Ditching the Departmental Divide

Most digital agencies are started by experts, do-ers, from one discipline. People who’ve done the work for other agencies at a high level, client-facing, and thought they could do it better. Or just didn’t want to work for someone else, in someone else’s stodgy agency, any longer.

A senior agency tech lead takes the leap, brings some buddies, maybe a client, and crafts a new flavor of tech shop that excels at his or her area of focus. If they do well, they start pulling in more people just like them, then complementary freelance specialists in other disciplines to round out a broader set of service offerings, then eventually they hire and staff those roles full time. Tech was the spark, and tech remains the core.

Or a creative director realizes that their best work won’t have the chance to exist until they start their own thing. So they launch a creative shop that does killer creative. As clients demand more and more elaborate execution and production, the agency brings on other creative freelancers, then dev freelancers, then video freelancers, whatever — and as it becomes clear that their agency will grow faster with those roles filled full time, they staff up. Creative was the spark for this agency, and creative remains at the core.

Everyone in this industry has worked on digital projects structured this way. From junior- to senior-level, in leadership positions, top-down director positions from on-high. There’s a directive to work as a team, but the key driver is usually clear. This is either a tech project or a creative project, and one half of the team is tasked with execution on the ideas of the other. To the client, this is presented as a team effort. Internally, it’s presented as a team effort. Everybody (hopefully) likes each other and respects their expertise across the departmental divide. But.

That unspoken hierarchy of importance, usually a sub-text relayed from the very top, infiltrates even the most well-crafted processes within agencies, and the work always, always, always suffers as a result. Do clients notice? Sometimes — especially if inefficiencies lead to budget spikes. Do teams notice? Hell yeah. Every time. But that’s always the way it’s been done in the digital age. Tech and creative. Design and Dev. Digital and Brand.

When most tech or creative folks set out on their own, they bring this with them. It’s natural. It’s what they know and have always known. And they’re really good at their thing — their side of the equation. So they lean in heavy.

How we evolve

We have to recognize the inefficiencies of the two-department approach to designing and building things for our clients. We can check our egos and our expertise, and recognize that if we build an agency from day one that places design and development on the same single pedestal, we can create new ways to do better work.

We all know that our output is more interesting, more engaging, and more effective when the collaboration between experts is fluid and nurtured from kickoff. We know this. But as in industry, we’re still a lot more comfortable sending the creatives off to come up with ideas, then tasking the dev team to build it as best they can before time runs out.

Or a tech team plans and builds a remarkable tool or experience, then pulls in a designer to dress it up for launch, before time runs out. Or worse, brings in a designer after it’s live to address look+feel or UX shortcomings.

These are the legacy project-killers on the two-department model that we can remove by breaking down departmental walls. Savvy established agencies are recognizing this and trying to craft tighter and more natural collaboration between their teams — but the departmental distinctions are still in place.

Project planning puts creative first, then dev second, on the timeline. Even when it’s clear that this doesn’t produce great results, the focus is on better across-the-wall collaboration, rather than the elimination of those walls entirely.

Don’t clash. Multiply.

We’ve built our agency on a Digital x Brand platform. Our founding team consists of two designers and two technologists. We’ve all been in the two-department system, and its shortcomings have always been clear to us. By deciding to see things differently, our project output has been so much smarter than it would have been if we’d set up shop as two distinct groups doing two distinct disciplines.

Digital expertise multiplies brand expertise. Design expertise multiplies development expertise. They don’t complement each other, they multiply each other. We don’t have creative projects and tech projects. We just have projects.

For us, all ideas enhance all of the other ideas already on the table, and both tech and creative solutions are equally valid and valued. There is no dominant department.

The overlapping of timelines and workspaces makes all the difference in bringing this practice to life. And by embedding this approach into the fabric of an agency from day one, it ensures that reaching this truly multiplicative collaboration is natural and authentic, rather than forced.

Creating something new is always more effective than changing something old and entrenched, within an old and entrenched system.

Agencies

Agency principals drive the structure, vision, evolution of their companies. How do you want your teams to collaborate? Can you imagine your agency without a wall up between the tech and creative teams? An agency without teams at all? We’ve all grown up on that model, and we all know where it fails.

The best way to serve our clients, protect their budgets, and accelerate their businesses through smarter and better work — is to put all of our best brains in the same room with equal influence, starting with sales and project planning. We can’t make one discipline wait on the other, even though we’ve been doing it for decades.

Marketers

Marketers can play a role in driving this more natural collaboration on their internal teams, as well as with their agencies. It’s hard to tell an agency how to structure their teams, but I guarantee that an open-minded account manager at your agency will welcome a conversation about how their work gets done.

If you’ve seen an agency falter in the home stretch because developers were squeezed on the back half of the timeline, you know that you need to protect your budget (and that timeline) from these snags in the future. A tech-heavy project with late stage lip service creative is destined for mediocrity.

Ask your agency to merge creative and tech earlier. Ask for a technical voice at the table starting with the kickoff, or better yet, the sales process. Definitely ask if your agency will be outsourcing technical development. There isn’t a less-integrated approach out there than the creative agency that builds websites with outside tech resources. The savings earned by hiring that off-shore team are either hoarded by the agency as markup, or it’s gutted later in the project when problems inevitably arise from the distinct lack of true collaboration throughout the process.

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By re-engineering the way we approach digital projects — and leaving past inefficiencies behind — we can increase our agency’s profitability while keeping our clients’ budgets streamlined. Small fundamental changes, well-considered and well-executed, can make big waves for agencies and marketers — we need to take the time to rethink what we know, and to seek out progressive change.