BT has no formalised design process. In fact, its Head of Design, David Mercer, is emphatic that formal processes do not adequately describe or control the interaction between designers and design management necessary for delivering a good quality result.
‘It is a common misunderstanding that management of design is just about buying design,’ he says, ‘It is not. In the eighteen years I’ve been involved with design at BT, there has never been a single instance when an agency has come back first time with a concept against a brief that is exactly spot-on.’
The process, he says, is two way and interactive, it is ‘more touchy-feely than a process, it’s about understanding how creativity works.’ In the best cases, he says, the designer can ‘take the business somewhere it didn’t quite know it was going.’ To make the best of these opportunities, says Mercer, BT must be able to work with the agencies and encourage them to deliver great work.
Much of this, he notes, is down to the chemistry between designer and client. It is also a delicate process to manage. ‘It’s a bit like glass blowing: you are on the edge of disaster all the time, you have to be quite careful – it’s easy to make mistakes, to go too far down the track and find the agency has gone in the wrong direction, so you have to bring them back.'