with business objectives, which can be challenging. While creativity is essential, it must be balanced with the need to meet project objectives and timelines.
• Unrealistic timelines:?Clients or stakeholders may have unrealistic expectations about the time it takes to complete a design project. This can lead to rushed or incomplete work, impacting the final product's quality.
• Lack of data or research: Design projects should be data-driven, focusing on metrics and requiring user research and testing. Data will help keep your team focused on what matters. If there is a lack of data or adequate testing, it can lead to accurate forecasts and assumptions.

Conclusion:?

Design project forecasting requires a clear understanding of the project requirements, realistic timelines and budgets, practical communication, and adequate resources and data. Effective design demand management helps to ensure that the company is meeting the needs and expectations of its customers. The company can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by prioritizing design projects that will impact customers the most.

When design demand is managed effectively, companies can achieve a higher return on their investment in design. By focusing on the most critical design projects, companies can ensure that they invest in projects that will significantly impact their bottom line. By prioritizing design projects with the most significant innovation potential, companies can foster a culture of creativity and innovation within the design team. This can lead to new products and services that help the company to stay ahead of its competitors.

Overall, design demand management is an essential process for companies that want to maximize the impact of their design efforts and stay ahead in today's competitive marketplace.

My next article is related to Design OKRs and promoting business value. ?

If you feel this was helpful and looking for help with your #DesignDemandManagement, maturing your #DesignOperations, or leading your #DesignPractices, please email me at [email protected] or [email protected].