DesignOps Summit 2021 – Defining DesignOps Strategy Using Maturity Models (Benjamin Real)

Independent Professional

I’m going to be sharing a personal story and how creating a maturity model helped

For about 12 years I had been leading teams

  • Helped them to define their goals and how to get there
  • Think of the future and how they should be preparing themselves

BBVA restructured and lost their DesignOps team at the same time – It caused me to lose a bit of my guidance ability

  • I didn’t know where we were or how to orient myself as the leader of my team

The consultants of the reorg provided us with a reference like a map – It was their first time doing this type of reorganizing, so they had little understanding of a design team making the reference they provided unhelpful

  • I had a new team, and I couldn’t help my team to understand what we should be doing

We continued to use some design ops models that we had been using

  • Some of us started doing research about the responsibilities, practice, and people
  • Some of us didn’t have a specific role and we were trying to figure that out
  • We were stuck in this place of confusion for almost a year

That year I spent a lot of time thinking about how to orient ourselves, where we should be going and at the same time, we were losing members of the team and it was in part the uncertainty and my failures at guiding the team

I started to research other companies and figure out how to help myself and my team orient ourselves

I came up with a model

  • Started with the behaviors that we needed to change, to understand for the organization and the Design team, but the model was still new and needed improvements
  • I continued researching and working on the model

I started putting together the analysis of the results of the model and I was able to explain to my team what these team behaviors were, how we were doing, and what we should be doing

  • I started guiding them towards a vision of where we should be going and what we should be doing
    • Allowed us to start a discussion to come up with a vision together

We continued our research to refine our model as needed

  • We used Deloittle’s – data maturity model as a reference
  • Academic papers about maturity models from different professions and fields
  • Internal references – sales team had a maturity model

Our Model

We came up with this model based on 3 key components

  • We used some components seen in other models
  • Indicators – McKinsey
  • Behaviors – McKinsey InVision, IBM, what we ourselves defined

Levels – Levels of maturity (InVision)

  1. Producers
  2. Connectors
  3. Architects
  4. Scientists
  5. Visionaries

Indicators – The behaviors that define the levels of maturity

Behaviors – What we defined as the “proper”

We started evaluating ourselves with the whole team using the new model

  • We were able to come up with answers for how we believed we were doing as a team with each behavior, as an organization
  • From the analysis
    • 48% Maturity level
    • Identified 13 different potential projects and started working on 9 of them
      • Each of these new project teams were able to define their objectives
      • Defining how we were going to measure the changes in this behavior over time

We figured out where we were, how to move forward, the different paths we could take and what is required