Strategic Design and Big IT Engagements: A love Story.
Before we start let me talk about our two lovers, I would like to call them Romeo and Juliet, but I won’t. In Romeo and Juliet story, both end dead at the end, and this tale is about success and happily living ever after. Let’s introduce them:
Strategic Design* has attached itself a tag of softness. When you talk about Strategic Design outside a very specific sphere of people, it feels as if you are telling a fairy tale. Most people know the story or remember hearing it somewhere, they can repeat it, but none of them is really buying it. The feeling is that Strategic Design is mostly related to exploration and inspiration. Still, Strategic Design is no longer a newcomer to the design space.
Big IT Engagements (BITEs) have a completely different story. Long gone from a workspace where they can have a perfect briefing (did they ever live there?), they are now on an everchanging road where challenger technologies, disruptive newcomers, and a long list of additional threats force them towards a very unstable space where their way of working is less and less sustainable. Even more, the pace at which this destruction of their traditional ways of working is happening goes faster than anyone predicted.
*This article initially discussed Futures Design and its relationship with BITEs, but after proofreading it and discussing the article with several colleagues (all cited in the article), the framework that is presented has a better fit with Strategic Design processes as a whole when interacting with BITEs
Flexibility and hype vs. solidity and crawl
Strategic Design is a discipline that is used to deal with uncertainty. It includes a flexible approach that can be modified to reach desirable outcomes that take into account not only economic return but a much bigger holistic impact. But for sure, it offers an open-ended result more oriented towards inspiration than towards implementation.
BITEs are a solid set of processes tailored for efficiency that have certainly lots of difficulties to deal with uncertainty and need fixed metrics to measure success and progress that usually lead to time & money.
Each side is strong in what the other lacks strength, they can complement each other, and both desire what the counterpart has. So, as in most love stories, opposites attract each other. How can it be that right now there’s not open cooperation between these two and each time they are coupled together there’s so much friction? Instead of cooperating, Strategic Design and BITEs usually fight.
Of course, there’s not a single source of problems here. So allow me to gather all the items that I believe are blocking what should be a fruitful relationship on three different categories.
1 — Culture / Philosophy
BITEs have been honed and perfected over decades towards efficiency and the premise of the identification of tasks and resources that can be easily identified and replaced. All of this to have a single focus towards implementing a defined solution.
Strategic Design needs to work with open-ended possibilities. It needs to explore and is mostly focused on defining long-term goals, set up a vision to follow, or identifying what the current problem might be.
Finally, the language used to work is radically different. On the one hand, both sides use similar terms to describe very different things, on the other, there are huge areas of the dictionary that both practices have made up to be able to speak concisely about their practice. Professionals of Design and Technology disciplines will clash and fail to understand the meaningfulness of what the other side is saying or doing.
2 — Metrics for success
BITEs are focused on delivery, which means time and money. How much will something cost and how fast can it be delivered. Meanwhile, Futures Design will be focused on many other things (E.g: people) and it will have more qualitative metrics.
Strategic Design as a discipline is pushed to focus on the people or even beyond the people. The environment, for instance, is key to ensure that the holistic impact of a certain solution is not validated just because of people's desires. So even the human-centric aspect of a solution is to be discussed. Measuring these goals can be a very fuzzy process and lots of decisions are made on assumptions that the team needs to make to move forward.
BITEs, need clarity and precision (as much as possible) and, to obtain it, eliminates anything that can be subjective from the equation so, even people are identified as resources. KPIs are rarely taken into a context or discussed as long as they are accepted as valid. Quoting my colleague Guillermo Granda:
A metric is an abstraction of a specific dimension of reality, so it is simplified and easier to manage or address. But because of its an abstraction, it is really easy for it to lose the link with the reality where it comes from, and so not being of any use for who’s using them.
It’s because of this that, in big teams where the work happens far away from the field, you can find a large team of people trying their best game to maximize a KPI that none of them fully understand just because that was set as the goal.
3 — Scale
When we talk about BITEs we need to talk about an army of people. Management is needed at several levels to ensure every piece of effort is deployed in the right position and is working according to plan. Communication and cooperation are heavily influenced by the needed bureaucratic processes or even internal politics that are in place to organize such engagements. You find forms to ask for every resource you might need. Improvisation here is a luxury.
When we talk about Strategic Design, we talk about smaller engagements and nimble projects. A small core team with some extra help here and there. Communication and cooperation are easy, and there’s clarity of the process being followed, project management can be assumed as a partial role and project length can be measured in weeks. There’s room for improvisation, and pivoting mid-project is business as usual.
A three condition framework
But there’s hope and a framework for such cooperation is possible. I’ll present three not so easy to obtain but necessary conditions that can set-up a successful first date and an example of a project where we managed to mix it:
1 Design and Tech co-led engagements: Design has better tools to set the vision and can coordinate this task helping the IT part of the team with facilitation tools to produce better inputs to build that vision. Also, Design is more used to thread and facilitate complex multi-discipline projects together.
Take into consideration that organizing such leadership is not easy. Traditionally the heaviest part of a project budget will be under the IT umbrella, so it’s considerably complicated to shift the leadership weight from one side to the other.
Also, when engaging with Technology and BITEs Design needs to be used as a guide, not as a service. If Design is allowed to guide/ lead an engagement, it can challenge and push for clarity. If Design is being used as a service it probably can just beautify the result. And for this, there’s a need for commitment from the Technology side. Support and engagement from the Technology side leadership to avoid all the complexities of the huge IT companies flowing into the program are needed. If this is not present on the engagement, erosion and the natural weight of the budget will tip the balance back to a traditional framework.
2 Blended teams: No matter how nice the team set-up is, a very noticeable line will appear to separate the experience people from the technology people. This line needs to be erased as soon as it appears. Spaces and tools need to be created and fostered so everybody can have a common understanding of the project goals.
The dilution of that line needs to be continuous, it means a bigger effort on both sides and a step outside their comfort zone. But there’s a huge benefit if this is achieved. We are talking about clarity as people from both sides will need to make sure their work is understood by people that are not used to do it and then, once they understand it, synergy appears as everybody will be able to build on their peer work to improve it.
3 High-level Stakeholder participation: The mix where big investments in IT infrastructure and company vision are being involved needs to be supported by company strategy or the results will be meaningless. Breaking silos inside the company and involving the internal teams that traditionally don’t get mixed with technology, but are key in defining the customer experience or the business is paramount.
Walking the talk: The Aurora engagement*
*As this project was done under a very strict confidentiality agreement, all the references that would help to identify who the client was have been obscured on purpose
Aurora delivered a unified solution that enabled the client organization to gain control over their core systems and reliably deliver value to customers and employees, both in their current context and as they confront shifting landscapes in the future.
From a technology ask to a holistic approach
Facing a commoditized market, and being captives of their technology providers our client wanted to upgrade their core systems and create an operating model that allowed them to regain control of their data and work-pace.
Their initial request was to perform an in-depth analysis of the current core system and propose an alternative solution for the future, from an operations & Technology (O&T) perspective.
However, it was also vital to understand the needs of their future customers, to detect potential business models, and then, use these inputs to recommend an alternative O&T solution fit for sustainable business in an evolving context.
“How might we explore, plan and test the viability of a customer-led alternative core system?”
Reframed as a holistic approach, we were proposing a customer-led program that connected Business, O&T, and Experience.
Defining the Current State and the Future Destination
To understand the client’s current position, we created a framework to explore the different views existing within the company, we incorporated both qualitative and quantitative information points from key departments, stakeholders, employees, and third-party providers. This was made tangible through a visualization of the Current-State Operating Model.
To design a possible future destination, we absorbed as much customer knowledge our client already had and worked with them to increase and complement it with selected customer user groups and people who could give insight into potential future needs that our client might have to respond to. We represented this through a Futures Matrix Framework that highlighted several opportunities that would determine different value propositions and services that connected all of that with the system requirements in the future.
This Futures Matrix Framework greatly helped our client to understand the implications that choosing one direction for the company might have, connecting the strategic decisions that they needed to make for the company to the technology and skills they would need to support these decisions.
But also, this Futures Matrix Framework greatly enhanced the communication between the technological layer, the experience layer, and the business layer within the project, giving all of us a commonplace to go back to understand what was needed from each one of us.
Connecting the dots
Once we had a definition of where we were, and our client had gained a better understanding of where they wanted to go, we needed to deliver something that connected both places. A business case perfectly filled the gap as it told the story of how much money the company would need to spend and how much time would be needed to go from point A (the Current State) to point B (The Future Vision).
Of course, knowing where we wanted to go didn’t mean we had the clarity needed to define the precise route to the destination so we defined a transition plan that showcased alternatives to the experience-led goal. Of course, this meant that the team was required to work in parallel, adapting, and collating numbers to each scenario.
An Experience concept to filter desirable futures from possible futures.
The business case was built from the definition of a vision that set up the destination where the company wanted to go.
This vision was represented by an experience concept that was based on industry context and research conducted with future customers and key stakeholders. This experience concept would use narrative elements to align the company’s business and operations towards delivering a differential value proposition for their customers.
A set of customer experience blueprints were created to connect the concept with the different pieces the future Target Operating Model (TOM).
But, in return, once established, the concept was to be used as a lens to define which of all the possible futures that a powerful platform as the TOM we were defining where to be supported and which were to be ignored.
Designing the future engine: the Target Operating Model (TOM)
Finally, the TOM depicted a future steady-state model for the organization. It explicitly articulated how the client’s strategic ambitions for customer experience and platform product & service flexibility would come to life through the proposed solution.
The TOM aligned & detailed the changes in capability and investment priorities required across the dimensions of People, Process & O&T and put in place a series of time-mapped activities to guide implementation.
Back to the Framework
Co-led by experience and technology, connected by business and empowered by operations & technology, Aurora's success story was only made possible by the close cooperation of a huge IT company, a strategic design studio, and the client working together as a single team.
But the key learnings we got from this project go back to the framework we proposed previously:
1The whole engagement was co-led by design and technology. This proved key as it avoided one of the main mistakes that happen on many other mixed engagements. Usually, the main piece of the budget is allocated in the IT space, and that removes Design from the spaces where they can shine, or limits some of its best capabilities to mere ornamentation. In our case, the design team was able to support and improve the strategic thinking that was done to decide on the technology side. This was understood by the client as they captured the value of the TOM being proposed and how it affected the strategic decisions that their company needed to make.
“We have done similar work before but seeing the final result now, one can tell there’s a difference. You can bring this to show the EXCO how customer experience affects our company strategy”
— Key client stakeholder
…
2The project leadership was there to tie teams together across traditionally different ways of working — that have bred contrasting cultures and concerns — in professionals from design and IT backgrounds.
We dedicated extensive efforts to erase these barriers like designing a 3 days onboarding kickoff workshop to ensure that all the teams had the same language and understood the challenge equally, that we as a team agreed on what we wanted to deliver when we wanted to deliver it and who was accountable for it and finally, that the client agreed and understood exactly what we would be doing during the whole engagement.
During the project, we managed to organize and schedule a daily meeting where all the team attended and, we established the Wednesday Critique where the different teams needed to present advances on their tasks to the rest of the troupe and receive constructive criticism (clients were invited here too).
Furthermore, all the steering committee meetings (fortnightly) were held in the project room, immersing the key stakeholders in the project each time they stepped in to give feedback on the project advances.
On the cooperation side, the feeling was that this engagement worked like a fluid 4-month long workshop.
“It was incredible to see the team come in and in such a short period, really capture what is going on in the company and what needs to be done.”
— key client stakeholder
…
3 Finally, we managed to set up a workroom where the client, the Technology team, and the Design team worked together. Tasks that would have otherwise been cumbersome were eased dramatically by having in-person contact with stakeholders regularly. Validations that could have delayed the project were resolved on the go in day-to-day interactions with stakeholders at the appropriate level within the client company.
Conclusion
The emphasis should be put on coordinating and equalizing the relationships and communication between all the different profiles that NEED to work together.
The success of these kinds of engagements can only come from an aligned view of Operations & Technology, Business, and Experience. And the emphasis should be put on coordinating and equalizing the relationships and communication between all the different profiles that NEED to work together.
Also, most love stories end up with a final scene where the happy couple gets married or when, after defeating all the possible problems they faced to be together they ride into the horizon under the promise of happiness. But let’s not deceive ourselves, that moment is just the start of the relationship. What comes after that perfect moment is lots of hard work. Just because one reached this spot doesn’t mean there will be success from now on. This framework needs to be extended to other teams, new people will need to work in this way, cooperating and complementing each other from opposite sides and demonstrating with each successful project that Strategic Design and BITEs were meant for each other all along.
The end.
P.S: This article was written together with Sophie Parker and Guillermo Granda, with the inestimable comment and help from Laura Buencuerpo, Carla Damerell, and Alfredo Vallina.
