De-risking is part of good design.
De-risk all the things (or as much as you can).
That was my 2 main takeaways from today’s #TyneDesignWeek event “Design in Software Delivery – A Decade in Retrospective” by hedgehog lab.
Ray Clarke and his team broke down how hedgehog lab approaches design strategy, design impact and business performance for their enterprise clients through 3 lens’
(1) Performance
(2) Delivery Model
(3) ROI
They discussed how they moved from producing apps to order, the challenges of un-scoped projects, through to a more consultative approach through stages of (1) Discover (2) Design (3) Build (4) Scale.
Ray and his team qualified de-risking as understanding the why; why does this project need to exist, and what is the problem to be solved, what are the outcomes, what research must we do, what are the expectations, and what is the most impactful or valuable thing to be built?
Questions from the audience ranged from how to manage client expectations, relationship building, to what does the pre-sales process look like and how is design being sold to decision makers, what the internal process, methodologies look like, and turn around times.
I’d like to have dug deeper into the pre-sales stage, but overall I thought the event was a very good overview of what design impact, design strategy can look like at the deal-stage, delivery stage and exit stage.
As a suggestion, I’d like to see a “North East Design Agency Leadership” round-table for upcoming agencies to share best practice.