DesOps
Consultancy
Design Ops is a front that aims to support designers in the midst of the current scenario with a constant increase in complexity and new challenges emerging every day.
The additional work overload such as rituals, meetings, processes, and others, can even compromise the time that this professional has to carry out his main activity, designing.
In addition, the growth of teams with different functions and formats tends to lead to a distance between these professionals who could exchange more knowledge and support each other's development.
Thus, Design Ops appears as a tool to support design teams to focus on their main activity and help maintain the exchange between the different specialties of the team.
What is Design Ops?
According to Nielsen Norman Group, we can understand Design Ops as “the orchestration and optimization of people and processes in order to create an order that amplify the value of design and its impact at scale”.
In this context, we can look at this front through three main lenses:
- Support the design team;
- Creation and management of work ecosystems;
- Efficient management of people and means in order to make them happier and more effective.
To work with these three lenses, it is possible to set three significant objectives for the Design Ops area:
- Collaborate at work: make people and teams work collaboratively.
- Deliver the work: have consistent standards and means for delivering the work.
- Measure the work: measure and disseminate the quality of what has been delivered.
Types of approaches
There are two main types of approaches to the discipline:
- Design Ops as a Role: It is an individual or group of individuals charged with ensuring that the design team is supported so that designers can focus on designing solutions.
These roles can be played, for example, by a Design Producer, a Program Manager or even a Research Ops Specialist.
- Design Ops as a mental model: It is an ecosystem or a set of standardized processes, methods, and tools that support the design team and allow you to design at scale efficiently.
Behind the mental model are mainly three questions:
- How to create and develop a design team?
- How to manage workload growth?
- How to amplify design impact and value?
Design ops missions
To better understand the performance of this front, we can list 6 important missions that will support both the foundation and definition of the work in this area as they already feed a knowledge base of the design team about itself.
Here they are presented randomly and not by priority, that is, all of them are important and can be done in parallel or organized within the context of each team, therefore not needing to follow the order presented below.
Mission 1: Understand the design team structure
There are currently three design team structure models that Design Ops can use as a reference when understanding your space and the type of complexity you will be dealing with:
1. Centralized teams: These are members of the design team reporting to a design manager and working on various design products and services as needed. For example: internal design agencies, design as a service and centers of excellence.
2. Decentralized teams: These are members of the design team reporting to a product team that has the budget and autonomy of the work. For example: built-in teams and scrum teams.
3. Matrix teams: These are members of the design team reporting to a design center, but also with occasional or operational reports to the product team. For example: hybrid teams and partnership teams.
Mission 2: Measure skills of the design team as a whole
For Design Ops work to be built it is also important to understand how skills are distributed across the design team.
In this context, it is important to understand which skills are needed and which are more present in the team and thus define where to invest more efforts to expand or attract missing or indebted skills, something that the Ops team can do in its performance.
To define or measure these skills, it is possible to use studies such as Clearleft and the Shuhari technique (learn, practice and master), for example.
Mission 3: Scaling design work with Design System
Of the many ways to scale the impact of design, one of the most important tools today is the Design System.
It, in turn, can be understood, according to Will Fanguy (Invision), as “a collection of reusable, pattern-driven components that can be assembled together to build any number of applications.”
To build a design system it is important to look at what currently exists, document it, create usage guides, and scale consistently. It can also be borne in mind that the design system has at least details about:
- Visual language.
- Patterns and components for structure, composition, behaviors.
- Models with the visual language and patterns applied.
- Code to build user interfaces that meet the defined standards.
- Usage Guidelines and Documentation.
Para escalar o Design System o time de Design Ops pode pensar em três modelos para implementar e gerenciar:
- Solitário: Uma equipe cria o sistema focado em suas próprias necessidades, e o torna disponível para outras equipes.
- Centralizado: Uma equipe única e centralizada cria e mantém um sistema usado por todos.
- Federado: Um conjunto representativo de designers e outros profissionais de várias equipes criam e mantém o sistema.
Mission 4: Scale design work with Research Ops
To scale the impact of research, it is possible to think of a research center.
According to Rachel Krau (Nielsen Norman Group), this hub brings together the “collection of research insights collected over time and aims to make research more collaborative and accessible”.
This center brings together a series of roles and responsibilities to support the company in collecting, maintaining and disseminating the diverse knowledge coming from research and interactions with customers, from governance to recruiting people to be interviewed.
Mission 5: Define and measure the quality of the developed design
One of the most important aspects of scaling the impact of design is defining how to measure it and then improve it and publicize it throughout the company.
Quality metrics can be built from many references, such as Nielsen's heuristics, however it is also important to observe how design impacts other metrics such as business, for example.
This understanding raises the perception of value of design in the company and opens more space for design to have an increasingly strategic voice.
So a good way to measure the quality of design is to look at the metrics of the triad between technology, business and people, following the ones that make the most sense and understanding how the design affects or is affected by them.
Mission 6: Multiplying design knowledge in the company
For design to be scaled and its value understood, it is important that the discipline is taught and understood by other areas and professionals.
Design is often seen as a mysterious black box and few understand or know how the design process works and how it generates results.
In this sense, it is important to think about how to educate other areas about the discipline and value of design.
One way to do this is to create toolkits that show the design processes and their ramifications, as, for example, the following initiatives have done:
- MediaLab Amsterdam Design Toolkit
Implementing Design Ops: Getting Started
For at least these 6 missions to happen, Design Ops is necessary and to implement it it is also important to have a well-planned structure.
This implementation goes through at least four stages, starting with the investigation of the current situation, definition of the desired values for the area, the creation of strategic partnerships for the operation of the area until the launch of the practice on a daily basis.
To finalize the implementation, it is important that the roadmap or backlog also includes strategic actions for the dissemination and communication of the work carried out and its value for all those involved.
Another way to start this planning is to use the Design Ops Canvas developed by Xplane, which encompasses the characteristics of the team itself and the necessary partners, very close to the Business Model Canvas (BMC).
References
Autodesk research; Clearleft habilidades; Clearleft habilidades framework; Design Ops Canvas; Invision App Framework; NIH – Escala de proficiência nas competências/habilidades; NN Group – Design Ops 101; NN Group – Heurísticas; NN Group – Research Ops 101; Rachel Karu Linkedin; Shapes of UX designer; UXPin Design System; UXPin Escalando UX Research; Imagem – Capa;