Elephant Team
Elephant Strategy + Design is a strategic design and innovation consultancy that partners with organizations to transform them into dynamic, profitable and meaningful entities. During the past 20 years, design at Elephant has evolved from a styling exercise to a sophisticated, key driver of innovation.

At Elephant we firmly believe that contemporary design requires a strong convergence of multiple disciplines. With approximately 65 professionals, Team Elephant comprises of business strategists, design thinkers, communication experts, engineers and social science experts working together in multidisciplinary teams to enhance clients’ businesses.

What was the need?
The need was felt on two fronts.

The first front was the way in which the whole design profession is seen. Design has always been considered an intuitive profession where the individuals’ creativity determines the success or failure of a particular design project. Designers traditionally view any kind of system or process for designing as something that is detrimental to their work and profession.

The second front was to systemize the design process of Elephant. Elephant Strategy + Design has been growing at a brisk pace. The number of projects, diversity of projects and number of designers have been growing continuously. With this growth, we needed a strong system that would help us not only to maintain excellence in design output but also to reduce rework, reduce redundancies, make use of the accumulated knowledge and most importantly democratize and decentralize the decision-making. The issues that were before us were as follows:

• How do we formally capture the amorphous design process and use it to provide our clients the best design solutions on a sustainable basis?
• How can our capability yield better productivity?
• How do we improve design productivity?
• How can our environment support continuous improvement of the design process?
• How does our design environment have early predictors of success / failure?
  

The Co-creation Exercise
This is a process Innovation through co-creation. The objective of this process innovation was to manage the design process to deliver consistently successful results. The focus was to manage the design process across complex, global, product and brand portfolios, to organize the designers work across the process lifecycle.
This process innovation successfully informs ways in which Elephant designers convert original project brief into a design output. The process takes care of engagement with different stakeholders both internal and external during the project lifecycle, the quality and timeliness of the deliverables at each project stage and the professional evaluation of the output.

The processes defined and developed help our designers to think systematically when they conceptualize their creative artifacts. Considering all the environmental factors for a business and the context in which the design output will be used, the process supports the technical, business and human factors in a balanced manner. The process helps the design to evolve in a comprehensive manner.

The process innovation contributes in framing of the problem effectively and then carrying out the same thread throughout the project lifecycle, thereby enabling the design to enrich the environment where it will be located, and capable of ensuring the cost effectiveness of its delivery.

As a part of our process innovation, we developed the definition of total design’s project quality advancing possible parameters to describe it. Through the implementation of this process, we achieved the designed quality of our output making it essential that quality is a key element of our design process contributing to the expressive different ways our client visualize and experience design.

It is at the initial stages in the design process where perceived design opportunities are transformed, through the generation of ideas and iterations, to problem definitions and potential design solutions. The design teams establish what the project should consist of, and whether it should exist at all, in a set of recommendations for a plan of action to present to the client. Event though it is the starting point, it is the most critical point which determines the quality and usefulness of the output. Our process addresses this point very strongly. Our process gives us the flexibility to move ahead of the design brief by ascertaining its appropriateness or to go backwards and to view at the given design brief from a new perspective. This tool box developed by us as a part of our process which helps us to go back and forth creates immense value for our clients by showing them opportunities they did not visualize.

In the middle phase i.e. the analysis process, perceived problems in a specific situation are transformed, through expert analysis and synthesis of information, to objective recommendations for decision-making. In both the initial and middle phase greater insight is the key element to ensure the success of the project, or, in other words, to determine a good design. Our process helps us to bring to the fore the right insights through a rigorous analysis and to validate the hypothesis generated in the initial phase.

The third phase of realizing the design solution and to implement it is equally important. However it solely rests on the correctness of the outputs of the first two phases. The crux of the challenge here is how to convey the knowledge in a way that inspires designers and creates alignment with the given problem statement and the analysis. Our process helps the designers to achieve design exploration based on the insights. The process describes how to translate brief, research, insights and patterns into tangible outcomes. The implementation of our process gives concreteness and objectivity to the entire solution. The process serves to inspire designers, rather than predetermine their outcome.

Besides informing the quality of design, our process also takes into account administrative issues like accounts and deliveries, project management issues like time management, process management, talent management and team composition and above all the issue of knowledge management where the immense knowledge that is generated across different projects is not only documents, but is also made available to different teams for their future usage.

What was the impact?
The process innovation was implemented on May 01, 2009, on the occasion of 20’th anniversary of the establishment of Elephant Strategy + Design.

Since the implementation of the process, the employee productivity has gone up considerably. Due to the volume of work, we used to work all six days of the week with the exception of 2’nd and 5’th Saturday being the weekly in addition to Sundays as off days. Now thanks to the implemented process, we have only 5 working days. We could save roughly 4 working days in each month resulting in boosting of employee morale as well as cost savings. The employees report to work fresh on each Monday due to a 2 day off and also result in less number of employee leaves. The cost savings is achieved as the everyday establishment cost is saved for 4 days which is about 13% of the overall establishment cost.

Earlier the common scene at the design studio was that of chaos, designers working long hours, deadlines being nearly missed and so on and so forth. Now since the implementation of the process, the scene is quite different. All deadlines are honored; most of the designers (except in case of exigencies from client side) go home in time.

The decision making has improved immensely as a result of decentralization. Clear role definitions have improved the quality of the individual output; wastage of time and resources has been reduced.

In our opinion the most important impact of this process innovation is qualitative. The multiple options and new opportunities for growth and innovation that our process generates for the clients create value for them that is beyond their expectation. It helps our clients to interact with our teams in a manner that is not ambiguous and leads to effective exchange of thoughts, concepts and information as a part of the framework as against spur of the moment reactions. As the process clearly delineates expectations and deliverables the happiness quotient of our clients has gone up.

How was this different?
In the past there have been a few attempts in academic literature to document the design process. However most of these attempts have been at the tertiary level. These design process models successfully document the building blocks of the design process, but fail to summarize the implementation of these blocks and also do not address the intricacies of project management, talent management and knowledge management.

Many Indian design companies list a design process on their websites, but in very few cases it goes beyond from being a thinking model to an action model. Also most of these design processes do not tackle ground realities.

We believe it is the first time, at least in India that Elephant Strategy + Design has created a design process which at the same time successfully addresses multiple issues from both supply and demand side. The uniqueness of our process lies in the fact that it was co-created by the entire team at Elephant (design & non-design backgrounds).

What did the process achieve?

• Capability to manage/ integrate a wide variety of design disciplines
• Interface improvement between clients, project managers, business managers and designers, leading to effective implementation of projects
• Reduction of complex and costly operational practicalities
• Effective project, talent and knowledge management

The Innovation
The objective of this process innovation was to manage the design process to deliver consistently
successful results. The focus was to manage the design process across complex, global, product
and brand portfolios, to organize the designers work across the process lifecycle.

Co-creation makes it sustainable
The most interesting and noteworthy high point of our endeavor was that it was bottoms-up rather than being top-down all the way. Right after the idea and decision to create a unique Elephant Strategy + Design, Design Process, the entire staff was involved in the development.

Elephant has broadly nine kinds of teams based on their functions & skills.
Three types of Design Teams:
Communication Design, Product Design & Environment Design.
Design Research Team, Implementation Team. Business Development Team, Project Management Team, Accounts & Finance Team and Administrative Team.

The entire development happened in three phases:

Phase 1
All individuals listed their activities, correlated their activities with each other.
Thereafter they gathered in their teams to identify the task list
Based on the activities and task, they created a work flow on as-is basis
Within the workflow they identified key and critical activities

Phase 2
From the as-is basis workflow, they got down to the task of creating an ideal design process encompassing the entire project lifecycle.

For each of the key activities within the workflow they identified the input, output, resources required, supporting processes and interface with other stakeholders

Phase 3
In this phase the design teams interacted with other design teams and other department teams of the company. In these interactions the anomalies, redundancies were focused on. This phase resulted into a clear Elephant Strategy + Design, design process.

Phase 4
This was the final phase where implementation was the key. In this phases the design processes were documented, appropriate forms and records formats were created, all kind of output generated by the design teams was standardized, a clear and accessible knowledge management system was put in place.

As is evident from above, in the entire development, all the Elephant team members were involved. This in our opinion is the key to the successful implementation of the new process, change in designers’ mindset to be more organized and structured, and above all being participatory is extremely sustainable as against a top driven model.

Ashwini Deshpande, Founder Director & Principal Designer of Elephant Strategy + Design

elephantdesign.com

About Ashwini Deshpande