How to distribute project load?
Resource management is the process of planning and scheduling a team’s resources and activities. It allows for balancing the team’s resources effectively and seeing the complete picture of how the team will achieve its goals. In a world where organizations are moving fast and often virtual, resource management becomes challenging.
Resource management is critical to the team’s success; let’s dig a little deeper into distributing project load and the standard model to plan & manage resources.
Check out these different ways to plan & manage resources in a project:
- By accelerating Design function in scaling organizations (increase in designers & ratio of designers to developers) — The role of design function is becoming more and more critical in scaling organizations. As Dave Malouf explains, “Our teams are getting larger, our problem spaces are getting larger, things are more intricate and complex, not just with the solutions we’re providing to users, but also the way we’re providing them.”
The key is to construct a design operations function that focuses on creating best practices for design and building a systematic framework that enables sustainable scalability, aligns the business and design objectives, and improves the design-business dynamic.
As organizations scale, there is a constant need for design services across different teams/departments in an organization — DesignOps helps integrate & scale the design function seamlessly.
Some global leaders are adding designers & growing their teams rapidly. Many large enterprises have invested in design in the last few years and are willing to invest in it at a much higher rate than ever before. Some global leaders are adding designers & growing their teams rapidly. Here are the stats on six companies’ designer: developer ratios in 2017 and compared to half a decade ago.
The growth is staggering — companies like Atlassian have gone from 1 designer: 25 engineers in 2012 to 1 designer: 9 developers in 2017. Uber’s design team has grown 70x since 2012, and they’re now targeting one designer: 8 engineers. Check out the rest:
- Distribution of work among teams — Teams are increasingly getting remote & distributed. Many companies have already made the switch, including prominent brands such as Adobe, Salesforce, Spotify, and Twitter. In May 2021, a Mercer study found that 70% of companies said they were planning to adopt the hybrid model.
As teams work in a hybrid model, there are challenges in allocating the right resources globally, such as different time zones, cultural differences, team collaboration, etc. We often hear from other design teams that building and maintaining a collaborative culture in a remote environment is one of their biggest challenges. The good news is that creating highly productive teams is all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
Getting the basics in place is essential to making remote work successful. Design teams will need extra tooling to accommodate critical stages of the design process in a digital environment. Teams will need shared tools for video conferencing, messaging, and documentation.
But try not to overthink things. The success of remote work depends primarily on the human relationships we develop. The value of taking the time early to establish shared tools and processes frees teams to focus on the actual work: being creative and collaborative.
- Increase team’s utilization rate — Utilization rate is the amount of time your project team spends on actionable, strategic, or “billable” work. On average, employees spend 60% of their time on work, like chasing approvals or searching for documents. Reducing such “work” time is the best way to empower your team to get their best job done and increase their utilization rate.
- Profile of Designers — Every designer has a unique profile (broken tooth comb profile); matching their skills to the project at hand is quite challenging. Understanding who is excellent at what helps determine the best resource for each task. When it comes to staffing projects or assigning resources, there’s both an art and a science to it. Try to make sure that someone’s available bandwidth matches the scope of the work set and also think about assigning projects that align with individual skills and career goals.
- Get the right work management tool— Remote work has exploded alongside the rise of digital collaboration tools. Using a spreadsheet is a surefire way to make resource management confusing quickly. Instead, try using a work management tool to track resources & people such as Trello, Asana, Jira, etc.
However, these tools are developer-friendly or related to task management and are not suited for iterative design work. Design tools and systems are wide-ranging, ever-changing, and increasingly complex — often resulting in bottlenecks. Plenty of design teams are reluctant to adopt developers’ processes and tools like Jira (as quoted by one of the design managers — Getting buried or blocked by Jira complexity).
Cubyts to scale design & plan, distribute and measure resources -
If you’re going to unlock design management success, you’ll need to identify and take advantage of the most appropriate design resource management tool out in the market. As we all know, there are several competing tools out there.
1. There are many collaboration tools, but it isn’t easy to collaborate with all stakeholders under one roof. Cubyts brings all the different teams together under one platform. Get cross-functional stakeholder input on your work back schedule. By doing so, you can ensure your team is aligned and set realistic expectations and timing up front.
2. Cubyts allow to view, monitor, and track resource utilization. Follow your team’s progress in the Roadmap view of Cubyts (in particular, your Timeline). See what work is delegated to your team members and use your Timeline to determine if you can help with any roadblocks.
3. The Design Maturity Platform, Cubyts, will provide visibility, manage deliverables, and measure outcomes of the design function, resulting in the enterprise’s customer-driven culture.
4. Lastly, Cubyts is the only design tool for designers to collaborate better, design, and measure products.
Choose the best design collaboration software.
Choose Cubyts!
