The Growing Practice of IBM DesignOps
Surveying IBM’s DesignOps Landscape
DesignOps has emerged as a critical role in our industry that’s focused on fostering the conditions for successful design teams. As mentioned in “DesignOps: An IBM Point of View,” the formalized practice of DesignOps at IBM is still in its early stages with various levels of practice maturity across the business.
To further illuminate what DesignOps is at IBM, we asked a number of DesignOps practitioners from fully dedicated to part-time to share their experiences and tell us why DesignOps is valuable to their teams and IBM’s business.
Meet several IBM practitioners and learn more about their current DesignOps responsibilities. We will continue to publish additional IBM DesignOps developments as part of forthcoming posts from our community.
Jenny Price
DesignOps Lead, Digital Growth and Commerce (DGC)
IBM Studios Astor, New York
Jenny is an accomplished design leader, designer, strategist, and has extensive experience leading large-scale distributed design teams. She serves as the DesignOps Leader for the Digital Growth & Commerce team. DGC drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, and creates the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while driving business results. This team leads the strategic and implementation direction and design for all of IBM.com — transforming the way IBM does business digitally across the enterprise. Jenny is a long-time advocate for the design profession and designers serving in numerous national leadership positions within AIGA, the professional association for design.
100% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Kristine Berry
DesignOps Program Director, IBM Z
IBM Studios RTP, North Carolina
Kristine is a Design advocate, change agent and leader who is passionate about helping hardware and software teams enjoy their work, and deliver outcomes that delight users and clients. She has 19 years of experience in design thinking and agile transformation, program management, instructional design, metrics, facilitation, coaching, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. She recently began a new role as the IBM Z DesignOps Program Director.
100% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Charlotte Hill
DesignOps Leader, CIO
IBM, Orlando, Florida
Charlotte’s background includes leadership roles in consulting, enterprise Agile coaching, as well as operations across different business units in IBM. Currently she leads the DesignOps team for CIO Design.
100% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Brittanni Risher
Design Project Manager, Design Ops Lead, Security
IBM Studios Austin, Texas
Brittanni is the Design Project Manager and Design Ops Lead for the Security Design team. She ensures the reporting teams to her Design Executive are provided the space to design & develop, and are equipped to focus on producing quality deliverables as high functioning cross-disciplinary teams. She helps evangelize design outcomes, track cross-team project work, manage team software licenses and tooling, drive progressive team health experiences, support and lead talent engagement & onboarding efforts, and manage the culture and community endeavors. She is a Certified Scrum Master and is in route to her global PMP certification. Her overall goal on the Security Design team is to support the Security team’s mission while alleviating non-designer related objectives to increase client satisfaction.
75% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Karen Masood
Design Strategy and Operations Lead, Watson Health
IBM, Greenwood Village, Colorado
Karen is a Design lead for strategy and operations across multiple projects to deliver not only quality designs but identify opportunities to innovate and improve user experiences. She is focused on supporting the ability for designers to create and iterate to improve their creations. Additionally, she defines processes for demonstrating the value these designs have across the organization. Karen connects design with product and development to ensure there is cross-organizational communication, collaboration, and shared understanding of design value through design operations.
50% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Ganesan T S S
Design Director, GBS
IBM Studios Bangalore, India
Ganesan has more than 20 years of experience in Global Design. He is an experience enabler and innovation facilitator. Since joining IBM in September 2015, he has led many successful projects in digital and experience transformation. He has handled projects across domains, of different magnitudes with varied culture and geographies. Well-traveled across the globe, he has good experience in handling various models of delivery. He has also led many Design Thinking Workshops for internal trainings, as teaser for clients, and for live projects. He is has also created a POP-Up studio for one of the Indian clients where the project was lead in a Lean UX (garage) model. He is design mentor and guide to many young designers and has transformed several of them them to award winning designers.
25% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Johannes Höhmann
Associate Design Director, GBS (IBM iX)
IBM Studios Hamburg, Germany
Johannes has been shaping the design of products and services for IBM’s clients over the last years. His role is rooted within the field of visual design, concept and research whilst co-creating the German speaking IBM DesignOps community. Currently he leads the Visual Design Team in Hamburg and the UI design of IBM’s electronic health and patient record for the German health care system.
10% of role dedicated to DesignOps
Are you part of a dedicated DesignOps team? If so, what is your role and how is the team structured? If not, how is your role structured?
Jenny Price: I am the only dedicated DesignOps Leader working in close partnership with the Digital Growth & Commerce Design Leadership team. This makeup comprises working alongside and reporting to Nigel Prentice, the Design Executive for the DGC and F&O Support design teams.
Kristine Berry: I report into the Design Director for IBM Z, and I am the only person in IBM Z (and in IBM Systems) in a dedicated DesignOps role.
Charlotte Hill: Yes, we have a DesignOps team and I am the leader/manager.
Brittanni Risher: No. I am the only DesignOps member on my team. I work mainly with our Design Managers and Design Executive to ensure design operations are fulfilled as well as our project teams to ensure they are optimized, high functioning, quality driven contributors.
Karen Masood: I am the only person 50% on my design ops “team of me”. I also manage designers and provide design strategy and direction for designers. My des ops role is to manage work across the team of researchers and designers. track metrics, train & lead on how we show design value, and define and train on design processes and tools. I report to the Practice Lead for Payer Provider Design in our market segment at Watson Health.
Ganesan T S S: Yes. I lead the DesOps team. We are six-member team. Each of the pillars — people, platform, and practice are lead by oneperson with others that support and contribute. Under each pillar, we have multiple sub-categories and we are in the process of expanding the team to split the work.
Core Team:
Ganesan T S S
Ramesh. A
Yogendra Solanki
Guruprasad Satyanarayan
Chanakya Naka
Vinod Thomas
Johannes Höhmann: My colleagues and I have teamed up earlier this year to align our DesignOps approach across all German speaking iX studios in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We represent a mix of different roles what is vital to get a holistic understanding of our needs and challenges. My role is to reflect and shape DesignOps in close collaboration with global and local IBM teams.
How long has your DesignOps role been practiced within the team and BU?
Jenny Price: Newly created role for which I joined in October 2019; responsibilities evolve based on strategic priorities
Kristine Berry: This role was new to IBM Z when I began in May 2020. I am the only dedicated DesignOps practitioner in IBM Systems.
Charlotte Hill: 3 years, evolving every quarter
Brittanni Risher: 2.5 years
Karen Masood: Since I started about 4 or more years ago
Ganesan T S S: Since 2019
Johannes Höhmann: Since early 2020
What is the scope of responsibility for your DesignOps role?
Jenny Price: In our developing state of maturity and based on team needs, on average, I tend to divide my weekly workload across the three buckets outlined in the “DesignOps: An IBM Point of View” post: 1) Operations Management (i.e. strategic planning, operational administration and process development, financial planning and support) 2) Design Culture and Engagement (i.e. project share-outs, design critiques, town halls, skill development, education, as well as design culture and community building) and 3)World Class Design: Design Craft and Business Acumen (i.e. strategic design program development and management). My priorities tend to shift quarterly with a focus on the 3 Ps, People + Practices + Places = Outcomes.
Kristine Berry: I act as an integration point across the IBM Z Design community, working with leaders to drive forward strategic initiatives and help bridge gaps in Design talent, process, and outcomes. Key responsibilities include: Defining, measuring and communicating IBM Z Design metrics; Driving Z Design portfolio planning, talent forecasting and budget to align with business priorities; Managing process and policy communications; and Identifying pervasive issues affecting Z Designer engagement, retention, efficiency, cross-functional collaboration, and design quality. I also work across IBM Systems design leaders and executives to help drive Design strategy, metrics, and collaboration.
Charlotte Hill: Optimizing processes & tooling including; staffing, workflow, recruitment, employee engagement, Agile Iteration management support, financial support, tooling evaluation, acquisition and procurement, metrics, and reporting.
Brittanni Risher: My role’s responsibilities are distributed across the three pillars; project management, process, and people. These responsibilities help ensure the design teams are equipped for success. This includes: project deliverables tracking, interview coordination, onboarding facilitation, software license tracking, asset management, budget tracking for team assets, team efficiency improvements, agile practice management, designer engagement, operational administration, team culture and community, assessing project health and reporting.
Karen Masood: My design ops role mixes HR, team onboarder/trainer, agile coach, program manager, scrum master, design manager, design thinking advisor, and design and research practice sherpa.
Ganesan T S S: The iX IBM India design studio is one of the largest at IBM with 120+ designers — with varied inter-disciplinary skills andexpertise. DesOps plays a major role in making sure all the three pillars of people, practice, and platform function and deliver the best outcomes possible.
Johannes Höhmann: Coordinating the alignment and optimization of our design workflows, standards and assets whilst identifying ways to increase our design excellence across our German speaking iX teams.
Describe the value your DesignOps role and tasks brings to your team. What are you accountable for and how do you measure your value (i.e. Checkpoint goals)? Secondly, what metrics do your teams use to measure success?
Jenny Price: In order to be setup for short-term and long-term success, getting the house in order is a fundamental component and ongoing need for design team health. The value my role and area of expertise as a design leader and manager is to facilitate and activate the team’s strategic vision, goals, engagement, and developmental needs, providing targeted design skills training, collaboration, coaching, educational opportunities to transform into a team of operational excellence — through empathy, consistency, efficiency, scalability, and sustainability.
In this role, I seek to measure and track success by aligning directly to the business outcomes that our team is tasked to achieve in delivering world-class design. Over time, I am contributing key insights and metrics that help shape and further build the maturity of DesignOps best practices across the company.
Additionally, cultivating design culture and community is a must-have for any DesignOps leader to nurture and help bring to life. Our mission within DGC is to elevate the culture of design and professional practice, inclusive of all IBM Design disciplines and designers, growing and supporting an engaged, inspired, world-class community of IBMers.
Read more about how the Digital Growth & Commerce Design team is doing just that in this Medium post, “Cultivating Design Culture and Community at IBM Studios Astor”.
Kristine Berry: One of my responsibilities is to work with the IBM Z Design Director, design leads and managers to define, measure, and report IBM Z Design metrics. This includes regularly sharing progress against metrics with stakeholders, including IBM Z executive leadership, to promote transparency and share actionable insights. These metrics are still being defined, but might include designer skills, attrition, engagement, design quality and project outcomes.
Charlotte Hill: Our value is in optimizing operational tasks within CIO Design so that our Designers, Coaches and Managers can focus more of their time and energy on their craft. We measure people, financials, work volumes (types and distribution by client) employee engagement, client NPS and are beginning to define & measure appropriate OKRs.
Brittanni Risher: The value my DesignOps role contributes to my team is creating & supporting an environment that eliminates the logistics, administrative, and tracking requirements for designers in order to ensure holistic and efficient design practices are maximized to produce quality deliverables for the portfolio. This involves streamlining obstacles, design advocacy, communicating project progress and concerns with stakeholders, surfacing and mitigating vulnerabilities, identifying gaps, driving team health best practices, all while allowing teams the space to grow and explore with the notion that things are still on course and remain within the aligned timeline.
Karen Masood: My team supports many offerings and I provide tracking and summarizing metrics to demonstrate our design value to Offering Management and Dev. I bring a lens for design value — a combination of focusing on the user, revenue generation, business value, and what our team brings that others don’t have the ability to bring forward. Measurements are taken through our metrics and ability to deliver not only what Offering Management and Dev ask for but pushing past that to vision and strategy for future releases and opportunities for our products.
Ganesan T S S: We have biweekly meeting with the core team. Also, we have one-on-one progress meetings with the lead of the individual pillars on a weekly basis. We create reports every month and submit to the design leadership and we have defined qualitative and quantitative goals we set, measure, and keep aligned on. These are connected to our individual goals and the Design Excellence Framework.
We measure the excellence across our design project by using a framework that is based on IBM’s “Experience Transformation Method”. The Experience transformation method is the framework for envisioning all aspects of a client’s future state experience, including the experience itself, but also a view to the required capabilities, future state technical architecture, processes and workflow, operating model, and anticipated business benefits.
We work with partners — both internal (HR, L&K, Excellence, Crowd Sift, etc). and external (Adobe, Udemy , IDF etc). We also have our iX Brand — iXponential, a platform for knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and celebrating people. In this new era of working remotely, this platform has really made a huge difference for designers in terms of engagement.
Johannes Höhmann: I like to think of myself as a solid link between our iX DACH DesignOps crew, the larger iX DACH Experience Design Community and the global IBM DesignOps team. I want to connect like-minded people, drive and exchange ideas and create awareness on the importance of DesignOps across all teams. I regularly report to our design leadership and share insights with the larger creative team in our community calls whilst holding the progress against my checkpoint goals. As we have only collectively kicked off the DesignOps initiative we are in the process of defining common OKRs for our teams and studios.
Learn More about DesignOps
Read part one of this post “DesignOps: An IBM Point of View” and learn how the Digital Growth & Commerce Design team is building design culture in this Medium post, “Cultivating Design Culture and Community at IBM Studios Astor”.
Special thanks to Doug Powell, Kristine Berry, Charlotte Hill, Brittanni Risher, Karen Masood, Ganesan T S S, Johannes Höhmann, and Edmund Chow for their contributions to this effort.
Jenny Price is the DesignOps Lead for the Digital Growth & Commerce Team at IBM Studios Astor based in the heart of New York City with team members co-located in Austin, Raleigh, Boston, and Bratislava .
The Digital Growth & Commerce design team drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, and creates the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while driving business results. The Digital Growth & Commerce Team and F&O Support Experiences are led by Nigel Prentice, Design Executive.
Please visit www.ibm.com/design for more information on Design at IBM.
The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Special thanks to Allison Biesboer.
