UX team organizational strategy
Make people and teams work collaboratively. This topic focuses on organizing structure, team composition and role definitions
Service
Design Ops and Lead
Client
Year
2021
Lacrei is an NGO created to gather and strengthen, in one place, the health, legal and psychosocial inclusion of LGBTQIAP+ people. We bridge the gap between the community and health professionals, lawyers and companies prepared to serve with safety and quality.
As our designers work on a voluntary basis, we don't have the 40 hours a week as in a conventional job. We need to optimize the delivery of volunteers, organize flows and keep the team motivated.
Using Design Ops
Design Ops is the department (or person) that plans, defines, and manages the design process within a company. His goal is to ensure that the design team becomes a machine — running with high efficiency, low friction, and generating the highest quality design artifacts.
When you are in good sync with the team, deliveries are happening and everything is turning around, you hardly see the organizational problems you may be facing. But they exist. A good delivery doesn't mean your team is 100% optimized and everything will be fine in a month or two, it's like building a Jenga tower: things start out good but as you move a resource from one place and place it on top of the tower, over time the tower becomes unstable! — With a lean team, everything works, but as we open sprints, reallocate resources to squads and new volunteers join, things show signs of falling apart.
To contain this collapse, I looked for some team and delivery organizational system and found a Design Ops performance map and it fit perfectly with the needs of the team. In this article, we're only going to cover the collaboration part of this map:
structure organization
To create the structural organization, we basically separate what types of deliveries we make and how our team is structured.
Strategy: Where we discover, hypothesize and confirm topics acting in research and design thinking
Implementation: where prototypes and screens are generated and delivered.
Team composition
Here we map the components of our ux team and this gives us a clear view of the type of professional working at each stage. This makes it easier to have a macro view of how the team works, which areas the professional works in and whether it is possible to work in more than one.
With the team composition mapping, we were able to better understand how to allocate tasks for each professional profile, career development and professional recruitment.
Definition of roles
When defining roles, all team volunteers are mapped and where they work within the composition, so we have control of which areas need support and hiring professionals and which are in balance or saturated.
We do a kind of interview with the user, we talk about who he is, why he is acting as a volunteer, which skill he feels more affinity with and what he wants to learn.
In addition, we can also make our goals and roles as a team clearer with the help of some dynamics. I really like using two in particular: the Team Charter Canvas where we can define the purpose, obstacles and expectations of each team as well as the role of each person. Another cava that I find interesting for individual use is the Personal Business Model Canvas, with it we were able to understand the vision of the volunteers about themselves, the team and their capabilities.
Rituals and Gatherings
As a volunteer team working in our spare time, we need to optimize our schedules very well between ritual meetings and task execution:
Weekly:
Meeting where all of the team, PO and possible stakeholders update periodically regarding the project situation, points of attention, deliveries to be made, we discuss impediments and give ideas to add delivery.
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Current status of a project;
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Recent progress;
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The main decisions that were taken;
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Action plans to be executed.
Refinement:
Organize, clean and order the Product Backlog in the eyes of the team. Together with the volunteers, we open the tasks in the backlog, refine the tasks and give them deadlines, discuss the specifications and answer questions.
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Remove unnecessary items or items that no longer make sense;
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UX 2 team organizational strategy
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Detail better items already listed and necessary;
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Reprioritize items in order of what should be developed first;
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Adapt estimates;
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Add and revise delivery criteria;
Checkpoint:
The checkpoint is our weekly technical orientation meeting for volunteers, where we do activities, discuss impediments and move forward with tasks. The idea of this meeting is to be objective and instructive; Create a controlled space for only technical discussions exclusively with the people acting on the task.
Introductions:
Meetings reserved only for the presentation and delivery of an assignment.
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team integration
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knowledge sharing
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Strengthening the volunteer's oratory skill
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Strengthening and defending the UX culture in the company.
Design Thinking Dynamics:
It allows the team to have in practice a collaborative perspective of problem solving, raising hypotheses and definitions. We can find solutions in a practical and dynamic way where we break the individual bias and add different points of view.
Feedback:
Evaluate and give an opinion on the accomplishment of a task or project. Thus, we do not focus only on the result, but on performance, deepening the analysis of the action so that, when it is repeated or on similar occasions, the lessons learned can be used for a different and better performance.
Community practices
The term Communities of Practice (CoP) represents a group of people, guided by a common purpose, where their actions always unfold in knowledge evolution, mainly tacit knowledge.
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better by interacting regularly.”
Etienne Wenger
The practical Community culture is very well inserted within Lacrei. All volunteers start from one concern and one passion: helping the LGBTQIA community and collaboratively seek to evolve their technical aspects in their respective areas.
Our goal is to strengthen this community and reap the benefits of this collaborative dynamic.
silo breaking
Practices and knowledge from isolated areas are now shared
Less dependency on courses
Formal education does not always fit individual needs, and it is not always accessible to all.
Collaboration Environment
Environment without hierarchy, where everyone can co-create
Tacit Knowledge
Interests and challenges addressed will hardly be found in books or courses, as they are practical problems, directly linked to experience
Humanize:
operations for people
Finally, in my opinion, the operation must revolve around the team and not the delivery. We must train the team and keep it motivated with a focus on the same vision. To do this, the team must:
Participation and evolution: Participate from the ideation of demands to the delivery and report. Volunteers should be encouraged to bring ideas for new activities and methodologies. We allocate the tasks idealizing the interests of each user and focus on writing and presenting how the solution for each task was created, so that knowledge is shared and they improve their oratory.
Participation and time: We also discuss delivery times, always keeping in mind that volunteers work in their spare time and deadlines must be validated by them, we do a checkpoint in the middle of delivery and, if necessary, adjust the date.
Participation and knowledge: For the future, we want to bring specialists to share knowledge and answer questions from volunteers through classes and workshops. In addition, we want to encourage volunteers to also share their knowledge, presenting workshops on their specialties, studies and experiences.
Participation and Feedback: It is also important to work with positive reinforcement and feedback on what can be improved, communicating our satisfaction or points of general attention so that we keep the team together and aware of how we see the value of its delivery. This Feedback can occur in isolation (One-on-one) or collaboratively (Feedback 360).