DesignOps 2020: Showing the Value of DesignOps By Not Having a Design Team (Session Notes)

Speaker: Benjamin Real, Design & UX Director, BBVA Mexico

Introduction

— Benjamin is Head of Design & UX for BBVA Mexico
  • In charge of BBVA’s Mexican Design Team

— BBVA recently decided to focus on the following six goals:

— To help accomplish these goals, a new BBVA design office needed to be created

— The first task was to create the design team, and needed to position operation lead and project manager. A snapshot of the company hierarchy from Q4 2016 is below.

— Team grew from 21 to 80 something people from 2016 to 2018.

 

— Design Ops team grew with the Design team, and both had practice working with each other for many years.
— Then life happened. BBVA changed, and DesignOps was subject to a company reorganization.
— The goal of the reorg was on becoming more agile, so a new organizational model was built around building blocks and activities.
— DesignOps went from models where each team performed own activities, but had specialized team doing these activities, to one where the company had teams exclusively dedicated to a single block.
— The design team was split between several parts, and distributed to other areas in the company.
— DesignOps was not thought as something that was needed in new volume, and that the work-load could be distributed without any consequences.

 

What Could Have Been Done Better

— Three main points contributed as to why the DesignOps team was dismantled.

—  1. DesignOps didn’t fully understand agile model, and were not fully working with people on how re-org would end.
  • List of activities in DesignOps team were not explained or clearly articulated to others

 

— 2. DesignOps could not answer why some activities could not be performed effectively by someone outside of team
—3. DesignOps didn’t have tools and maturity to specify specific impacts Design Ops team had on design team, and bad impacts lack of team would have. People took the DesignOps team for granted.

 

What Happened When DesignOps Was Dismantled?

— Basically, it was a big mess.
— Benjamin and his managers had a gut feeling that something bad was going to happen without DesignOps. And it happened.
— Designers started to send thank-you notes for members of DesignOps team, appreciating their work.
— Designers acknowledged how DesignOps made the life of the designers easy overall, and helped manage the overall process
— Example of printing out documentation from BBVA.
  • Designers had to face issue of company bureaucracy without their DesignOps team
— Designers, when they had ops team to support them, were very happy. Then when team went away the designers became more stressed and over-stretched.
— Started to ask their managers questions all the time about DesignOps activities that the designers had to take on themselves
— Design leaders now had to take on DesignOps activities
— They couldn’t be with designers and that led to sub-par outcomes
  • This was noticed by company management.

— Design also lost coordination and standards to practices in DesignOps
— For recruitment
  • Design had a candidate contacted by four different people, who didn’t know candidate wasn’t being interviewed by others in the department.
  • Onboarding of designers suffered (one designer didn’t have a computer or email for a week after arriving at work)

— Design struggled with staffing all company projects. Had too many people assigned on a single project, and also projects were issued without follow-up actions.

— Teams taking over didn’t understand why certain activities needed,
  • For instance agency people were not getting paid in full at the end of each job
— It was a difficult time, and people were wondering how they could re-org, between design disciplines.
— The teams went back to the basics. They reviewed all Agile documentation within bank and looked at books like “Org Design for Design Orgs”
— Several things were noticed:
— In the end, another reorganization occurred:
— Three teams were actually extended DesignOps team
— The team had reached a level of complexity in terms of designers they had (170 people) and realized model of Krysten Skinner that they reached level 6, but were not operating on level 6, based on how they should be organized
— The team realized they needed to regain activities of DesignOps. If DesignOps team was extended, needed to reduce activities to team
— The team needed to get back prior positions, and reconstituted DesignOps team to work with Design heads

 

— They began a new plan for distributing the DesignOps activities and responsibilities within new teams such as ReOPs and DeOPs, as well as a reconstituted DesignOps function.

Conclusion

— The company realized Design needed DesignOps to function and to operate.
— The company didn’t realize level of importance for DesignOps until they lost it.
— Benjamin’s hope is that audience can take his story, learn from it, and prevent mistakes that Benjamin’s DesignOps group made.

 

Questions

  1. Do you have metrics to measure impact of DesignOps team? How do you understand how work creates positive trend?
—Already starting to do metrics right now, but can say that it’s impossible without Design team without the DesignOps team
—When he arrived at BBVA, had designers working in engineering, and executive team noticed that poor UX was due to focus on engineers doing the UX
—As they started to do projects with DesignOps team and approach of
—Improved experience of customers, and reduced customer complaints
—Level of work started to fall off a cliff.
—Specifically  articulate how design team was supported.
  1. How did not having DesignOps change value story of DesignOps?
—Main thing that surprised the company was level of recognition designers had for the DesignOps team members
—Changed way most design leaders viewed them, as opposed to being someone who worked behind the team, as opposed to being unable work without the ops team
—Need to focus on experience and design, and DesignOps allowed this to happen
—Need to work to make sure importance is shared with everyone else.
—Need more visibility to show what was done, and have clear metrics how design team is helping people be successful
  1. Distinction between program and project managers? What is the difference?
—Three big design teams (203) team with retail banking, enterprise banking, and internal company operations
—Had head of design for each, and program manager for each of these and everyone works with each other
—Single team to support two groups of people
  • DesignOps project manager allows really complex projects
—Designer Need to be emboldened to work on project
—Need to balance people doing projects in design, and need more
  1. Any recommendation on ratio of DesignOps to Designers?
—For Benjamin, ideal ratio is to have DesignOps Project manager for each design manager
—Having DesignOps manager for every 14 designers
—However, there are pressures around projects and conflicting pressures
—Currently have 1 DesignOps for every 25 people
  • Should be more focused but its a balance that has to be struck
  1. C-Suite’s involvement in reorg and recognition of importance?
—Head of retail banking in Mexico didn’t expect for there to be an impact
—Issue for him, was that Benjamin couldn’t really explain exact nature of negative impacts
—Understand their concerns, took attitude that everyone would be against change, and hard for them to separate feeling that if you were just resisting  change or had legitimate reason
—Big change for org, and had responsibility to implement change. Even though didn’t open door to be part of certain decision
  1. How to contact speaker?
—In Rosenfeld community, and on the Slack Channels and can be communicated at Benjamin.real@bbva.com