DesignOps and StudioOps

The need to deliver change, align practice communities and disciplines, create value and demonstrate the impact of design in an agile world means we need people with new skill-sets, augmented capabilities, efficient research, design and development processes together with collaborative practices and delivery processes that work at scale.

This has precipitated the emergence of Design Operations (DesignOps or DesOps) as a way of systemising and operationalising design using a blend of new and established approaches that enable designers and their colleagues from DevOps (Development Operations) and BizOps (Business Operations) to work in new ways together, where their collective effort is underpinned with insight and data garnered from a range of sources using Research Operations (ResOps).

Furthermore, successful teams are adopting Studio Operations (StudioOps) with its distinct set of behaviours, its learning mindset and 'studio' culture proven in the world of design. StudioOps is concerned with recruitment and career development, casting the right people in the right roles with the right skills, to work in environments that support remote and physical collaboration while ensuring flow and frictionless work by ensuring teams have the best tools.

DesignOps (DesOps), in the design of products and services, is concerned with the operationalisation of service design, UX design and UI design, where designers work in a team (or Tribe) to formulate strategy, participate in research, share insights and apply hypothesis-driven design (HDD) to deliver outcomes (rather than outputs) in an iterative and agile approach of ‘design, build, test, and measure’.

DesignOps is concerned with :

• Design capability
• Ways of working and work ethos
• Communication and language
• Design Quality - design standards and governance
• Practices (i.e. playbooks with tools, methods and activities for the team)
• Tools and toolchains
• Measuring the impact of design
• Outcomes - delivering benefits to users and creating value for the business (or NP or Government Service).

StudioOps

StudioOps is a collective term for addressing challenges of engaging design, scaling and evolving a studio culture, embedding design practices in teams and hiring people with the right skills, ensuring they are able to collaborate effectively in teams. It is concerned with the following:

• Building relationships within the organisation
• Shaping engagement
• Recruitment and retention
• Tracking success
• Developing careers
• Project resourcing
• Supporting learning culture
• Coaching and training

Why DesignOps?

DesignOps (DesOps) is increasingly important as it can be applied to deliver impactful outcomes, improve design capability and democratise design while working at pace to significantly reduce the time to market of innovative and user-centric products and services.

DesignOps has a primary goal to establish a highly efficient design mechanics that generates high-quality design and high impact outcomes for the business and its users.

Service design and UX design offer a strategic and tactical vision while DesOps provides the mechanics, linked operations and activity chains to enable designers, developers and product managers (or owners) to work at speed to collaborate effectively within teams using agile principles.

Increasingly there are sets of principles and practices for Design Operations (DesignOps or DesOps) that are applied to the design of products and services. DesignOps requires a systemic change to the way design is used in the development of new services and products in a workflow that is highly collaborative, fast, and lean to support transformation at speed and with agility.

Getting Started with DesignOps

Before you adopt DesignOps and start your journey it’s important to invest in a cultural and behavioural mind-set that supports Design Thinking by having a?focus on user outcomes as well as diverse and empowered teams that together have a spirit of restless reinvention through a design, build, test and measure model.

User Focused Outcomes?

Users rely on products and services to get their tasks and goals fulfilled. Success isn’t measured by the features and functions you release, rather it’s measured by how well the users’ needs and goals are fulfilled. Focus on outcomes that can be measured.

Diverse and Empowered Teams?

Diverse teams generate more ideas than homogeneous ones, increasing your chance of creating a truly innovative and disruptive product or service. Empower the team with the expertise and authority to turn those ideas into outcomes. Ensure teams are small and multi-disciplinary while encouraging trans-disciplinary skill-sets.

Iterative

Prototypia, not Utopia. Everything is in flux and always a prototype as we iterate in a build, test, measure and learn approach. Adapt and survive where teams are empowered to bring new thinking and new concepts to deliver outcomes in a process of continuous iteration and development. We are never finished!

DesignOps – The Three Pillars

There are three pillars in Design Ops:?

1. Design Process
2. Design Practices
3. Design Tools

1. Design Process?

DesignOps links the design operations to the organisation.

• Bridge tribes and guilds??– promoting a culture of collaboration.?
• Facilitate design quality through having a consistent toolkit, playbook and processes.
• A shared understanding of a high-level design process, from initiation and framing challenges through research, design, development, testing and delivery.
• Define and align design activities within the design process based in business need and challenge.
• Use a standardised toolkit and design tools for efficient collaboration.
• Measure the impact of design and the value it creates. We make design accountable by defining and measuring design quality:

1. Establish a culture of excellence, not perfection, in all things.
2. Choosing and aligning metrics for design quality, and tracking those metrics over time.
3. Creating and using design principles throughout the design process as objective measures.

2. Design Practice

Teams have a goal to streamline workflows. When a DesignOps department starts to rework the process, they usually do the following things:

• Identify the critical gaps and weaknesses of an existing process.
• Build a process to optimise day-to-day workflow to maximize engagement and reduce duplicated efforts and creating re-suable assets and components.
• Scaling and managing design systems to create efficiencies for designers. Unify design language across platforms. Unified language helps designers achieve consistency across all platforms.
• Building repositories of user-research data that are accessible to everyone.
• Using digital-asset managers (DAMS) or other systems to share design assets and templates among team members.
• Systemise consistent approach to methods, playbook and toolkits.??
• Auditing and enforcing the use of the same design tools for efficient collaboration
• Define clear metrics of success and ensure designers align with them. Metrics are selected according to the business’s goals. DesignOps might introduce a practice of design review to ensure that designs are executed to the highest quality.
• Enforce workshop and meeting etiquette. Reduce meetings. Introduce a mandatory requirement for clear agendas before meetings and action items after the meeting).
• Establish a clear scheme of design delivery. Decide who needs to see the work, and when.?
• Define sprints based on outcomes and impact.

3. Design Tools

DesignOps also determine what tools design teams need to work efficiently.?

• Standardise the tooling and systems used, as well as introduce new tools and make sure designers (and our colleagues) adopt them.
• Ensure outputs are exchangeable and measurable.
• Support flow and adaptability to ensure teams can work at pace speed in an agile environment.

StudioOps

StudioOps?is a collective term for addressing challenges of engaging design, scaling and evolving a studio culture, embedding design practices in teams and hiring people with the right skills, ensuring they are able to collaborate effectively in teams. StudioOps is primarily concerned with the following

StudioOps – The Three Pillars

It is concerned with; recruiting the best talent to form teams with the right skills, the optimisation of processes, team coordination, shared practices, encouraging behaviours and values that deliver benefits to the business and its customers.

There are three pillars in StudioOps:?

1. Design Talent
2. Resourcing
3. Culture

1. Design Talent

StudioOps has a remit to attract and create a home for the best talent.

• Hiring - attract the best people that are a good fit. It's critical to establish consistent hiring and onboarding practices to set up new team members for success.
• Learning Mindset - Encourage a learning mindset by supporting coaching, training and mentoring accompanied by certification and badging. Focus on creating T-Shaped’ people that are talented practitioners with specialisms and expertise but with great understanding of technology and a business vertical.
• Skills and Competencies - Train people to ensure they are able to use and apply the latest tools based on their role and level and that thet adhere to design standards where necessary.
• Roles and Levels - Create career pathways for both management and non-management roles by defining a framework that describes responsibilities, skills and competencies.

2. Resourcing

StudioOps is also responsible for focusing on the business aspects of the design. They are involved in the following activities:

• Engagement – Connecting with the business, scoping projects, setting ambition and attracting business sponsors and product owners.
• Budgeting – Understanding design team costs and tracking money is key to profitability. The goal is to achieve transparency for resource allocation that can be measured, tracked and audited.
• Reputation - Developing a reputation in the design community to attract the best people is important. We work with the community to describe our approaches, share successes and also lessons learnt. Develop a reputation for thought and practice leadership.
• Casting – We work with the business to anticipate project needs and manage human resourcing to build optimal teams that are able to work to together.
• Resourcing and Materials – It's important to provide designers with the right resources and materials they need so that they can concentrate on design work, instead of details like budgeting, hiring or buying materials.
• Collaboration - We need to create remote and physical environments to support people to work together while enabling effective communication. The mechanics of collaboration include:

1. Defining a structure and nature of rituals such as meetings, workshop types, reviews and critiques.
2. Ensuring that the group's digital environments and physical spaces are conducive to collaboration and support flow.This includes working with stakeholders, partners and importantly users in spaces that are appropriate and make people feel comfortable where they are able to enage.

3. Culture

Design culture is a key element that keeps design teams motivated, engaged and resilient.

• Training. Understand and decide what skills are missing in a team and how to gain them. The 'studio' is responsible for onboarding new team members while ensuring their is a shared language and approach to practicing design.
• Engagement. Its important to cast people in roles that are challenging, where they can be impactful while being valued.
• Accountability. Its important that the designers are responsible and accountable for quality and that they are accountable for both the customer and colleague experience as well as design standards.
• Knowledge sharing. Establishing communities of practice for skills sharing and to enable people to develop knowledge and understanding.
• Evangelising design - A studio culture is focused on how the organisation understands the value of excellent design. The studio team will act as evangelists to demonstrate and evidence the value of design within the organisations. We do this by:

1. Narrating and honing a consistent message of the role and impact of design a
2. Celebrating success and lessons learnt from failure - recognising and rewarding individuals and teams that apply design practices to their work and make a difference.
3. Establishing strong partnerships that breaks down barriers and support teams to work across silos to foster strong relationships whether they are remote or located in the building or room.

Peter Fossick is the producer and co-ordinator of the DesignOps Network and DesignOps Global Conference. Https://DesignOps-Conference.com