D(esign) Playbook - Governance
Connecting Design Capability & Business Outcomes
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Keys to Connecting Design Capability & Business Outcomes:
First Set of General Business Outcomes/Metrics
| Outcome/Metric | Definition | Potential Support Measures |
|---|---|---|
| Employee Experience | Demonstrate improvement in what employees encounter, observe, or perceive during their employee journey. | Employee survey results |
| Financial - Cost Avoidance | Demonstrate an avoidance of a potential future cost that can be directly attributed to a new capability of change/enhancement/removal of an existing capability. | Avoidance of a mandatory upgrade fee/cost that would have been required |
| Financial - Expense Savings | Demonstrate a decrease in costs (on-going maintenance, run cost, labor costs, etc) that can be directly attributed to a new capability of change/enhancement/removal of an existing capability. | Year over year maintenance cost for an application/tool or year over year contractor cost towards a specific business unit |
| Financial - Increase Revenue | Demonstrate an increase in revenue that can be directly attributed to a new capability of change/enhancement/removal of an existing capability. | $ in new revenue year over year |
| Infrastructure/Platform Stability | Demonstrate that underlying infrastructure or platforms are more resilient, stable, or less prone to downtime, errors, or challenges. | # of platforms tagged as "End of Life" that were converted to new versions or replaced |
| Innovation | Demonstrate delivery of new/innovative products, services, or offerings to the enterprise or to users/customers. | # of apis, widgets, prototypes, deployed |
| Market Share | Demonstrate growth in percentage of an industry of total market earned over a specific period of time. | Market share compared with competitors |
| Resources - Capacity Returned | Demonstrate the ability of the enterprise to do something with fewer resource hours/allocation/effort than are required today. | # of resource hours/allocation/effort units required to support a process |
| Resources - Reductions | Demonstrate the ability of the enterprise to do something with fewer resources than are required today. | # of FTE resources/headcount |
| Risk Reduction | Demonstrate the mitigation of existing risk or future risk either to the enterprise or to users/customers. | # of risk critical events logged over a time |
| System Improvement | Demonstrate the ability of systems to do something better (e.g. faster, shorter, more efficient) than is done today. | Mean time between failures, mean time to recover/repair |
| Time to Market | Demonstrate the ability to implement new or enhanced capabilities, changes, or updates to systems, processes, platforms (etc) better (faster, shorter, more efficiently) than is done today. | Team velocity, cycle time, Issue(s) open/close rate |
Some other initial steps to take to earn your seat at the table of business outcomes with your peers.
I.) Understand the top level function of the enterprise/firm.
Utilize a framework to understand the what, how, and why of what the enterprise/firm provides.
Map out the ecosystem in which the enterprise/firm operates. Don’t be disheartened if/when these two steps may take months to begin to approach the maturity of your peers understanding.
II.) Understand your collaboration peers and internal stakeholders.
Map the organizational structure and meaningful networks of your collaboration peers and internal stakeholders.
Focus down to better understand the world view of the most crucial collaboration partners and internal stakeholders.
Including how they fit into the framework of the greater enterprise/firm goals and directives.
And specific observations towards developing a profile of these priority partners and stakeholders.
III.) Convert your understanding of the firm operations and the needs of your targeted partners and stakeholders into expressions of your practice that will provide value, have effective impact in their world view, and that are the most likely to be adopted (see motivation and ability to implement considerations).
IV.) Map your unique teams place in supporting the goals and strategy of the enterprise/firm and the areas where your partners and stakeholders sit.
V.) Tie together the outputs from steps III (your practice value to your partners and stakeholders) and IV (your practice values mapped into the enterprise/firm strategy and goals), generating hypothesis driven drive frameworks you can use to drive value to the business.
Citations/Learn More:
https://www.designbetter.co/business-thinking-for-designers/
https://www.secondwavedive.com/
*Last updated 4/30/2020, please note this is for the purpose of allowing me to document and evolve my thoughts, experiences, and approach. I’d very much appreciate the opportunity to learn from you sharing yours. Reach out to me at jaydubois@gmail.com or @jaydubois