Keynote at ICEEFEST 2018 – Designing Services using DesOps for Industrial Revolution 4.0

 

Design as a practice is undergoing significant change within the product-service continuum. Seismic shits in the era of cognitive commuting that includes Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, IoE and 5G networks, means that we have to deal with increasing complexity as Industrial Revolution 4.0 disrupts every sector transforming all manner of products and services.  The growing and dominant role of Agile Development methodologies and the need to collaborate at speed, has precipitated the emergence of Design Operations (DesOps) as means to integrate service design and user experience design within the lean organisation using Agile Development.

Agile Development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies. The most popular agile methodologies include Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Lean Development, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD) where the emphasis on building and releasing code, features and products. Alongside the emergence of Agile Development has been the adoption of Design Thinking and User Centred Design to design and develop products and services that are both usability and intuitive to use. 

Service Design is set of principles and practices of design that is being adopted by a wide range of sectors as way to deal with complexity when transforming organisations and their offerings. Service design has its origins in banking and financials services and it has now matured into an approach that enables teams to look at complex and interconnected ecosystems consisting of people, places, touchpoints, communications, interactions, processes and systems, and the challenges of transforming and delivering services that result in engaging user experiences to both customers and employees. 

Service design along with other design practices are becoming operationalised so that designers can fully integrated within multi-disciplinary teams using Agile Development methods. The operationalisation of design is referred to as Design Operations or DesignOps or DesOps, and it has emerged as a new paradigm in design practice and project management using a systemised set of design practices and activities to work alongside and dovetail with DevOps (Development Operations) and BizOps (Business Operations).

This paper will explore the principles and practices of DesOps in Service Design, in the design of products and services, and how design activities, processes and toolchains are operationalised to enable designers to integrate and work in a core team (Scrum Team or Tribe) using Agile Development methods. This paper will assert that DesOps requires a systemic change to the way design is used in the development of new products and services in a workflow that is highly collaborative, fast, and lean, to support agile transformation at speed.

Service Design using Design Operations (DesOps) can applied to the design of products and services to create innovative and breakthrough businesses that are capable of generating experience equity and service equity.  This paper explore that principles and practice of Service Design and DesOps and how it changing design practice. This presentation will show how DesOps can be applied to deliver impactful transformation, improve design capability and capacity while working at speed to significantly reduce the time to market of innovative and user-centric products and services.

The world’s businesses, organisations and public services are undergoing seismic changing in the way they operate and deliver value as they transform to become digital first organisations. They are undergoing radial transformation and a period of unprecedented technology change that demands agility, speed and new ways to work together.  As a result there is now a new and emergent field of Design Operations (DesignOps or DesOps) that is part of a new approach to design called Design 4.0. Design 4.0 is a way for organisations to design in Industry 4.0.