Over at Russell Wilson's blog guest blogger Ben Erwin raises the question of how valuable good design is to a successful legacy application. In his example, if a prospect wants XYZ report, sales needs it fast to close a deal, and engineering can deliver the report faster than it can if a designer participates, what's wrong with that? I guess nothing - even a rock will pound a nail after all, and if you have to nail something right now and all you have is a rock there's no reason you shouldn't try to use it. How many of us have resorted to using a shoe as a hammer in a pinch? But being minimally serviceable transforms neither a rock nor a shoe into a hammer.

My further comments on Ben's post:

It used to be said that a tool might "come well [or easily] to hand." How a software feature "comes to hand" is the designer's province.

Luke Wroblewski has written that design is the "manifestation of your product strategy." Everything about your product says something about your company. All designers are experts in communicating via the tangible and intangible characteristics of their chosen medium. Graphic designers are experts in communicating via the characteristics of advertising or of marketing collateral. Why do companies invest in creative services for branding? Why not just have the Photoshop production guy create your collateral without involving a graphic designer?

Other designers do the same through the media in which the products they design are realized, architects, through their buildings’ characteristics, and interior designers through the beauty and utility of their spaces. Sure, you could order up some lobby furniture and let the guys who deliver it decide how to arrange it. What difference does it make as long as people can find the card swiper? Most companies that can afford in-house software development efforts might care a little more than that what their lobbies say about them, and might therefore hire interior designers. How does that show up in the bottom line?

That said, we should consider whether it’s inevitable that design = slow. As designers, can we accept that there might be such a thing as “good enough design,” and that some software engineers are capable of it? Can we recognize that the best software engineers do care whether their applications come easily to the user’s hand? Can we trust the sales and marketing organization to make reasonable judgments about whether a feature has importance to just one customer or has the potential for a broader competitive impact?

If we make those choices, what, then, is our value? Kevin McCullagh, writing in last fall’s Design Management Review, makes a powerful argument for designers, whom he characterizes as uniquely capable of interpretation, tangibility, synthesis, and resolution. And good designers “are smart at turning knowledge into action—they solve problems, resolve tensions, draw tangible and practical conclusions, and hit deadlines.”

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The new manager is a designer

Since My ScrumMaster training, as an experience designer and manager I've been thinking a lot about the value of those roles. At first I was tempted to think that Scrum meant organizational managers are obsolete. How could they, after all, do anything but obstruct the Agile organization? Well, Agile is onto something there - but if so, it's to expose most companies' failure to value and develop an effective management practice.

I've decided that every manager's job is to create an effective organization. If a manager isn't working today to help the whole organization work smarter with better results than it did yesterday, that manager's company is not deploying its headcount for highest business value.

My first stint as a department manager gave me an established team of programmer/analysts and help desk analysts. As it happened, the company relied on me most to manage projects and tasks the department's members were working on. To the people who reported to me I was an interrupt-managing interface to the rest of the organization.

Something didn't seem right. What of serving a team that is effective and satisfied, proud of their accomplishments and continually learning and growing? What of moving beyond caretaking or task management to finding new ways to add value? It seemed that outside of the budget and annual reviews (to which most employees and managers paid lip service) department management seemed to exist mainly to relieve the administrative burden of higher-level managers.

I went on to do my tour of duty as a consultant. I watched project managers create and shepherd projects that delivered value-generating products. I watched product managers deploy that product to realize its power in the marketplace.

In a seemingly unrelated activity, I've been designing a BPM application in which reporting relationships and organizational structure can be used for various process management purposes. In the the world of workflow, organizational units become active delivery mechanisms of essential resources.

Now all the pieces came together. Project managers deliver products via projects. Product managers deliver revenue via products. And organizational managers deliver effective human systems for deploying expertise, coordination, authority, and responsibility. To do so, managers have to design experiences and interactions.

As it happens, I've been seeing quite a lot of discussion pointing to this very conclusion. Next month Richard Buchanan will speak on management as design in his presentation The Four Orders of Design at the Design Management Institute annual conference.

I'm both a designer and a manager; expect this topic to become one of the main themes here.

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