BT Design Ops
Optimising design processes, tools, and teams to deliver of high-quality design
Project overview
We had a major organisational change and as part of our digital tansformation we worked on redefining how we worked, our teams roles, and how to create great designs that make an impact
Understanding the problem
With a major transformation going on and a re-organisation of our team structure it was deemed a good opportunity to get a better understanding of our teams ways of working and how our work was actually used by other teams
I proposed a complete Design Operations project to understand our strengths and weaknesses and divided the work into three phases, understanding the current workspace, defining the value of change, then prioritising and starting work.
Understanding our starting point
We already had a working team, and relationships with other teams like product, service and delivery teams. But we had to find out what was working and what wasn't. We asked our our designers, and the people who use, or commision those dsigns what they thought worked and what didn't
We used a variety of method to gather their thoughts
- Discovery survey: We asked the team to fill in surveys designed to uncover productivity, workload, roadblocks etc.
- Stakeholder interviews: We interviewed, one on one and in groups our own team and people we worked with every dy to understand where we were succeeding or failing
- Document the design process: We compared our way of working with our process and documented the differences, we also added in how our stakeholders used our work.
Defining the value of change
Based upon the research in the first part of the project we were able to understand the biggest "pain points" and prioritise fixing them. We then made sure that our team felt they were empowered to solve these problems and got them to work with stakeholders to fine tune our operations and relationships. then we made sure we shared the vision, and the changes we were making widely in the business to increase buy in and collaboration
Prioritise and change
After defining our most valuable changes to make we set a roadmap and began to improve our ways of working, this included trialling of new tools, optimising our design outputs, updating what information and research we gave to our stakeholders, and more. An important part of this process was also creating touchpoints where we could measure progress. We took the information gathered in the first part of the project and used it to benchmark our progress.
Results of the Design Ops project
We discovered a large number of things we could enhane to make our teams lives better and our work more efficient and were able to prioritise many important changes. We received great feedback from our stakeholders about how our changes to ways of working helped them move forward too. As is the nature of Design Ops projects, the changes always need to be reconsidered occasinally, but having the bencharks we set would help keep us on track.