THL_Formula_AW_v2.0

THL_Formula_AW_v2.0

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  CH3 ESTIMATE θ y u r h = u² (sin²θ) 2y 12 CH3 p ∫[o-r]ma+nce e R= Version1.0 1 t = 1.5(dbmm) t v = 3 √25+10√5a2 ANALYSE 45ºC RELEASE PACKAGE 44 32 12 6 9 3 3 PRODUCE HAVE YOU WORKED IT OUT YET? How to unlock the formula for a high performance digital product team The Human Layer JULY 2015 Brought to you by SPECIAL ISSUE N°3 The Human Layer JULY 2015 Brought to you by SPECIAL ISSUE Perspectives on building successful digital product capability Featuring contributions from: John Barrow, Katie Buchanan, Matt Kelly, Mariana Southern, Mark Wilson and Simon Young
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  Issue #3
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  Previous topics we’veexplored in The Human Layer have been inspired by our personal experiences, changing behaviours and rapidly digitising sectors that have excited us. This time, our topic is slightly different. This issue is a direct response to a plea that many of our clients have asked of us recently: make our digital teams better. This has been most noticeable in the briefs that have been landing in our inboxes over the last six months. Beyond the delivery of excellent digital experiences that we’ve always been asked to help organisations with, almost all have asked for ‘upskilling’ in some capacity. This has always been – we hope – a byproduct of working with an agency that values collaboration as highly as we do at Wilson Fletcher, but upskilling as a deliverable has been a relatively new request in 2015. While the cynics in us might point to upskilling as this year’s disruption/ transformation/[insert generic industry buzzword here], improving digital capability is something we help our clients with every single day. And certainly, the pressure on established organisations to bring world-class digital services to market at pace has never been greater. Determining the best approach to digital product development is a critical challenge faced by every organisation today, as is the need to sustain that capability. What follows in this newspaper is a selection of articles and personal experiences of people trying to crack what makes for great digital product development teams. For some of our contributors, improving digital capability means choosing the right agency to work with them in the right way. For others, it’s about understanding what you’re good at and being unafraid of sticking to it. And for some, building great digital capability means instilling agency thinking in­-house. While there are certainly several guiding lessons to take away, there is no single answer, simply because no two organisations have the same makeup, demands and objectives. So think of this newspaper as a workbook, a series of lessons and exercises that will help you determine what’s best for you. We hope it will help you crack your own formula. Editor’s letter Sorcha Daly is the Editor of The Human Layer and Senior Content Strategist at Wilson Fletcher
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  Responsive Design: It’s not justfor websites How to keep your team responsive in an agile world. The digital landscape alters industry. At Associated Press, we live it daily as the news industry attempts to embrace its traditional roots yet discover new, useful ways to stay relevant in a socially connected world. This is exciting and frightening. Any industry that is trying to find or rediscover its footing is imposing. Moreover, it’s daunting to contrive and maintain support capabilities in a shifting organisation. Even defining what “success” means to your organisation might be dizzying. Be adaptive. Understanding your organisation, not merely products but enterprise-level goals, affords appreciation across the array of customer touch points. An efficient strategy to deliver digital products must regard the top down to adequately guide the ship. There are numerous methodologies available but you’ll likely come into yours through trial and error. You may instinctually want to adopt one verbatim. Stay mindful. Identical company cultures are nonexistent, so a one-size-fits-all approach is more or less fictitious. Chances are you will mature your processes over time. The goal is to stay as process-lean as possible at every turn. As the Director of Product Design at AP, adaptability for me is administering an annual mission statement with simple, understandable and achievable objectives. Defining a mission that’s actionable is critical. It remains fluid and serves as both a reminder of our legacy and of how we’ll adapt in the coming months. Furthermore, it outlays a unified commitment while staying agile. As the team embraces the mission, they can upskill accordingly by learning new technologies or tools. Educate your organisation on your processes and learn how to “sell” your story. Illustrate your vision in a measurable pilot if necessary by recruiting an internal business partner. We’ve spent more than two years instilling UX into the AP lexicon by proving how knowledge of who our customers are and how they behave empowers intelligent decisions. Including cross-departmental representatives helped make the case and produced an army of advocates. Our Product Design team is lean and small, with a long reach, overlapping skills and “intrapreneurial” spirits. We’re an in-house “agency” that services one By John Barrow, Director of Product Design, Associated Press Be adaptive Don’t adopt methodologies just because they work for others. Instead, commit to trial and error until you find yours. Identical company cultures are non-existent, so a one- size-fits-all approach is more or less fictitious. Be unified Set and share regular mission statements as targets for what success means right now,keeping it transparent as and when it changes.
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  client – theAP. The team is diverse with synchronistic personalities and there is a high level of autonomy along with a culture of peer review. They remain informed across the product landscape and have the opportunity for involvement on projects to which they have not been directly assigned. A creative environment fosters electric collaboration, debate and innovation. We’ve created a work area that is conducive to creativity. The space is as tactile a space as possible, with an oversized whiteboard, common area, putting green and various games for stimulation. In an office of cubicles, we’ve removed the glass partitions to encourage organic interaction amongst the team. In light of the space, stakeholders from other departments stop by regularly, a practice that opens up cross-departmental communication. As to the question of outsourcing, we’ve experienced varying degrees of success at AP. There are certainly situations where it’s a smart choice – we fully outsource all QA for advanced automation, for example. However, jumping from vendor to vendor is challenging. There are realities such as time zones and language barriers, but imagine educating a new vendor for each project. Timelines and budgets can quickly get away, erasing any saving that was a lure to begin with. Cost savings ought not be your only factor in making an outsource decision and you should think of partners rather than suppliers. We often claim to know our own customers and organisations best, but it’s a problematic assumption since we naturally have bias. Engaging with the right partner often broadens the view without the bias and can help inform product roadmaps. Allow unfettered, sometimes unflattering insight of your business that is frequently difficult to obtain from within. Nonbiased input derived from research is paramount and, in some cases, priceless. As you work with a partner long enough, you become in lockstep and able to instinctually know where they fit into a project, even during planning stages. It is important to think of partners as extensions of your team from the onset. Longer term relationships prove best. Ultimately, what you want is for your partner to become subject matter experts, just as you have, as well as being versed in your corporate ways. Embed into your partner – or vice versa – to act as a liaison. Claim a workspace at your partner’s studio and have someone from your team sit there regularly to allow more agility. Direct access to stakeholders can be a dramatic time saver. We design websites responsively and optimise the user experience across a multitude of footprints, so start taking the same approach to designing your teams. If you stay in tune, remain responsive and agile in your approach and provide an environment that is creative, collaborative and engaging, you will be more apt to survive the tide in delivering world-class digital products. Create a space for collaboration Small changes to environment – like taking down desk partitions – can encourage creativity and collaboration. Sell your story Recruit an internal business partner and cross-department advocates to build support for your projects across the organisation – and keep sharing your story. Embed partners in your team Choose a partner for a longterm relationships to garner unfettered, unbiased insight of your business that can inform the product roadmap. It is important to think of partners as extensions of your team from the onset.
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  Along with itssibling disruption, innovation is surely one of the defining words of our age. The principles encased in it have been important to everyone who was sitting back and ignoring how the dynamics of business were changing. Most long­- -established businesses had become ponderous and their cosy market positions were suddenly being disrupted by lean, fail-­fast teenage upstarts with startups. To survive, let alone compete, they needed to become more innovative. However, somehow, somewhere along the line, the imperative to be more innovative got bastardised into ‘act like a startup’ and everyone got swept up in it. Many digital agencies and consulting firms adopted it as their mantra and packaged up startup­- like methodologies as processes they could sell in. They’ve been giving out design thinking toolkits and innovation frameworks, taken the Board to a disruptive business techniques workshop and got the CEO wearing jeans. Organisations have been convinced that by using these tools, by following specific methods and following frameworks, they too can behave just like those Silicon Valley rocketships that go from idea to island ownership in months. The reality is, however, a little more complicated. Startups (typically technology-­ centred new businesses) are themselves a product of innovation. They are fundamentally organisations set up to make an idea happen, often driven by a single person’s vision about a single thing, a big pot of money and no risk other than failure (and most do fail: something like one in 20 startups succeed, with one in 1000 making it big – hardly success rates to aspire to). Oh, and they’re usually staffed by young teams who know they can just hop onto the next startup if this one doesn’t make it. Established organisations are very different animals and have a lot more at stake, which means that they can’t just start acting like startups. What they can – and must – do is adopt new practices and shift their behaviour. The ‘act more like a startup’ imperative is the wrong emphasis, and not least because the good startups don’t stay startups for long. What happens to startups if they become successful? They become secure and self-sustaining, they expand and grow, they become ‘real’ businesses, sometimes employing thousands of people on hundreds of floors in office buildings in multiple countries. Bit by bit, they stop behaving like the ‘startups’ they were and start behaving like mature digital­-age businesses. The really interesting, great role models for businesses aren’t startups, they’re these ex- startups. They quickly shed many of their most startup-­like behaviours, adapt some new behaviours for their increasingly established businesses, maintain a few key principles and philosophies and add an increasing dose of rigour to their thinking. Combined, this allows them to evolve and adapt their offer better and faster than many traditional peers. Stop trying to act like startups Evolve and adapt: that’s the crux of the challenge for an established organisation. By Mark Wilson, Managing Director of Wilson Fletcher The real role models for established businesses are ex-startups.
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  Evolve and adapt:that’s the crux of the challenge for an established organisation. Successful innovation for an established business is rarely about developing radically new ideas; it’s about building on your strengths. In a recent interview, Lego’s CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, summed up their internal innovation approach nicely: “It’s about discovering what’s obviously Lego but has never been seen before.” It’s worth noting that he said this shortly after Lego became the world’s biggest toy manufacturer. This goes some way to explaining why few well-­known ex­- -startups have gone on to subsequent success with dramatically new offerings, because radical innovation or startup­-like shifts in direction (ok, I’ll say it, pivots) became increasingly risky and commercially inappropriate as they became successful. The more customers they had, the more revenue they generated, and the more mouths they had to feed, the more they had to lose – just like those old­-school peers. Of course, the smart ones recognise this and accept it as part of becoming a ‘real’ business, typically using their cash mountains to acquire new products and services to offer their customers instead. Today’s Mark Zuckerberg is the smart CEO of an ex- startup: a big business, with some powerhouse lieutenants, that does what it needs to in order to deliver continued success. The new Facebook for Business can hardly be described as a startup­ like innovation – it’s an evolutionary step, and many would say a defensive one at that. If there’s one thing startups should never be, it’s defensive. So the question is: if successful startups don’t maintain their own behaviour as they become established and successful, why is anyone trying to encourage established business to behave like them? Why try to take a business with solid market foundations and make it more like one without? Clearly, we shouldn’t. Many established organisations are simply incompatible with startup behaviour. You can’t simply introduce innovation to established organisations like it’s a new HR system. The real message in the innovation agenda is ‘you need to listen to your customers constantly, pay close attention to what is going on around you, proactively look for new opportunities and rapidly adapt your business to explore and exploit them’. You can’t simply introduce innovation to established organisations like it’s a new HR system. You can’t install an internal innovation team and expect them to make your entire organisation innovative, nor can you graft something onto the edges and hope for a halo effect. This behaviour needs to be learned and adopted, built on smaller steps and the progressive confidence that comes from forward momentum. It’s time to own up here. I found myself reviewing a plan for a long­standing client the other day: a plan, ready to be implemented in the next few months, for setting them up a standalone innovation lab. This innovation lab would be separated from the pressures and innate behaviours of their core business, help them generate a steady stream of new product ideas and give them a sustainable engine for innovation. I realised that we were actually proposing something that sounded great, but that I simply didn’t believe would work. We were planning to help them run faster by growing them a new arm. What they need is a fitter heart and stronger legs. The reality is that we can, and will, help them become a more successful digital­-age business, but we won’t do it by trying to make them into something they’re not. They are never, ever, going to behave like a startup. Instead, we’ll focus on helping them become a much better version of what they are: an established, successful business with long-standing customers and healthy profits that most startups would kill to have. We’ll help them rethink what they need to, evolve where they should, and introduce new services where there are compelling opportunities to do so; but we’ll do it centrally, and we’ll do it carefully. This is a business that’s decades old. It will take them time to learn new habits. They’ll absorb new techniques and practices rather than have them imposed. They’ll adapt positively and progressively and they’ll do it without breaking their existing business, something startups never have to consider. Startups have nothing to break, established organisations do. Ex­-startups do too. We’re only just seeing the first generation of ex­-startups operate in the broader business context, and time will tell how well they maintain the competitive edge. Based on what we’ve seen so far, I believe that they provide a much better role model for how established organisations should behave than startups ever will. You can’t simply introduce innovation to established organisations like it’s a new HR system.
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  By Mariana Southern, Head of Innovation at William Hill Muddling through When asked to write an article on building and running a digital team I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was the right person to do this. I have neither the credentials, nor the formal qualifications, nor any published works on this subject. My professional background is in User Experience and in previous lives I was a Food Engineer and a Cognitive Psychology PhD student. But building and running William Hill’s Shoreditch Innovation team is what I’ve been trying to do for the last year or so, so all that is written here is from hands‐on experience. Most people who are put in charge of building something new and worthwhile probably feel like I do most days: blindfolded, feeling their way around, arms stretched out forward in hesitation. To add to that teetering feeling, good decisions are usually discovered in hindsight. My way of getting through it is sticking to three guiding principles: 1) build nothing that doesn’t add value to the customer or more importantly, make their lives better in some way; 2) look after people over throughput, profit or any personal agenda and 3) question everything – how you work, what has been done so far, how it’s been done, what tools have been used, job roles and titles, team structures and so on. Besides these core principles, my main working tools are gut feel and empathy. Believe it or not, empathy is an extremely effective, hard business tool. People respond to empathy. Using it both when considering my customers and my team drives motivation and eventually leads to remarkable digital experiences (which, in essence, are built by people to be used by people). One other constant in the context of digital and innovation is change. A tautology, I know, but an important one to keep in mind. Customer behaviours have changed dramatically and so have (or should have) long‐ standing disciplines such as UX, design and project management, to name a few. In the day‐to‐day you have to go with what works for the team and let them choose how they work, what tools they use and create selfless T‐shaped roles. In our team, besides their main job, everyone does a little of everything. We have lost many of the two‐letter roles you can usually find in ‘traditional’ digital teams like the BA, PM, SE, PO and are continually questioning the roles we still hold, including my own. Also important is ownership. Everyone owns the product and everyone is present in all the meetings, demos or stand‐ups. We don’t have separate A personal account of running a digital innovation team.
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  Build nothing that doesn’tadd value to the customer. Question everything – how you work, what has been done so far and team structure. Look after people over throughput, profit or any personal agenda. ‘business’, ‘product’ or ‘tech’ meetings, and we are constantly revising what our meetings are for. We have retrospectives at the end of each release, where we self‐evaluate and adjust what went wrong. In order to innovate and change we had to become autonomous, both in terms of process and technology. The more you integrate innovation into the main business, the slower it gets. And ultimately, William Hill will fail to innovate, and so will we as a team. So as the innovation team, we have to operate independently from the organisation. A good example is when we found that using current release processes and technical infrastructure was too cumbersome for us to be lean, so we built our own platform for release. This independence from the organisation is both our biggest luxury and our biggest challenge, as we come up against the vacuum between the way we work and the way the rest of the company does alongside trying to integrate what we do into the existing product, structure and tech. William Hill is a large 80‐year‐old organisation that has learned to do something really well and naturally opposes the forces that are trying to do something differently. We often don’t have the roles and documentation that is ‘expected’ as standard and our work can be perceived as less serious than the rest of the company’s. Besides, everyone is busy with their own roadmaps and often see us as an unwanted distraction. Because of this, I spend much of my time insulating the team from politics, working hard at our internal PR, promoting transparency and building relationships. One such way is to invite people from other teams to our demos to see what we are doing and ask them to raise ideas or issues. Perhaps this way of working can only operate in smaller teams within the context of smaller builds. But if we know it works – and so far I don’t have reason to believe it doesn’t – maybe we should only create small teams that work in small builds, even in big businesses. We are learning to work better as a digital innovation team, but a lot needs to be done in the wider context of the business and how it commits to innovation. As you get the within‐team answers, the challenge is likely to be the between‐teams dynamic. And the between‐teams dynamic often fails for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I believe that a clear umbrella culture of selfless collaboration across all teams should be the starting point to address a lot of the issues. And if you read closely, culture has been the constant thread in this article. When it comes down to it, it is the culture you instill, the values you hold, communicate and transfer to everyone in the team that will eventually underlie the value you add to the customer. And hiring people who value that same ethos is equally important. They need to fit culturally and they need to be nice. They need to be selfless, relentless and believe anything is possible. They need to be comfortable with risk and uncertainty. They need to be OK with throwing away the rule book. They say culture eats strategy for breakfast... I say culture eats everything for breakfast. It eats strategy, process, hierarchy, roles, rules and reward systems. And culture too, needs to keep changing. The more you integrate innovation into the main business, the slower it gets.
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  What the newspaperindustry can teach digital about product, publishing and perseverance. On babies and bathwater It is, and has been for a decade or more, fashionable to patronise the newspaper industry. A friend of mine, a barrister, tells a great story about a judge explaining a piece of jurisprudence to a not‐very‐bright defendant, and then pausing to say: “I don’t mean to patronise you... you do know what patronise means, don’t you?” That’s how it feels sometimes when you confess to being from the world of print. For the past ten years my sole focus has been the development and growth of mass market digital media within legacy businesses; first with the Daily Mirror in the UK, then with a number of Latin American news organisations – especially Argentina’s Grupo Clarin – and now with Local World, a major group of more than 70 news brands in the UK. Colleagues from the tech community, digital, entrepreneurs and even other legacy media (TV in particular – and don’t worry my friends; your time is coming) look upon those of us from and in the newspaper trade with a degree of semi‐interested curiosity. The way we gaze at white rhinos in a safari park. Sometimes, out of politeness, they ask a few questions. But never the right questions. “Where do all the stories come from?” (newspapers have things called reporters who are paid to find and write them) “Is it true they’ve got a safe at The Sun with pictures of so and so doing something unspeakable with an Alsatian?” (so I hear) and “Is Piers Morgan really such an arse?” (no, he’s an extraordinarily decent and funny guy). Some of the questions they should be asking – you know, just on the off chance they could actually learn something from the tree‐killers – include the following: What are the production processes that enable you to create an entire newspaper from scratch, every day, without fail? Like the world of digital development, newspapers also employ an agile process. Except in the case of newspapers, this agile process is actually By Matt Kelly, Director of Local World and former Publisher of Mirror Group Digital
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  agile. The productionand distribution of a mass market national newspaper is a science that has been perfected over generations and is founded on the principle of close collaboration between groups with clearly demarcated responsibilities all working towards a common goal – the deadline. Intrinsic in this process is a high tolerance of errors. Kelvin McKenzie, a well-known former tabloid editor (and, interestingly enough, a very successful digital entrepreneur these days) once told me that any day he got 7 out of 1o editorial decisions right was a great day. Getting everything right in a daily newspaper is not the point. Getting the newspaper to the point of sale on time is the point. How do you iterate your product so the newspaper in your hands can feel both modern and yet recognisably the same product your father brought home with him in the 1970s? Newspapers evolve constantly. Change is structuralised into the workflow. The very production of a newspaper is designed to accommodate day-to-day iterative improvements which will deliver a commercial advantage but won’t scare the readers. And they are brilliant at it. Over time, the product evolves piecemeal, never seeking or desiring a state of stasis. Silicon Valley thinks they invented the concept of permanent beta. They didn’t; they just gave it a name. How have you managed to maintain a business for decades that consistently manages millions of micro‐ transactions on a daily basis? Every single day, millions of people walk into a newsagent or supermarket and pick up a newspaper WITHOUT EVEN THINKING ABOUT IT! Name me an app that would survive a month if you had to go to a shop to manually renew the subscription. Even a week? Newspapers are brilliant at creating loyalty because they are dependable – managing to combine both predictability and surprise. “Shock and amaze on every page” used to be the mantra for tabloids in the UK in the 70s. And they did. But they did so within a consistent framework allied to consistent values. Steve Jobs liked to bang on about understanding the ‘why’ of Apple’s products. Newspapers know their ‘why’ inside out – sometimes they know it so well they can’t even articulate it, but just feel it instead – and when they breach those values (and I watched 5% of loyal Daily Mirror readers walk away for good when we printed hoax photographs from the Gulf War) the readership feel a sense of outrage that can only be felt about something you care about deeply. Tell me an app that people care about that much. How do they achieve this? Newspapers are built in their readers’ image. Not the other way round. How did the newspaper industry manage to adapt and thrive throughout wave after wave of cyclical and structural existential threat? Radio, TV, teletext, the internet – they were all supposed to kill newspapers. And yet... (well, ok, perhaps the internet will finally see them off – but not any time soon) they survive. Not through pivots, but through perseverance. The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products. It’s just that the digital community doesn’t always appreciate that. Nor, sadly, does the newspaper business itself. The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products.
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  But what aboutwhen a company decides it’s time to make the transition from being the client to also doing the work traditionally done by the agency? How do you go about recruiting an internal digital product team with very specific technical skills from scratch? And how do you integrate that team into an existing business? This was the challenge I took on two years ago, when I moved from agency­ side to set up Paul Smith’s web development team. The following is my advice for anybody embarking on the same challenge. Set your roadmap collectively Without doubt the biggest benefit of bringing your digital product development team in-house is the additional control it gives you over your own development roadmap.Your team is working solely on your projects and your priorities and isn’t open to external impacts such as the demand of other agency clients. Limitations will still apply but these tend not to be the hard financial limits that often constrain an external development roadmap and tend to be more about prioritising your internal team’s resources. As we brought our team in-­house we put in place a steering group comprised of key members of the e-commerce, IT and marketing teams. This group has a remit to agree and prioritise the development roadmap, taking into account trading requirements, brand marketing requirements and available resources across teams. This collective digital management enables us to react quickly when opportunities present themselves By Simon Young, Web Development Manager at Paul Smith Lessons in building an in-house web delivery team The first person I ever worked for offered me these words of wisdom on my very first day: “In the end, every client leaves. Some after a year, some after ten years but eventually they all leave.”
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  and also torespond to changes or new priorities within the business with minimum disruption. This process and collective responsibility is vital in order to set realistic expectations for other business stakeholders. Know what not to bring in-house Perhaps the most important element of bringing your team in- house is understanding what not to bring in-house. We brought all of our digital development in-house and, based on our existing strong IT function and the people we were able to attract, we also took the step of bring our e­-commerce platform hosting in-house too. This was not a simple task and took a major investment in hardware and support software services but it was a good fit for our overall IT strategy and has enabled us to lower our ongoing operating expenditure in this area. At the same, we also recognised a set of services that were so specialist that it would make no financial sense to bring them in-­house, so we still use external partners for some very specific areas of our service offering. Build from the top We took the approach that the best way to build the team was top­-down. By starting off with myself and adding a digital project manager, we were able to get our strategy in place to continue working with our partner agency as we recruited the internal team and brought them up to speed. Working with an agency who understood that this was our desired end result was extremely important. Work like an agency When we started the journey to bring our digital product team in­-house, we were faced with a set of practices and processes that were focused on delivering internal IT services over a specific platform which did not fit with the open source nature of our digital products. Early on, we took the decision that we would invest in new tools for the business to best replicate the processes that had worked so well in an agency/client relationship. For us, this meant investing in introducing the agile development methodology internally, which hadn’t been done before. We invested in agile training, supporting software and services and ensured complete transparency across the team, the IT group and the wider business. We then focused on building our ability to deliver – starting with fairly small sprint sizes and proving to the business every two weeks that we could deliver this service internally. That agile development and delivery methodology was key to allowing other areas of the business to have confidence in the digital product team. Establish clear business expectations Working with an agency usually comes with fairly high expectations. You’re usually making a heavy financial investment in the relationship, which means that when things go wrong you expect them to be fixed and you don’t have to bother yourself with considering how. Essentially, you are hiring them to take problems away. Once you move past that agency model it’s vital to ensure that the business has a clear understanding of the levels of service and support that can be offered. To aid with this we use an internal Service Level Agreement to ensure that everybody understands what to expect. So, is it worth it? It may not be a route that is right for every company, but taking account of the key points above has certainly helped us on the way to the successful implementation of our technical delivery in­house. We’re now able to deliver continuous improvement and innovation with a lower total cost base and a higher return than ever before, while still maintaining the type of flexibility we enjoyed working with a specialist technical agency. Agile development and delivery is key to allowing other areas of the business to have confidence in the digital product team.
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  Never in itshistory has design been so valued in business. Traditional organisations of all types – from management consultants to retailers and banks – are recognising the crucial role that design plays and are either building or buying­in design skills at a rate of knots. At long last, everyone’s looking to build the perfect design capability. In the last six months, we’ve received numerous briefs asking for help to ‘up­skill’ in­-house teams. These briefs all highlight the same objectives and ask for the same deliverables, which is remarkable given that they’re coming from vastly different companies. As any former head of transformation or director of disruption will tell you, we are a very trend-­based industry. When it comes to a team’s culture and processes, adopting the latest buzz­-approach and attempting to do what everyone else is doing can be dangerous, as Gary Pisano highlights in a recent Harvard Business Review article: Innovation remains a frustrating pursuit. Failure rates are high and even successful companies can’t sustain their performance. The root cause is that companies fall into the trap of adopting whatever best practices are in vogue or aping the exemplar innovation of the moment. Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business Review, June 2015 It should come as no surprise that there are multiple variations of the in-­house/out­-house model in play: every organisation is unique and has its own multitude of factors influencing the dynamics of the digital team. An organisation’s shape, history and digital maturity; the market and environment it operates in; the individual personalities involved and the often overwhelming impact of the organisational culture all affect what will and won’t work. But one ingredient that will always be essential in any organisation is strong design leadership: a vocal champion for the importance of the customer experience. The first step in defining the right formula must be to hire experienced design leaders who have the judgement to continually propose and evaluate the shape and makeup of their digital team. These people understand where the team’s skillset is strong, where it needs to improve and, sometimes more importantly, where it doesn’t. These leaders can judge what they should be doing in-­ house, as well as understanding if, when and how they should engage with external partners. Design leaders understand the different capabilities that in-­house teams and external design partners have and what they can offer the design process. Let’s not forget, the underlying characteristics of each are inherently different. An in-­house team is embedded in the organisation, whether that be a bank, retailer or broadcaster, and this means they are focused on their own business, typically comparing themselves to their direct competitors. An external partner, by contrast, typically works across multiple sectors, with multiple types of organisation and can provide a broader and more objective perspective. Due to their embedded nature, internal teams can often get caught up with the constant pressure to launch products, losing the ability to pull back and frame a problem instead of jumping in and trying to solve it. They are simply too close to the problem and all the small details that impact it. External teams provide fresh perspectives, broader influences and new thinking but are rarely in touch enough with internal agendas to make the best decisions for the business. In our experience, the best results come from blending the advantages of both. We certainly always do our best work alongside smart internal teams. But let’s take a step back and remember who we are doing this for – customers. And what do customers care about? It’s certainly not the skillset of your internal team or even the process by which the product they use was made. They just care that it’s great. Obviously, from a business perspective, customers equal revenue, loyalty and brand advocacy.You simply can’t afford to deprioritise their needs. In today’s competitive market, organisations need to use whatever methods and processes they can to ensure their products are always world-­class: customers simply won’t wait around for them to upskill. The digital leader: The one hire your business needs As the champion of both the customer experience and digital roadmap, the secret to a successful team is a great leader. By Katie Buchanan, Partner at Wilson Fletcher
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  Five principles of collaboration 123 4 5 The secret of a great design agency/client working relationship is collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just mean regular meetings. Undoubtedly, the best work we do is when we have smart clients who know their business inside-out and are comfortable taking the same approach as we do to collaboration. We have a few basic principles that underpin this approach. 1 Learn by doing We believe that people need to apply their knowledge to real-world challenges in order to really learn. You can know and understand the best methods and tools but if you can’t apply them intelligently, it means nothing. 2One approach does not fit all 2One approach does not fit all 2Every design challenge differs and each requires often a 2Every design challenge differs and each requires often a 2slightly nuanced approach. We don’t believe in process, 2slightly nuanced approach. We don’t believe in process, 2but a tailored approach based on each particular 2but a tailored approach based on each particular 2challenge. One process certainly does not fit all. 2challenge. One process certainly does not fit all. 2 4Collaboration is not 4Collaboration is not 4design by committee 4design by committee 4We believe that the key to effective collaboration is involving the right people at the right time. Not everyone needs to be involved in every decision and the art of effective teamwork is knowing the roles and strengths of each individual. 5 Tangible outcomes 5 Tangible outcomes 5 build momentum 5 build momentum 5 We believe that the best way to build 5 We believe that the best way to build 5momentum and demonstrate value for a 5momentum and demonstrate value for a 5partnership programme is to build brilliant, 5partnership programme is to build brilliant, 5tangible things quickly. This in turn will 5tangible things quickly. This in turn will 5increase the confidence of internal teams 5increase the confidence of internal teams 5and increase visibility across the business. 5and increase visibility across the business. 5 3Pushing frameworks and 3Pushing frameworks and 3toolkits on design teams3toolkits on design teams3rarely works We believe it’s almost impossible to embed a process from the outside in. Organisations need to create and continually iterate on their own process. Pushing frameworks and toolkits on design teams rarely works.
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  For more articlesand insight, visit: www.thehumanlayer.com The Human Layer is brought to you by Wilson Fletcher. www.wilsonfletcher.com Wilson Fletcher is a digital service design studio. We conceive, design and develop digital products and services. Our work helps forward-thinking organisations shape their digital strategy and deliver world-class experiences across all digital platforms. Printed in the UK, by Newspaper Club © Wilson Fletcher Limited 2015 @wilsonfletcher Wilson Fletcher _wilsonfletcher