Summary
Traditional approaches to maintaining consistency break down when confronted by the complexity of digital business. While DesignOps and related approaches such as DevOps can enhance speed and responsiveness, they risk generating their own kinds of silos, blockages, and breakdowns. This talk will present an agile governance model that scales without becoming brittle, slow, or invasive. It will describe principles and practices teams across-the design-operations spectrum can use to balance agility, coherency, and resilience.
Key Insights
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Design ops and DevOps reflect a shift from an industrial, product-focused mindset to a service-oriented approach.
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Complex systems in today's digital environment require an understanding of relationships and service delivery rather than just individual components.
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Organizations benefit from treating their teams as mutual service providers focused on customer outcomes.
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Continuous learning and adaptation are essential as systems cannot be fully controlled or understood as we traditionally view them.
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Governance should be a supportive mechanism that aligns diverse parts of an organization rather than a rigid enforcement structure.
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Smaller, more agile teams can enhance innovation and collaboration, aimed at delivering valuable services.
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Failures in digital services often stem from a lack of user-centered design, highlighting the need for empathy in system design.
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Urgent need to incorporate service design principles into both design and operations processes within organizations.
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Organizations should prioritize building a culture around service and user-centered design to navigate complexities.
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Designing for service requires recognizing that both the process of creation and end customer experience are interlinked.
Notable Quotes
"Design thinking and cloud computing profoundly changed my approach to work."
"Empathetic relationships are as crucial to service delivery as automation."
"We need to think about relationships, not just components."
"Complex systems behave differently than machines and can fail catastrophically due to interdependencies."
"The only way to know how a system will work is when people use it for real."
"Change can be harnessed to our advantage, rather than seen as a sign of weakness."
"Organizational components should treat each other as service providers."
"How you make a service is part of what you deliver to the customer."
"We must continuously improve our services, making the act of service a part of our everyday work."
"The most profound action is to embed user-centered design into the fabric of organizations."
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