Design Thinking & Project Management

Recently I have been working on a turnaround project that needed some additional project management discipline and rigor. I have been providing come guidance to some of the junior PMs, that I wanted to share with the community here.

Guidance for Project Managers:

• Empathy and listening is key to being a successful Project Manager. Ask your teams “Where can I help?” and they will tell you.

• Teams do not communicate well. It is our job as PMs to make sure any mis-communications or delays in communication are beaten down.

• Be an escalation point for your teams to ensure that their open items and concerns are being addressed in a timely manner.

• Get your hands dirty. There is a lot of important work that no one team is assigned to do yet needs to be done for the project to be successful. (e.g. “herding cats”, action item follow-up, procuring additional software or resources, generating drafts of documents for the team to react to, etc.).

• Think strategically and think about the bigger picture. Someone needs to help guide and focus the team on “The Goal”.

• Keep a watchful eye on dependencies and their impacts on milestones.

• Stay focused on the Top 3-4 critical issues that could delay or derail the teams’ progress.

• Make sure the team takes time to prepare for key stakeholder meetings. Conduct dry runs if needed, but at minimum presentation materials should be reviewed prior to sharing with stakeholders.

• Shield the team from as much administrative work as possible.

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I recently participated on a lecture panel for Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design. My role on the panel was to bring a project manager's perspective on design, specifically for development and design of software in the healthcare sector. 

One of the messages that I wanted to communicate to the graduate students was to treat your project manager as resource and not a task master. 

Rightly or wrongly, people often think of Project Managers as the person in charge. They see this person as managing timelines & schedules and handing out task assignments. However, I wanted the graduate students to understand that their job would be easier if they treat their PM as a partner and a resource.

In my opinion -- a good PM helps his or her team to remove roadblocks and open new paths to help the team achieve its goals.

If a software developer needs a new software license or a certain piece of hardware, the PM should be the one championing the procurement of the new resources. 

If the UX design team needs feedback from certain customers, salespeople, or product users, the PM could make those initial introductions happen and help the designers gain access to the stakeholder groups.

What if the analysts and designers wanted to know the current set of feature priorities or the worst-offender bugs? How about what the latest data teaches us about a new product feature? The PM should be able to provide the data or at least connect the analysts and designers with the right people who have the data.

I also feel that it is our jobs as PMs to shield our teams from as much administrivia and unnecessary distractions as possible. This will allow your team members to do their best and most meaningful work. 

I encourage you to tell your teams that they should treat you as a resource and not a task master. 

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I am planning to develop a Part 2 presentation to the webinar "Design Thinking & Project Management". My goal is to continue the conversation on how Design and Project Management intersect and how design can benefit your projects. ( Please watch my webinar is you have not already! )

Thus far, I have the collected the following topics (in no specific order):

• How to start incorporating Design Thinking into projects
• Change management or improving an organization's readiness to adopt design methods
• One or two real world examples of the design process (case studies)
• Managing schedule risk around design activities
• Budgeting for user research and usability testing

I am interested in any additional topics or questions from everyone to be included in the next Design presentation. Your feedback is valuable as I formulate the agenda.

Thanks in advance!

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In May 2016, I presented a webinar to the PMI Community on the topic "Design Thinking & Project Management". Continuing my series of articles on how Project Managers can integrate design into projects, this article will focus on Lesson #2: "Design should be involved in the full project lifecycle", and specifically options and recommendations on how to structure UX Design teams within your organization.

Each company or organization is different. How you decide to organize your teams will depend on what works best for your company's goals and culture. The key organizational models for UX Design are: centralized, de-centralized (aka embedded), or hybrid of the two. There are advantages and disadvantages for each model.

1. Centralized Model

In a centralized team model, designers belong to a single unit and are "farmed out" to work on individual projects around the organization. When a particular designer's work is complete they return to the central group and are re-assigned to new work and new projects.

Advantages:

• Promotes uniform career growth of the design team.
• Provides emotional benefits of belonging to a group.
• Advances a coherent design experience across the organization.

Disadvantages:

• Reduces design to a purely execution function, not fully integrated into the project lifecycle.
• Designers are inserted into a project that was already underway.
• Designers would not have participated in problem definition, a key activity that designers are well-suited to lead the team through.
• Perception of designers as outsiders - "not one of us".

2. Embedded Model

In this model, designers are embedded into multidisciplinary teams and report up through local management. Designers are dedicated to a team and each team is devoted to a distinct aspect of the product or software development.

Advantages:

• Over time, the team forms a cohesive unit and team members respect the contributions of the designer.
• The designer builds up specific business or domain knowledge and
• The designer establishes stronger bonds with key stakeholder (and decision makers) involved in the project.

Disadvantages:

• Designers have no sense of design community for support, they could become lonely.
• Designers work on their own, likely not collaborating with other designers within the organization.
• Team members are non-designers who do not speak the same professional language. 

3.  Hybrid Model

From recent experiences, we overcame the disadvantages of the two previous models by evolving a hybrid model with both embedded and centralized attributes. We found that having UX designers embedded in the development teams, but also members of a design group within the organization, worked best. The result had the combined advantages from both models.

In the hybrid model, there is a degree of commitment and engagement desired from the embedded designers assigned to specific projects. In this case, the designer understands the full life cycle and is deeply wedded to the business or domain. Having a centralized reporting structure lets designers to be managed by other designers. This allows for peer design, knowledge sharing across projects and quickly ramping up on a project.

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

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I just attended a multi-disciplinary tech conference named Abstractions in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA USA and it was awesome!

The Abstractions conference brought together 1,500+ individuals involved in modern software development, including: software developers, software architects, UI/UX designers, DevOps, QA testers and community leaders, with the purpose to teach, learn, and connect. I was one of the few project managers (or management types) in attendance, but I have to tell you that I returned from the conference with a much broader horizon of the field.

While the primary focus of the conference was software development, the sessions covered a wide variety of topics and I found many tracks that sparked my interest and intellect. 

Here are select session topics that I attended during the conference:

• Machine Learning (ML) in Healthcare 
• Quality and security issues in the Internet of Things (IoT)
• Kubernetes: Building the next generation automation tools
• Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) - e.g. Siri, Echo, Cortana 
• Designing for Virtual Reality
• Style guide best practices
• How Micro-interactions can elevate your UX
• You too can become a sketching machine!
• Free Software, Free Society (Open Source Initiative)
• Overview of npm (package manager for JavaScript)
• Why we need to bring back apprenticeships, and how to make it happen
• Don't Fear Failure
• Three easy steps for changing the world
• Building a (self-sustaining) culture of learning within your organization

Conferences are an important professional development opportunity. Most provide best practices, innovation tracks and terrific networking. 

After this recent experience, my advice is to use conference attendance to your advantage. Don't limit yourself to PMI-only conferences. Seek out a multi-disciplinary conference to attend and be prepared to broaden your horizons!

I welcome any feedback or comments on this article. 

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