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There is a shift happening within the design culture of your organization. With the rise of the Creative and Design Ops roles, the structure of teams is changing, and it has significant implications for your business.
Brands like Grammarly and DocuSign are already shifting the way they work to accommodate this new role. Shopify has a blog article called “Understanding DesignOps and Their Role in Design Teams.”
Why are they creating new positions?
Truly understanding these roles begins with acknowledging the pressures designers face today as the industry becomes more integrated, specialized, and digitized.
With the digitization of design, automation of manual tasks became necessary. Advances in creative automation and new tooling have finally allowed the design role to shift back from the production-line towards a more strategic position. Still, there’s an organizational process change that needs to occur, too, and it comes with embracing Creative and Design Ops roles to foster a design culture in your organization.
But what are Creative and Design Ops?
Design Ops
Design Ops roles manage everything a designer does in a day that is not design. But why, you might ask, would a designer be doing anything except design? Exactly.
The fact is that most designers in modern organizations are spending a large portion of the workday on administrative tasks such as system management, tools, project coordination, client relations, and even recruitment.
As systems have become more sophisticated, the need for many variations and minor adjustments is now standard practice. Once, a designer might have created a static design in one program for one platform, they now develop responsively for multitudes.
Not only do they have to consider the design, but they must also manage version control, rights management, and archiving of assets, among other concerns.
While the designer’s world has changed dramatically, our organizations, processes, and team structures have not kept pace, especially in the team hierarchy.
Digital Transformation
It has been happening consistently, but over the last year, the impact from COVID-19 has pushed companies well into digital transformation. Now, businesses and organizations are seeing massive payoffs from their foray into transformative digital design.
As companies are transitioning into a digital-first culture, a spotlight has been turned onto design teams, and what we see looks like chaos.
Blurred Lines
As the industry has changed, designers have been pulled in many directions. They are often called upon to create budgets, timelines, schedules and even evaluate new tools or respond to proposals.
“What I like the least about my job is the admin work or doing jobs of other titles like being a project manager, a product manager, or a content strategist,” said Tracy Gabrys, [RC1] Senior Interaction Designer with more than 12 years of experience.
Historically, some organizations expected designers to also function as project managers and agency design leaders. Still, while they’re doing these things, they’re not doing the very, highly skilled work that only they can do.
“We’ve incorporated some automation, but someone still has to design the form of automation and edit it when it does not fit the needs of the team. That role still falls on the designers as they are the ones producing the work that would need the automation.”
With demand for digital design at an all-time high, savvy organizations realize it may be time to have someone else manage the tools, budgets, and timeline questions while designers manage the digital product design.
Creative Ops
The same thing that happened in Design has happened in Creative, with the brunt of the operational work falling onto creative directors.
In partnership with sales and marketing teams, these directors found themselves spending an increasing amount of time working in or evaluating tools, infrastructure, workflow, people, and governance and less time on creative projects.
While creative directors may be performing more operational roles, their positions have not been backfilled. Additionally, as creatives, they are often not the best choice for the functional roles they now find themselves through no fault of their own.
While they may be adapting, creative directors are not trained to make data-based business decisions, develop organizational structure and process, and implement systems and tools.
The history here is similar. Where creative designers were once only creating for one platform or concept, they are now creating multi-platform concepts that must integrate across channels and systems and come to life in various UX environments. What’s more, many of these creatives haven’t been able to upskill from analog to digital and are being quickly outdated by technology as it races ahead and requires them to create in ways they’d never considered.
Like many others, they have to do these jobs with fewer people while the demands are growing and digital requirements are increasing at a pace never before imagined. Demand for faster, smarter, better creative digital design is outpacing the ability to provide it.
Training and Development
Aside from the increased demand for more digital design and designers, there is also a skillset gap to overcome. Design, like any creative pursuit, takes time and requires ongoing skill-building. Unfortunately, the increasing demands of digital transformation have left little for learning the many new tools and platforms our modern world needs.
The crossover between designers, coders, creatives, and design engineers are beginning to blur.
Gone are the days when a creative designer could concept beautiful layouts, and a coder could bring them to life. Now, integration, or at the very least, a collaboration between these skill sets, is paramount in successful programs.
There are many different types of specialists within the design field – from UX designers, researchers, motion or visual designers, and many others; it may not be practical or beneficial to expect them to learn or know multiple disciplines.
The need, too, for professional development and continual learning in the digital design field is persistent and too often, due to lack of process, overlooked.
Production, Strategy, or something else?
Designers who create tangible assets have a production role, whereas those who develop the strategy work more on concepts. There is also design research, development, and various UX designers and creatives depending on the project. Typically, these groups work in a fragmented structure to the detriment of the project, each other, the company, and possibly, the client.
“I just had a discussion today asking why do we have individual documents tracking all the same information? Because people didn’t collaborate or delegate work, so individuals were tracking their work in excels,” Gabrys said. “You can have all the software in the world, but if processes and appropriate people aren’t there, then you just have tools not being used or overworked employees wearing too many hats.”
Enter Creative and Design Ops
In most organizations, the need for creative and design ops roles has come about gradually, while their lack has seen businesses suffer from duplicative work and department confusion about roles and processes.
Content and process is the thread that connects employees, users, clients, customers, and organizations. Ensuring that the thread is kept in good condition is a testament to a healthy, efficient organization.
Most organizations have multiple complex internal processes and programs that employees must navigate while completing their assignments. Files and information are shared in an email, cloud servers, messages, conversations, notes, files, and various other methods that make accurate, rapid data collection difficult.
Creative and Design Ops roles help cut off these inefficiencies before they happen and streamline the communications and data collections and distribution process.
As data collection and storage become more prevalent, oversight of the information must be appropriately stored to remain in compliance with any laws and regulations in an audit.
Competitive Advantage
It was inevitable that the operational gaps would happen when the growth was so prolific and the technology in such high demand. But the best organizations are now bridging those gaps so their talent can focus on the work they do best that will help advance their organizations ahead of the competition.
Creative and Design Ops team members help to stem the tide of demand and ensure the supply of content doesn’t run out by enabling a structured workflow to allow employees to move as fast as they need while maintaining high-quality work.
This addition can help bring structure, process, and order to teams to optimize timeliness, capacity, and costs. These positions manage the creative process like a supply chain and eliminate roadblocks, timewasting tasks, and keep the trains running efficiently, effectively, and on time with the same (or fewer) number of people.
These team members help maintain a smooth and timely flow of work and information throughout the organization that takes the pressure off content creators while managing communication with leadership. Their knowledge and expertise allow them to make quick decisions and reallocate resources to meet changing strategies.
The Difference between Creative and Design Ops
The difference between these two roles is a matter of form over function. What they will do for your organization is the same – it’s the specialized experience – either in creative or design that they differ.
Both roles help bring cohesion and project management consistency throughout silos and break them down, so teams work as one unit during the project process.
But it’s much more than project management.
While project managers ensure the smooth flow of individual projects, Creative and Design Ops roles enable the smooth functioning of entire creative and design departments.
Depending on the organization’s size, the role could be just one person or a team that ensures efficiency, top-quality, speedy output and promotes design through the company.
Because these roles are high profile, action-oriented, problem solvers, the best have various skills and experience. In addition to the requisite creative or design background, they’re also relationship builders who can evangelize the department throughout the company while also managing tools, infrastructure, workflow, people, and governance.
They’ll need to understand product development and engineering principles while also having excellent account management skills. This could include budgeting, time allocation, resourcing, and project management principles.
AS the facilitators of information between departments, they’ll need to translate research requests, discovery information, establish intake processes, and understand current complexity with the efficient delivery of assets.
Creative and Design Ops Job Skills
It’s easy to see that designers are pulled in far too many directions that have nothing to do with their core skill set, and equally easy to see how the investment in Creative and Design Ops teams could be an immediate benefit. They’ll help:
- Define the creative and or design process
- Develop process efficiency
- Streamline potential bottlenecks
- Identify technology gaps
- Evaluate tools and solutions
- Ensure high-quality output
- Manage training and development
- Analyze project workflow
- Facilitate recruitment process
- Coordinate review and approval process
With roles and tools to manage Creative and Design Ops, organizations will achieve more timeliness, increased collaboration, higher capacity, more accurate forecasts, and assured compliance.
Creative and Design Ops roles, however, can’t do everything. Automation is still necessary.
The Role of Automation
Despite the best Creative and Design Ops teams, for every project that creative and design teams work on, there are still potentially hundreds of digital files that must be created, transferred, delivered, and stored. To manage the volume that modern creative design requires, automation is no longer optional.
Automation isn’t replacing creative workers, though. It’s supporting them by alleviating a new, repetitive, low-skill technical task that must be completed as part of every creative project today.
“Processes and programs that speed production are necessary to meet customer needs in a fast-paced market. Slow delivery means lost opportunity,” said Dorthea Kemp[RC2] , a Web UI/UX Designer with over ten years’ experience. “Design automation allows us the ability to focus on the product while using programs for repetitive tasks.”
Creative automation tools can save hours when launching variations for campaigns across multiple tactics and markets, each requiring its minor specification of text, size, format, or delivery.
Without automation, designers must manually hand-adjust, store, and transfer each asset to multiple sources taking hours and leaving room for error and lapses in quality control.
With automation, one asset yields limitless variations and saves dozens of hours per project, shorter production cycles, and provides a faster time-to-market in a fast-paced, high volume, competitive marketplace without sacrificing quality.
With the importance of segmentation and digital advertising ad variants, automation makes it much easier and faster to provide multiple asset variations for A/B tests or minor changes in language, copy, CTAs, or other design elements. Having these tools saves time, increases output, and enhances quality control, competitive advantage, and added value to clients and customers.
In a world where content truly is king and digital content is overtaking them all, how we manage it is a critical role that will set the best apart from the herd. Content management and Creative and Design Ops aren’t just an agency, creative, or design problem, they’re a shift in how business is done and those that manage it well will have smoother operations and competitive advantage.