Quality in Design
There is a lot of prominence on design and this prominence has put a lot of designers in pressure to be creative, on time and have high-quality deliverables.
Customer’s understanding
Most of the customers/people who desire a design solution, may not understand the depth of analysis that a designer has to do and to ensure that the final output is very usable and to a great extent - future proof.
Customer’s however, do expect that while the designer is doing all that - to give a great quality output, they also get the status on the progress, plans, timesheets etc.
Predicament of a designer
The process that a designer follows is not unique, but the analysis and output are very specific to a customer and the need of the customer’s user.
But to expect a designer to manage all the tasks, their plans, risks, issues, timesheet tracking, resource and task management, and a plethora of other things related to a project, people and resource management is not correct.
This dual expectation is sure to fail the whole concept of having a design team and this would severely impact the quality of output.
Managing Design
The designers can always be trained on aspects of project management and given the tools to enter timesheets and risks etc.
But, Design and Project Management are two different entities and should be done by two different people. This is in line with segregation of duties, but this would only work if the individual who is to do the Project Management job is very much aware of design processes and its principles.
Managing a design team has its challenges, but it starts with the establishment of the right kind of an individual who can understand Design, Quality and Project Management.
These two have to work together and this is the training or process that needs to be defined as per the vision, goal and need of the organisation.
Quality in Design
Quality in design is more than Project Management. But setting up a design friendly project management and other administrative processes and systems is an essential need in today's design-focused organisations.
The customer too should be made aware of this difference to ensure that there is a right set of expectation in place.
Cost of Quality
One may surely look at an additional resource as an overhead, but including a design aware project manager would ensure that the tasks are better managed and with high quality. Over time, this would give a much higher return than design projects where there is no dedicated project management oversight.
