Design can't be treated in isolation from other business processes: designers have always needed to interact with commercial functions, with manufacturing and with product or service support. Multi-disciplinary teams and working processes are a key feature in many of the companies from our study
While these interactions are an essential part of the design process, they can be carried out in many different ways. For every company in our survey, managing the interactions between the design function and other parts of the organisation was a key concern.
Interaction requires more than regularly scheduled meetings, however. Designers, engineers and commercial staff often look at the world in different ways. They each speak their own language and can be motivated by rather different concerns.
For many of the companies in our survey, these cultural barriers were overcome by educating designers in the language of other functions.
At Yahoo!, and LEGO for example, designers must be able to speak fluently about the commercial implications of their design decisions. At Xerox, designers are fluent in the analysis methods and processes used by their engineering colleagues.
For many of the organisations in our survey, strong interactions between designers and other functions are achieved not by building formal communication processes, but by integrating the designers directly into cross functional development teams.
Yahoo!’s AGILE development process is a good example of the way cross functional teams are operated, with frequent formal and informal exchange of information between team members from different disciplines.
At Microsoft, engineers, product managers, designers and user researchers are all part of the process of developing a new product or service. The central driver for multidisciplinary working throughout the design process at Microsoft is a focus on the user, with team members all equally engaged in finding solutions that adequately address user needs.
Integration has gone so far at Microsoft that the company argues that everyone involved in its development process – including the users, executives, developers and programmers – is a designer.