Dave Malouf is passionate about how technology can help people connect to each other and help them achieve their personal and organisational goals. As a veteran design leader, strategist, facilitator, researcher, and educator he has worked with some of the largest and fastest growing organisations globally. He is taking that experience and passion and helping organisations amplify the value they get from their investment in design. Dave is a writer, teacher, and facilitator sought after around the globe for speaking and workshop engagements helping to teach designers how to build strategic, visionary, empathetic, and creative organisations.

WHO THIS IS FOR This workshop is for people who are in the early stages of thinking about or already starting a design operations practice in their organizations. They will learn a broad and flexible definition of design operations as well as tangible activities for how to start.

PROBLEM STATEMENT No matter how well a design practice is executing their craft within their processes, they often face operational challenges as they scale in size, complexity, and scope. Design leaders experience issues like poor design team engagement and poorer outcomes, especially in the overlap between design intent and design execution. Design teams don’t have the right tools to meet and scale their needs, nor do they have internal and cross-functional systems in place to allow for better communication, asset management, and workflow management.

HOW THIS WORKSHOP WILL HELP This workshop helps design leaders and managers apply service design mindsets and methods to their own design organization so they can increase the value their design organization contributes to their larger organization. We will review the makeup of an operational model for a design organization, a canvas for insight discovery of breakdowns in your current operational model, and finally, use service blueprinting to imagine a new holistic design operations model.

TAKEAWAYS Create a plan and execute DesignOps for managing teams—from recruitment through promotion and even off-boarding Develop assessment criteria to evaluate and select current software for supporting design operations Develop methods for optimizing workflows Integrate DesignOps roles and responsibilities into the wider design organisation.