Crucial Inputs for Design Team Effectiveness

If you manage a Corporate Design team, read this.

According to research, a whopping 90% of organizations have recently restructured their creative teams, or are planning to do so within the next year. What are the key motivators for such large-scale change?

The top three reasons given are for better internal collaboration, a more sustainable workload, and improving customer experience.

Noticeably, these improvements were more project-centric than people-centric. This is understandable, especially in a corporate environment, where management is more used to and adept at optimizing processes.

Often, adding a robust creative operations platform or project management solution is central to improved workflow, allowing creative team and clients a clear view of project status. Increasingly, managers are adding account people or project management roles to the team.

Overall, these changes have resulted in a 37% increase in getting work to clients.

However, improved customer experience has only increased by 4%. Also lagging are improved internal communications (7%) and collaboration (12%).

In my experience, these areas can be addressed by optimizing the design team itself, where deeper transformations can be implemented. Development of key areas such as client management, strategic approach, and presentation refinement can significantly increase communication capabilities, foster collaborative attitudes, and lead to improved client relationships.

I created the Design Team Scorecard to measure these and 5 other critical components of successful designers and teams. It addresses important areas where opportunities exist to develop the capabilities required to implement the top three restructuring drivers, as well as the more subtle but powerful opportunities for improvement and growth through personal development.

It's the perfect tool to baseline your team and help plan your restructuring, and can be downloaded free at my site here.

Categories: : Restructuring