6 Lessons for Integrating Design into Projects

 

My first post on the topic of Design Thinking & Project Management was a "call to action" to my fellow Project Managers. As a follow-on post, I want to share some lessons gained from my experience of integrating design into projects.

Here are my Top 6 Lessons Learned for integrating design into your projects. Over the coming weeks, I plan to post additional articles that will go into more detail for each item below.

1) Shield your teams from heavy PM tools/processes. 

Apply project management tools and processes at a higher level to give structure to the product or service delivery, but just enough structure to allow creativity and iteration to occur within the project.

2) Design should be involved in the full development lifecycle.

Embed design practitioners into your development organization, but also allow for a central function to provide some level of design governance. This works better than having designers segregated off in their own department supporting multiple teams as “consultants” to those projects. The proximity to engineering (and business) will allow designers to build relationships with the necessary teams and promote collaboration on the project.

3) Sequencing of design work matters.

User research and design needs to happen ahead of the development work. Design should have a “head start” to provide well thought-out solutions that can be iterated upon. If your organization uses Agile, setting up parallel tracks for design and development is a good practice. This allows design practitioners to work on design for the following iteration while providing support as necessary for the current iteration and testing the product from the previous iteration.

4) Strive for extensive collaboration and share designs early and often.

Involving business teams and engineering in the design process helps define scope and avoids costly investment in solutions that are not feasible. 

5) Co-Design works.

Design sessions that include domain and technical knowledge of all disciplines is a great way to resolve conflicts between user need, legacy product and technical constraints. Additionally, the collaborative resolution of design problems increases the sense of ownership and authorship across the entire team.

6) Evangelize Design by “Doing it”.

Design is all about action. Sharing the design process and methods with business and engineering is more effective than talking about it -- or even training sessions. One example that I have seen work well is to include other team members and stakeholders as silent participants in user engagement. This is an excellent way to expose them to human centered design and increase confidence in the design process. 

A few additional thoughts:

1. As a Project Manager, you need to understand whatever design process you are using and account for it in your project planning and execution.
2. With any change or adoption of new processes, don't expect to get things perfect the first round. Put something in motion, evaluate and make changes as needed.

I am passionate about evangelizing Design within the Project Management community. I welcome any feedback or comments below. 

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