Shaping our design operations team

Story adapted from my talk at the Global DesignOps 2019 conference in Manchester with Matt Gottschalk.

We are both really proud of the work we have done to build up our DesignOps capability at Centrica and it’s amazing for us to get the chance to share our journey with you. We don’t pretend to be experts, but we hope there will be some practical tips that you can take away and apply back into your own companies.

The Triggers for Implementing DesignOps:

As our organization grew, we began to experience some of the inefficiencies and challenges that can arise in large organizations with lower levels of design maturity. Senior designers were tasked with operational activities as “side-work,” but these became ineffective at a larger team level.

The reach and influence of the design team outside of the digital landscape were decreasing, as senior designers were spending more time focusing on the needs of the team rather than on representing design across all initiatives.

Design tooling, including broader techniques and processes, needed serious attention to maintaining consistency and uniformity of design output and methods.

The ability to manage and support the needs of the design team was stretched, with recruitment activity and onboarding ramped up. More documented and structured processes were needed, along with continual feedback loops to optimize these areas.

Laying the Foundations for Our DesignOps Function:

To lay the foundations for our DesignOps function, we did a deep dive into what design operations actually are and how to implement them within our environment.

We looked at different types of DesignOps setups to understand where we could make the biggest impact. With a decentralized design team working on ongoing product support rather than projects requiring workflow or project support, we realized that focusing on culture, environment, and processes for the entire team would have the biggest impact.

We created four strategic goals based on our four pillars of DesignOps: People, Design Toolkit, Collaboration, and Design Value.

Our Four Pillars of DesignOps:

People

 To understand the “health of the practice,” we mapped out the end-to-end experience for designers in our team, from onboarding to exit interviews. We ran engagement surveys, workshops, and interviews to uncover opportunity areas and pain points, which helped us build out our DesignOps roadmap from the perspective of our team.

Design Toolkit

We built and managed our research lab, provided hardware and software support, set rules and best practices for using the lab, and provided support when something didn’t work as intended or when a designer needed help running a session.

Collaboration

We encouraged collaborative initiatives such as running workshops for our design team and supporting designers in organizing workshops for their product teams, providing project support by jumping in as a UX designer for teams without design skills available, running design critiques where designers show work in progress and receive constructive feedback from the rest of the team, organizing a Design Week with internal and external talks and workshops, and potentially starting a design meetup outside of London to showcase our team’s work and attract potential talent.

Design Value

We worked to increase this metric by establishing or improving relationships with other disciplines and leadership, providing consultancy to sister disciplines to help them set up their own Ops functions, and switching to a project support operational model to demonstrate the value of including design at the early stages of a project and doing internal and external talks to show who we are and what value we can create.

Our Experience with Codified Design Systems

We were the drivers in bringing codified design systems into Centrica. We educated teams and stakeholders on their value by highlighting inconsistencies in the current workflow. We gained sponsorship to have a dedicated team in place to focus on building out our design system.

The DesignOps team was responsible for the ownership of this team, running recruitment, identifying skills to bring into the team at various stages, working with the team on tooling strategies, and communicating adoption plans for the system with leadership teams.

Even though we are still in the early stages of implementing a design system, we have already seen some early wins through improved SEO, performance, and accessibility scores for new components that have gone live.

The biggest win for us has been getting a fully funded dedicated team in place that is now considered a product team. They have roadmaps, backlogs, and KPIs just like all other teams. Our design system has also acted as an enabler for cultural change. It has helped foster a more collaborative community of designers and developers who feel joint ownership of our guidelines and principles as they are continually involved in helping them grow. This increased collaboration is driving a reduction of design and development waste.

Is DesignOps worth it?

If you are struggling within your own organization to get buy-in or increase momentum for implementing design practices, or increase your design team’s reach, then I would say give DesignOps a go.

It’s hard to talk about the value of design, to build relationships So we recommend trying to secure sponsorship for a team for a short-term period. Use this time to work on some quick wins and drive engagement.

There will come a time when people start wondering how they managed without this team in place.