Surviving Design Projects

“There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here…”

Teams do not have insight into the organizational, business, or operational context surrounding a project. Context is crucial to the success of a design project because it allows designers to gauge what approach, process, and solution will be the best fit. Context establishes constraints, not only for the project, but for the design itself.

The effect: The project team runs into unanticipated roadblocks in the design project.

The challenge: Stakeholders may see “insulating” the design team as their responsibility, and be reluctant to relinquish that role.

“It’s a shame she’s not in the meeting. All these action items are for her.”

The people responsible for delivering and executing are not included in the planning process.

The effect: Project teams spend more time reconciling plans (or easing the anxiety of the producers) than necessary.

The challenge: Collaborative environments tend to favor the path of least resistance, which in this case entails making decisions on someone’s behalf when they’re not there. One flavor of this scenario involves actively excluding key producers because they are seen as not essential to the planning process.

“I hate to put you on the spot, but…”

Project stakeholders do not understand the design work because the design team hasn’t assembled a meaningful narrative. Designers may have been asked to present concepts without sufficient notice, or the design team neglected to anticipate questions from the stakeholders.

The effect: Progress on the design work may be held back until stakeholders buy into the design concept. High quality work may be undermined by a poor presentation.

The challenge: Design processes balance spontaneity with deliberation. Presenting a design at a moment’s notice is not necessarily unreasonable, but the project team must understand the potential risks to the project.

“Just get some rough ideas down by tomorrow, OK?”

Forces outside the design team establish an unreasonable schedule for producing design ideas.

The effect: Designers confronted with this situation will resent the project team if forced to prepare outputs without sufficient time. If they comply with the unreasonable request, they may find themselves committed to a design concept that doesn’t effectively solve the problem.

The challenge: The design team may be eager to dive into the problem or to prove their value, ignoring the risks that come with short-changing their process.

See also: Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job, Chapter 6, Sticking to Your Process.

“I think we all agree here.”

The team comes to some agreement (on direction or approach, for example) but doesn’t really understand the underlying assumptions or the downstream implications. If they understood those, they might not agree.

The effect: A false consensus may move the project forward, leading to more challenging conflicts later when the underlying assumptions come to light.

The challenge: Since everyone agrees, it may be difficult to detect that this is a problem.

Do a small project (a pilot or proof of concept) to help other teams or organizations understand the value or the purpose of a larger program. Like the “Make it Real” pattern, by doing a pilot project, the team has an opportunity to experience the execution of a particular strategy or direction. By implementing at a small scale, the team can extract lessons learned to set them up for a larger endeavor. This small victory serves as a model for subsequent projects.

Use when:

• You’ve identified a strategy or direction, but need to get further buy-in.

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Employ a different metaphor for exploring the situation. People typically use war as a metaphor for talking about conflict. Through this metaphor, we come to expect winners and losers, offense and defense, and strategies of shock and awe. The anticipation of conflict, when positioned akin to war, makes it inevitably unproductive.

Resolving Conflicts at Work offers two other metaphors: 

• Conflict as opportunity: Position the conflict as a problem that needs solving collaboratively.
• Conflict as journey: Position the conflict as an ongoing process, allowing you to “transcend the idea that you are trapped in your conflict”. “Journeys create expectations and anticipations of growth, self-improvement, awareness, and forgiveness.”

Use when:

• The language used to describe the conflict is limited to winners/losers and us/them.

Force yourself to look at a situation from both a macro and micro view. It can be hard to consider a situation from multiple perspectives. Through these lenses, however, nuances of the situation reveal themselves. New and different perspective on a situation gives you an opportunity to re-evaluate the conflict, and determine whether the conflict is truly stalling a project.

Use when:

• You’re having trouble seeing the situation from any perspective besides your own.

Realize how much your trust of someone (or something) is driven by faith, not by experience. We are wired to believe things we want to be true, and aren’t always “rescued” by our rational side. That is, the bullsh*t detector doesn’t always ring loud enough to overwhelm our desire to believe in our colleagues. Decisions driven by faith can lead to conflict when performance or quality doesn’t meet our expectations.