co-author: Alesha Arp | editor: Jonathon Coleman
DesignOps plays a crucial role in driving the timeliness, efficiency, and effectiveness of design teams.
We asked participants to share their relationship to project management - both as a core competency and as a category of tools used by Design and DesignOps teams. We found that project management is a core competency across the board, with nearly 89% of respondents indicating that they regularly (“at least once per month”) practice some form of project management in their role. Regarding types of project management, nearly 54% of all respondents selected “Lean / Agile / Scrum” while 35% selected “traditional / PMP” project management.
DesignOps practitioners often find themselves adapting tools designed for cross-functional disciplines for their project management needs. And while Design teams often must resort to using project management tools designed for product and engineering workflows, these tools consistently fail to support Design-specific workflows out of the box. This problem is made worse by the lack of centralized tooling, which prevents cross- cutting visibility for Design and DesignOps stakeholders and decision makers.
Adapting project management tools to achieve DesignOps objectives requires a lot of creative shoehorning. This is frustrating when DesignOps practitioners are often responsible for bridging the workflows of partner teams. It’s even more complicated when teams use different tools that don’t integrate well (or at all). Porting information from one system to another and back again can be tedious and introduce errors, especially when practitioners have to repeatedly copy and paste.
A solid 66% of respondents rated their satisfaction with their project management tools as “somewhat satisfied” or “not at all satisfied.” While almost 31% of respondents said they were “satisfied”, the written feedback about the shortcomings of project management tools suggest that a majority of DesignOps professionals would like to see changes to them that better support DesignOps workflows - especially for enabling Design at scale. Participant responses suggest a need for more centralized, integrated, and user-friendly project management solutions that align with the specific needs of DesignOps.
However, many barriers exist to this tool utopia. Resistance to change and difficulties in training and adoption are barriers to successfully implementing project management tools. The diversity of tools in organizations creates a lack of a standardized approach and makes unification and adoption challenging. Rigid organizational policies and constraints worsen these problems. Often, these constraints fall in the realm of restrictive IT policies that, unless there is a strong relationship between Design and Finance (and/or Procurement), invariably result in limited project management tool choices.
Determination is key to fighting this uphill battle. Standardization of workarounds, training, change management, and fostering a culture of tool adoption are critical approaches for minimizing the shortcomings of project management tools.