Design Thinking & Project Management

(Gracias a José Alzurut para la traducción y edición de ayuda en este artículo.)

En mayo de 2016, me di un seminario de la Comunidad PMI sobre el tema de "Diseño Pensamiento y Gestión de Proyectos". Recientemente, en un blog de seguimiento, compartío 6 lecciones aprendidas a partir de mi experiencia de integración de diseño en los proyectos.

Este artículo se centrará en la lección # 1: proteger sus equipos de herramientas y procesos pesados de la gestión de proyectos. El objetivo de "proteger a sus equipos" es la aplicación de herramientas y procesos de gestión de proyectos en un nivel superior para dar estructura al producto o servicio de entrega, para permitir la creatividad y la iteración que se produzca dentro del proyecto.

Mi consejo a usted como jefe de proyecto:  Hacer espacio para la creatividad, el descubrimiento y el fracaso de tu equipo.

• “Proteja su equipo de proyecto del  trabajo administrativo, tanto como sea posible”. Esto puede incluir, trabajo tales como: La generación de informes, asistir a reuniones, actualizaciones de estado, registro de tiempo en tareas específicas (TimeSheet), estimar el tiempo restante en tareas específicas, entre otros. En este sentido, mantenga su equipo centrado en las más valiosas tareas y donde pueden ser más productivo.

• “Entrenar a su equipo en  técnicas creativas para resolver problemas”. La mayor parte de su equipo no estarán familiarizados con las técnicas aplicadas en solución creativa de problemas. Discutir con esto problemas con la gerencia, a los fines de poder invertir en las sesiones de entrenamiento para tu equipo en técnicas formales tales como: lluvia de ideas, pensamiento lateral, mapas mentales y human-centered design.

• “Asignar tiempo para las nuevas ideas que surjan”. Tratar de no mantener a su equipo atado a los calendarios, plazos irrazonables y arbitrarias tareas. Es por ello, que no debe ejecutar el proyecto con un programa de tareas detalladas de 4 horas, debido a que esto  se convierte en una carga para el equipo en la realización de  actualizaciones de estado. En su lugar, es pertinente comunicar con claridad los hitos y plazos para la finalización de las fases clave, por ejemplo, el descubrimiento, la síntesis, la ideación, creación de prototipos, validación, entre otros aspectos.

• “Deje que su equipo haga su trabajo” sin los constantes registros de entrada y de supervisión. No se enfrasque sobre su personal solicitando información sobre el estado de las tareas de forma reiterativa, dado que esta situación conlleva, a que si tienen problemas es posible que quieran escalar. Y por encima de todo, evitar la micro-gestión.

• “Subrayar la importancia de la comunicación abierta”. El equipo no deber ser dependiente de usted para poder tener una comunicación y colaboración eficiente.

• “Alentar a su equipo para utilizarlo como punto de escalada”. Permitir que su equipo de trabajo aborde el problema antes de que sea escalado a usted. No limite al equipo para que realice una comunicación y colaboración eficiente.

• “Permitir al equipo explorar lo sucedido y animar a compartir el aprendizaje de lo sucedido en todas las disciplinas”. Promover la colaboración interdisciplinaria, esto es clave. Debe animar a que nazcan y se promuevan relaciones cruzadas en todas las disciplinas: diseño, ingeniería, análisis de negocios, calidad, soporte, marketing, entre otros. Se sorprenderá con los resultados cuando las paredes y barreras comienzan a caer y exista un entendimiento compartido entre los grupos.

• “Seguir desafiando la forma en que su equipo está realizando su trabajo”. Anime a los miembros del equipo para seguir buscando una nueva manera de ejecutar su trabajo. Preguntar a la gente si han considerado formas alternativas de trabajo y lo que podrían haber alcanzados por hacer las cosas de manera diferente. Sea solidario y para los miembros del equipo que no están cumpliendo con las expectativas, dar retroalimentación sincera en privado.

• Y lo más importante - tolerar la posibilidad de riesgos. Es inevitable con el pensamiento de diseño. Fomentar un ambiente de equipo donde el fracaso es una oportunidad de aprendizaje, no es algo que pueda limitar la carrera de uno. Usted no tendrá la innovación y el descubrimiento sin algún fallo.

Soy un apasionado de evangelizar Design Thinking dentro de la comunidad de gestión de proyectos y la bienvenida a cualquier retroalimentación o comentarios.

Conecte conmigo aquí en Linkedin o seguirme en Twitter @brucegay

(I apologize in advance if this article comes off as didactic, that was not my intension.) 

In early May 2016, I gave a webinar to the PMI Community on the topic "Design Thinking & Project Management". Recently in a follow-on blog post, I shared 6 lessons learned from my experience of integrating design into projects.

This article will focus on Lesson #1: Shield your teams from heavy PM tools & processes. The goal of "shielding your teams" is to 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.

My advice to you:  Make space for creativity, investigation and failure on your team.

• Shield your team from as much administrative work as possible. This may include work such as: generating reports, attending status update meetings, recording time worked on specific tasks, estimating time remaining on specific tasks, etc. Keep your team focused on the most valuable tasks and where they can be most productive.

• Train your team in creative problem-solving techniques. Most of your team will be unfamiliar with the skills involved in creative problem-solving. Haggle with your management to invest in training sessions for your team on formal techniques such as brainstorming, lateral thinking, mind-mapping and human-centered design.

• Allocate time for new ideas to emerge. Try not to hold your team to unreasonable and arbitrary schedules and deadlines. Don’t run the project with a project schedule that has tracks detailed 4-hour tasks and becomes a burden on the team to provide status updates. Instead, you should clearly communicate time-bound milestones for the completion of key phases, e.g. discovery, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, validation.

• ​Let your team do their job without the constant check-ins and oversight. Don’t hover over your staff asking for updates, or if they have issues they may want to escalate. And above all else, avoid micro-management!

• Stress the importance of open communication. Don’t make the team dependent on you for efficient communication and collaboration. 

• Encourage your team to utilize you as an escalation point. Have your team try work through issues before raising to your level. Don’t make the team dependent on you for efficient communication and collaboration.

• Allow exploration to happen and encourage the team to share 'learnings' across all disciplines. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration - this is key. You should encourage cross-fertilization across all disciplines: design, engineering, business analysis, quality, support, marketing, etc. You will be surprised with the results when walls/barriers begin to fall and there is a shared understanding across the groups.

• Keep challenging the way your team approaches their work. Encourage team members to keep looking anew at the way they approach their work. Ask people whether they have considered alternative ways of working and what might be achieved by doing things differently. Be supportive and for those team members who are not meeting expectations, give candid feedback in private. 

• And most importantly -- tolerate risk-taking. It is inevitable with design thinking. Foster a team environment where failure is a learning opportunity, not something that would limit one's career. You will not have innovation and discovery without some failure.

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

Connect with me on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter @brucegay

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. 

Connect with me on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter @brucegay

In early May, I gave a presentation on the topic "Design Thinking & Project Management". At the beginning of my presentation, I polled the participants about their relationship with design with respect to their projects and organization. One-third of the respondents indicated "Design is already part of our process and culture". The remaining two-thirds of the participants chose the option "I'm interested, but I don't know where to start."

Clearly there is interest in Design Thinking within the PM community, but many do not know how to become more informed on the tools and methods.

The aim of this blog post is to provide a short list of well-known Design Thinking resources that Project Managers and their teams can start using to become more knowledgeable on the subject.

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka d.school)

If there is one place for Project Managers to start learning more about Design Thinking, I would highly recommend the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, more commonly known as the "d.school."  The d.school provides a "Virtual Crash Course on Design Thinking" on their website at http://dschool.stanford.edu/

Even more importantly, the d.school has made available free their most-used design tools in a PDF document called the "The Bootcamp Bootleg" - http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/the-bootcamp-bootleg/ As a PM new to the methods and tools, I highlight recommend downloading and studying the "Bootcamp Bootleg".

Google Ventures (GV) Design Sprint

GV has developed a 5-day process for tackling business questions through design, prototyping, and testing of ideas with customers. A guide for "The Design Sprint" is laid out nicely at http://www.gv.com/sprint/

IDEO

IDEO (pronounced "eye-dee-oh") an international design and consulting firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has been a leading proponent of applying design thinking methodology to design products, services, environments, and digital experiences.

IDEO has created a series of design thinking online courses (Cost: US$400 - US$600) at http://www.ideou.com/

One focus area for IDEO has been adapting design methodologies for providers of primary education. Their website "Design Thinking for Educators" http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/ provides a starting point for educators who want to bring Design Thinking and the design processes into their classrooms. An excellent resource for process and methods of design, "Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit", is available as a downloadable PDF is available on the same site.

Frog Design (aka frog)

Frog is global product strategy and design firm founded in Germany and currently headquartered in San Francisco, California. Frog has developed and made available a "Collective Action Toolkit" that helps put design-thinking tools into the hands of local change agents to transform their communities. While this toolkit is more geared to solving community problems, the tools and methods can be applied to problem-solving in the government and business sectors.

http://www.frogdesign.com/cat

http://www.frogdesign.com/sites/default/files/pdf/frog_collective_action_toolkit.pdf

LUMA Institute

The LUMA Institute provides training programs for learning and applying key practices of human-centered design. Their "Looking, Understanding, Making" approach is very accessible to average people who may not necessarily think of themselves as "innovators".

https://www.luma-institute.com/story

https://www.luma-institute.com/resources

IBM Design Thinking

IBM has made their approach, IBM Design Thinking, freely available and open to all. IBM Design Thinking is billed as a scalable framework to help teams understand and deliver. At the heart of this framework is a is a set of behaviors focused on discovering users’ needs and envisioning a better future, called the "Loop." The Loop is a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting and making.

http://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/

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

In this my inaugural post, I want to elaborate on the Key Elements of Design Thinking and highlight how they relate to the Project Management context.

Design Thinking has emerged as a practical methodology for driving innovative outcomes. Design Thinking encourages innovative solutions by drawing on approaches from engineering and design and combining them with ideas from the arts, social sciences, and the business world.

Design Thinking is ...

1)  People-centered. Empathy is at the core.

Empathy gained through user research is at the center of design. The PM and project team should strive to include all project stakeholders and customers in the process, starting from project initiation. The goal is to get immediate and timely feedback from the customer and make changes and revisions along the way.

2) Extensive interdisciplinary collaboration.

A common challenge across projects is communication. Words, and the meaning behind them are often misunderstood. Different people with different backgrounds and experiences use language differently. Design Thinking tools and methods, like sketching, mind maps or physical models, can be extremely useful. They force people to remove imprecise words and organize around a “synthesized” picture to describe the concept. Additionally, people are terrible at recall, but we’re awesome at recognition. Project Managers should utilize these tools and methods to bring people together and work more effectively.

3) Highly creative. Strives for diverse viewpoints.

As a PM, you should staff your project team with people that possess different perspectives for the best results. You absolutely need people who think differently, but to be efficient, you need to find ways to communicate, prioritize, share in decision making. Seek out staff that can “think laterally” and are willing to try connecting ideas that might not seem to intuitively go together. 

4) All about doing and being hands-on.

Design Thinking is about taking ideas and concepts and quickly giving them form. Whether a napkin sketch, a prototype carved from foam rubber, or a digital mock-up, the quick-and-rough models that designers constantly create are a critical component of innovation. When you give form to an idea, you begin to make it real and can elicit emotional responses from end users and customers. You have to make in order to learn. 

5) Iterative.

Lastly, Design Thinking is iterative. You and your team will never get it right the first time.

As part of your project management process, you need to embed the cyclical process of prototyping, analyzing, and refining a product or service. Your team needs to secure timely feedback from the customer in order to make iterative/incremental improvements along the way. My advice -- the iterative nature of design is not as costly as not doing it at all.

A few closing thoughts on this topic:

1. Design Thinking is not magic. There is rigor to it. You can learn it. You can practice it, you can get better at it.
2. There are many design models to choose from and no single process or toolkit serves every case. As a PM, you need to understand whatever model you are using and account for it in your project planning and execution. 
3. Design is a set of tools to solve problems. If you do it well, it is a sustainable activity that can transform your projects and your entire business.

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