DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 5) The Definition & the 3 Dimensions

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Eunoia.i/o

3 min readApr 15, 2018

DesOps is about defining a culture of design through improved work practices and communication among the design team with the inter-cum-intra project/product teams and stakeholders and aiding this practices with the help of technology to bring communications among the involved tools and the arching eco-systems.

In recent times many have attempted to define the DesOps in easier words to the community. But many of those attempts never went beyond the explorations beyond the efforts put to define a Design System. In many cases in many UX communities and teams, the definitions of DesOps is limited within the scope of Design System, which in turn essentially is a meta-product i.e. a product that enables other products. Then what is the scope of DesOps?

In my view, DesOps is not only about tools or technology employed which is generally referred to the discourses about binging automation and improved process re-engineering in the engineering sense. Rather DesOps is about defining a culture of design through improved work practices and communication among the design team with the inter-cum-intra project/product teams and stakeholders and aiding this practices with the help of technology to bring communications among the involved tools and the arching eco-systems.

So DesOps is rather a combination of —

Designing of Design Culture and Communications + Work practices + EcoSystem of Tools & Technologies

In the Designing of Design Culture basically the design process is involved to come up with a solution that takes into account the existing gaps and areas of improvement which is needed for a specific organisation where communities or a teams involved in product life cycles, (in case of Software industry, it’s more influenced from the Software Development Life Cycle ) to improve productivity, remove wastage (in terms of effort, delivery timeline, man-power etc. ) and in many cases establish a lean process and methodologies. As DesOpsis associated with these aspects, and especially the Lean Process and methodologies, it intern impacts the culture and how the team collaborate, work and communicate.

DesOps, in other words, empowers the philosophies of the Lean UX and Fail-Fast models of start-up organisations in a better way. So the process that involves the work-culture, team — communication, product feedback loops etc. are re-designed as a part of DesOpsimplementation and this is referred as Work practices.

To aid the above two, in DesOps implementation, the focus is more on automation involving certain workflow engineering to support the re-design process (referred in the paragraph above). Basically, this 3rd aspect is more about the translation of the about two aspects with the help of technologies and building and putting in places the tools to define the required eco-system that brings seamless delivery track and complement it with DevOps through continuous and integrated delivery approach with the arching feedback loop. The use of automation in this aspect improves efficiency and scales the whole process across the whole product delivery cycle and reduces wastage.

So here is a crude way to group the different dimensions of DesOps, which come into play while modelling DesOps solution for a target organisation or team. Let’s not take them literally as many of these dimensions have overlaps among them, for example, the way we work might involve components from the cultural shift dimension.