Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Design Staffing for Impact
Gold
Monday, January 8, 2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Share the love for this talk
Design Staffing for Impact
Speakers: Patrick Commarford
Link:

Summary

The IBM CIO portfolio is comprised of thousands of tools and services. Given the organization’s obsession with the IBMer experience and their desire to positively impact IBMer productivity, it is extremely important that they allocate their scarce Design & Research talent to the projects that have the greatest impact on IBMers' work experience. To this end, they have refined their staffing processes and developed a new metric, The Design Staffing Score, that allows them to measure the degree to which their staffing approach aligns with project priority. Patrick will describe their refined approach to staffing, how progress is measured, and the tangible benefits they’ve realized.

Key Insights

  • A simple prioritize/reject staffing model without documented criteria leads to confusion and inefficiency.

  • Focusing priority on two quantifiable variables—number of users and frequency of use—provides an objective basis for staffing decisions.

  • Leadership support from the CIO, Fletcher Breven, was critical to prioritizing employee experience and UX impact.

  • Using domain-specific design advisors helps define ideal staffing per project and aligns staffing to project needs.

  • A transparent queue with published priority scores and staffing expectations improves stakeholder communication and reduces uncertainty.

  • Introducing tiers of support allows low priority projects to receive appropriate (though limited) assistance without full designer embedding.

  • Creating a design staffing score metric measuring correlation between priority and staffing enables tracking impact and improvement.

  • Weekly automation of staffing data collection and score calculation helps maintain alignment and enables rapid adjustments.

  • Collaboration across domains through weekly meetings and focal points reduces duplication and promotes sharing of research and design knowledge.

  • Continuous communication, feedback loops, and leadership involvement are essential for evolving prioritization and staffing strategies.

Notable Quotes

"If you’re like us, your team simply isn’t large enough to fully staff every project with 100% of the UX talent it needs."

"We created a simple formula focused on how many people a project impacts and how often they use it."

"Our chief information officer Fletcher Breven has always seen his role as providing a productive environment for IBMers—it’s our North Star."

"We went from an approve/reject model to a transparent prioritized queue where nothing is rejected, only priorities confirmed or adjusted."

"We transitioned designers embedded on low priority projects to higher priority ones within three weeks."

"We created tiers of support where the gold standard, embedding designers, is reserved for priority one through three projects."

"We measure alignment with a design staffing score reflecting the correlation between project priority and percent staffed."

"We automated our staffing records and updated our staffing score weekly, watching it grow from 44 to nearly 80."

"Design advisors maintain relationships with designers and project teams to reassess staffing needs as project scope changes."

"Communicating frequently and transparently with stakeholders about priorities and staffing builds trust and understanding."

Ask the Rosenbot
Gina Mendolia
Therapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Cheryl Platz
Demystifying Multimodal Design: The Design Practice You Didn't Know You're Doing (Videoconference)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Catherine Dubut
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design (Videoconference)
2021 • Enterprise Community
Robin Beers
Beyond Insights: Researchers as Organizational Change Catalysts
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Jill Fruchter
Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Prerna Makanawala
Achieving Balanced Design Consistency
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Max Gadney
Assessing UX jobs for impact in climate
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group (Rosenfeld Community)
Steve Baty
Breaking Out of Ruts: Tips for Overcoming the Fear of Change
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Sharon Bautista
Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
A Typology of Participation in Participatory Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Corey Nelson
Layoffs (Videoconference)
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Chris Geison
What's Next for Research? (Videoconference)
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Jorge Arango
Meeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth (Videoconference)
2021 • Enterprise Community
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 1: Intro
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Laura Klein
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises (Videoconference)
2020 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

"Using skittles to map skills made it less personal but more fun and engaging for designers."

Shaping design, designers and teams

November 8, 2018

Sabrina Mach

"Design needs to be aligned first; if design cannot agree amongst itself, how can the bigger organisation understand it."

Sabrina Mach Nina Wainwright

How to Design Your Design Operating Model

September 29, 2021

Samuel Proulx

"Complexity is not a barrier to accessibility – even the most complicated games have been made accessible."

Samuel Proulx

Invisible barriers: Why accessible service design can’t be an afterthought

December 3, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Nothing about us without us is the mantra we are embracing when doing our inclusive design operations."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility (Videoconference)

May 26, 2022

Briana Thomas

"Michael became our farmer maintaining a steady flow of the team; Dana was our gardener cultivating quality work."

Briana Thomas

The Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams

September 24, 2024

Adam Cutler

"The hardest part about remote is making design reviews feel collaborative and team-based."

Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan Worthman

Discussion

June 8, 2016

"We had no idea where we were going, so we had to build and connect with teams like we’d never had before."

Operationalizing DesignOps

November 7, 2018

Leah Buley

"Executives see research value when they’ve lost money on bad bets and want to mitigate risk for future decisions."

Leah Buley Joe Natoli

Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)

October 8, 2024

Nathan Shedroff

"Strategy should be continuous, circular, and evolve with every action the organization takes."

Nathan Shedroff

Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically

March 31, 2020