The Creative Mess: Operationalizing Design
By: John Paul De Guzman
Tags: Design Operations, Framework, Process, Design Framework, Design Process

TLDR:

Operationalize you design practice by looking at:

Craft — Revolves around the depth and breadth of your team’s technical abilities to transform ideas into forms and shapes.

— Revolves around the depth and breadth of your team’s technical abilities to transform ideas into forms and shapes. Collaboration — Centers around how you work with someone (work dynamics), how you communicate to them (communication protocols), and how you compromise and resolve conflicts (conflict resolution).

— Centers around how you work with someone (work dynamics), how you communicate to them (communication protocols), and how you compromise and resolve conflicts (conflict resolution). Coordination — Defines the operational side of work. Each member of your team needs to know their roles and responsibilities (team structure), needs to be on the same page (alignment), need to know what everyone is doing (work visibility), and have enough bandwidth to perform the work (capacity).

— Defines the operational side of work. Each member of your team needs to know their roles and responsibilities (team structure), needs to be on the same page (alignment), need to know what everyone is doing (work visibility), and have enough bandwidth to perform the work (capacity). Compliance — Defines the standards of your work. It’s the bar where everything is measured. It grounds everyone from your team on what is acceptable and of quality.

— Defines the standards of your work. It’s the bar where everything is measured. It grounds everyone from your team on what is acceptable and of quality. Custom — Actions directed to achieve compliant results. Customs can be a set of formalized activities — standard operating procedures, written best practices, recipes, or even playbook. It can also be part of ad-hoc, passed on oral traditions that form your organizational work culture and peculiarities.

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Design Operations (DesignOps / DesOps) aims to operationalize the practice of design to deliver value and impact at scale. Its primary impetus is to tame the chaos, streamline the activity, and achieve consistency with efficiency.

Large companies like Pinterest and IBM are vocal proponents that own significant mindshare that shapes the ongoing discussion around this burgeoning practice. It only makes sense. These organizations command hundreds or even thousands of designers across diverse product portfolios. Steering these behemoths demands expertise smaller organizations won’t even comprehend.

However, this role is finding its champion, trying to legitimize its value into the organization. Measuring “design” is challenging. In a recent survey of NN/Group, only 6% has a consistent way to measure the design quality across the organization. Standard business metrics prove to be insufficient and sometimes inconclusive.

But where do you even start? Is this practice exclusive for big product companies? Can smaller organizations benefit or consider investing in Design Operations?

Superfluous practice?

Any organization that uses design as a crucial component to deliver value should operationalize their design practice. It can help you navigate ambiguity with confidence, maintain a level of consistency on your output, and make your organization process-dependent.

Structure plays a considerable part in how organizations operate their design practice. A small unit, department, or company will have one designer to do everything. Some might have project managers and producers running the projects, or take an alternative route of getting creative service providers. Others would have mixtures of both in-house and external contributors. For most, this simplistic approach works, and formalizing the practices specific for design can be superfluous.

There’s a limit of how far poorly operated design practice can take you. Poor design practices compound out of short-term maneuvers. Designers are typically overrun by the number of endeavors they have to support across the organization. To keep up with demand, organizations hire more designers. This vicious cycle creates compounding operational debt, work inconsistencies, varying output and standards, poor work visibility, unbalanced workload distribution, and design conflicts.

Finally, the hurdle comes from the actual practice itself. There is limited literature about design operations. Design is complicated, contextual, and riddled with peculiarities that are only privy to those who practice it. And people are more fascinated to demystify the process of creativity that behooves only those who possess the gift than the exploring nitty-gritty of design production.

Where do you start?

Operationalizing your design practice is a daunting endeavor — it has to be intentional that demands discipline and rigor.

Investing in design and the practice of design is a strategic initiative with long-term prospects. Your organization has to recognize the inherent value of design and what it brings to the table. If you are a small organization, the design should be at the heart of what you do. It has to align it with your strategic objectives with an executive champion at the helm.

Your goal is to build operating infrastructure around your team’s skills, capabilities, and strengths. You start with your people. You have to equip them with the right set tools. Provide an environment conducive for productivity. Finally, align them with sets of practices and methodologies to streamline their activities for them to be efficient.

But here’s a clincher. Your design activities have to be measurable for it to be effective. The only way you can optimize is through intentional measurement of your practice.

5Cs of Design Operations Framework

Context

You can operationalize your practice even if you’re small.

Frost is a boutique creative service provider. We have been in the industry for more than 11 years. As of this writing, we are 15. 4 of them were designers. We started just like any other team — unorganized and fragmented. Prior, our operational practices hindered us from tackling complex projects. A lot of things have changed since.

The need for us to operationalize our processes comes from the scale of the projects we handled. We recognized the importance of creating strong practices as a key to untangle the complexities presented to us.

Honestly, our design operations practice is still evolving — we are far from where we want and have a lot to figure out. It can take us a lifetime to get it right.

Focus

Some articles about design operations cast a far broader spectrum. The magnitude of its coverage can make it overwhelming. To make it approachable, I decide to focus on design production and execution because it’s one area that has a profound organizational impact that affects you, your designers, and your company every day.

I took inspiration from NNg Design Ops 101 and Design Ops Handbook and cross-reference it to our current design practice. I have to simplify some of the principles to make it applicable to smaller organizations. Next, I intentionally exclude items that may not be relevant due to cross-functional responsibilities, operational scale, and capabilities.

The principles and the objectives defined by this framework applies to embedded (internal) creative teams and creative service providers (external consultants). Though they may vary in the intensity of practice and production lifecycle, they still exhibit the same challenges most creative teams need to overcome.