DesignOps Summit 2021 Design Operations Metrics (Kristin Sundermeyer & Tygre Morehart)

Kristin Sundermeyer – Director of Design Operations, McGraw Hill

Tygre Morehart – Lead Designer, McGraw Hill

Budget Management

  • How providing a holistic view of spending relating to a project, gives design leaders data they need to make evidence-based decisions when product teams ask for more

Resource Planning

  • How we use metrics to show peaks and values across a timeline

Productivity Tracking

  • How we are capturing peoples time on tasks to get us to a standard

Sometimes projects were requesting a lot less than originally anticipated, so there’s obvious room in the budget

Other times it appeared we were trending over

  • Some designers are good at tracking details or forecasting and others not so much.

I thought – This cannot be good for business

We began developing a DesignOps team

  • We built templates and connected workspace that every project uses
  • We had to keep in mind flexibility and unique personalities of each project
  • Helped provide clarity and identifying the common denominator
  • We switched from passing design tickets around in Excel files to capturing everything in Smartsheet
  • We built templates and a connected workspace that every project uses by working systematically and working together with these templates, we can connect data so much easier and instantly.
  • But we had to keep in mind flexibility and unique personalities of all our different projects.
  • Meeting with other teams on these very different projects help provide clarity on identifying that common denominator

So, to help with budget management, we ended up with something like this

Asset logs or design tickets for each project

  • can contain anywhere from 100 to 3000 assets requests
  • typically represents a component of the products
    • Example: student edition or teachers manual, a digital component, or ancillaries

Invoice sheets

  • Have built in formulas that connect an asset from the log to the appropriate line item in the purchase order

Many projects will have multiple invoices (Ex: by vendor or component)

  • We can combine all these invoices into a single report which gives the design manager a bird’s eye view to see what is going on at that moment in time in the project

Unlike our old Excel files, we can keep adding to the same smartsheet

  • The report that could bundle up anything that needs uploaded into our provisioning database
  • Once it’s been marked complete, it falls off the report and new items appear automatically

Five key column that allows us to track invoice details

Final image column

  • Adding the final image triggers that the asset is ready for billing

Complexity column

  • Each asset is associated with the complexity. This complexity ties it to a line item in our rate sheet.

Unique code column

  • Each invoice has a unique code, the code is captured so that the asset can be counted on the correct invoice sheet

Dates and notes column

  • Help us keep track and organize assets as they are being invoiced

The next item in our template package is an invoice sheet

  • This invoice sheet contains all our design rates and uses the complexity code and a unique invoice number to count all design requests on all asset logs.
  • This invoice sheet has many other cool features built-in, such as
    • Alerting designers early on if a line item is at risk of going over the original predicted count.
  • A way to hide all the other line items from the rate sheet
  • a built-in calculator that will show the variance from the adjusted line numbers to the original purchase order

There’s an invoice sheet in Smartsheet and because cross sheet formulas are baked in, designers can copy as many as they need

We have a report that pulls all of them into one place

  • shows some key details such as the performance total or what is anticipated to be billed next – forecasting or budget used to date

Managers were now able to self-service the data they needed

  • These invoice sheets made it much easier for us to manage our budget and have conversations early because scope creep was easier to be identified and drastically improved our invoicing processes with our vendors

Resource Planning

Getting together the right team is step 1 but how many should be on that team?

  • The frustration we experience on our projects is: How hard it can be to manage resource allocation

We tackled this from two different directions

  • I realized that we were looking at projects as a whole, instead of drilling into the tasks expected of our teams and the time it takes to complete them

Started with a schedule and made sure all the tasks were being accounted for

  • Basic end to end tasks

Then assigned groups to each task

  • Foreshadow using a dropdown and shows consistency to help with a future formulas

Identified the total time on tasks

  • Important to identify the average amount of time it usually takes to accomplish a task, as well as it’s variances – its peaks and valleys

A formula is added to calculate allocation based on the hours required to complete the task and the beginning and end date of the task

  • More time to complete the task – Less allocation needed

Added a metric sheet that looks like the schedule and counts the percentage allocation per week by group

  • These metrics are used as a source for a chart and dashboard that looks something like this

  • Live dashboard so if dates change or new schedules are added Design Managers can make the best decisions with the most up to date information

Productivity Tracking

The problems we’re trying to solve in DesignOps

  • Internal design team of 80 designers working on 100 projects
    • They have different managers and different projects
    • Cover different disciplines and different grade levels
    • Different stakeholders and different markets

How do we ensure that we have the right designers on the right projects focused on the right things across our design organization?

To make the data set useful we needed to lock down the tasks and define what each task meant and encompassed

End-to End Product Lifecycle document was developed by our project management office in collaboration with all the cross-functional product teams

  • Captures every task that needs to be completed from initial conception of a product to maintenance and which cross functional team(s) is responsible for the task

Once we had our tasks identified we then noted all the projects that are currently in flight and will be in flight

  • imported them into a productivity tracking tool called Toggl Track Productivity tool
    • online time tracking – robust reporting
  • Designers can easily log their time against their tasks and projects
  • Create their own tags
    • Allowed them to further categorize tasks with information that was meaningful to them
  • Designers can also use the task tracker to visually show their manager where they needed more time for certain projects/tasks

What we observed over the course of the year

  • The team tracked 48,000 hours.
  • Certain discipline tasks take longer than others during our Plan and Build phases
  • Certain grade level tasks need more designers than others,
    • We can’t use the same assumptions across the board.
  • There are some set of people who consistently work overtime

We’re in the process of revising how we plan for an assigned staff on future projects and how smartsheet can help us get rid of heirloom spreadsheets for good and how maybe we can turn this data set into a knowledge bank