Resilience in DesignOps
Photo: Upsplash Alex Shute @faithgiant
It is believed that mentors and coaches in the workplace will help leaders and employees become more resilient. It is an important topic (especially recently after the COVID-19 pandemic.)
According to Susan Kobasa, a psychologist, there are three essential points in resilience training:
Challenges: resilient people do not see problems as impossible to overcome but rather as challenges that will help them grow.
Commitment: resilient people commit to their objectives and do not give up after the first failure but see each challenge as an opportunity to learn.
Personal control: resilient people do not waste their time trying to change what they have no control over but instead focus on what they can do to affect positively. Personal control allows them to feel more empowered rather than defeated.
Resilience in DesignOps
Challenges
As ops people, the topic of resilience appears to be extremely important. Design practice has long been more established in the larger tech enterprise world as an equal partner of engineering and product management. However, many companies still have a long way to catch up, including our own company. Without understanding the design team’s role, designers have to educate the organization relentlessly. As a service design/supporting function to design, Ops will take even more effort and resilience to achieve goals. It is a challenge.
Commitment
We position our initiatives as experiments. By framing it as experiments, we give our members permission to explore and fail. An experiment is an iterative process. As the service design to the design organization, designOps facilitate many discussions of how might we improve efficiency and achieve desired outcomes for the design team. Build, Measure, Learn. The service design approach works for DesignOps.
Personal Control
It is essential to take time to understand the company context. Therefore, we focus on what we have control of and what we can affect positively. DesignOps is different from other operational teams. We prioritize our design team’s and designers’ needs first. Build team culture and design process. We introduce tools for the design team and educate the rest of the company to share our toolbox. By focusing on what we can achieve within the power of the design team, we empower.
Being resilient is not easy. Being resilient is rewarding.
Resources
Benefits and best practices of resilience in the workplace
Strategic resilience during the COVID-19 crisis
Agile resilience: Lessons from COVID-19
From risk management to strategic resilience
Building more resilient value chains after the COVID-19 crisis