Governance model for UX and project management

The redesign of a legacy website with over 7000 pages requires research, planning and the negotiation and consultation of many business stakeholders. It also requires a solid and collaborative UX approach.

Our client engaged CXCO to provide UX oversight into the design process and create a governance model to define how different vendors, teams and stakeholders could work together to achieve shared outcomes.

UX, project management and development teams had been working under an agile project methodology. In divergence from most “pure” agile projects, much research, design thinking, strategic planning, and requirements gathering had been done upfront over the course of previous projects.

This presented a number of challenges – how to work an existing tool set into the design process, how to help a brand new team take on the project, and how to transition the design process from the CCD process that was being followed to a desired agile work practice.

The aim of the governance model was to:

  • Facilitate the transfer of knowledge from previous efforts and between teams.
  • Guarantee stakeholder consultation at the appropriate time in the design cycle.
  • Ensure insight from previous design and market research was leveraged, and the investment not lost.
  • Ensure existing design thinking and tools were utilised.
  • Ensure already defined requirements were considered by a new team into design

What were the key benefits?

  • A defined project management framework that addressed the complexity and scale of the project for design teams.
  • A governance framework to unify and align disparate stakeholder groups and assist in the knowledge transfer to other parts of the business.
  • A directory of business stakeholder groups for the design team and project managers to reference.
  • A timeline of when business stakeholders needed to be consulted to inform requirements and assist sign-off.
  • A set of design tools and guidelines for both UX and non design stakeholders to follow, assisting product owners to understand and follow design language during critique and sign off.

What were the key results?

  • A synthesis of research, design tools and project management into a governance framework for a multi-disciplinary team to follow.
  • A framework and tool set for the organisation to guide critique at key checkpoints.

What was the approach?

An initial period of consultation involved observing the working methods of cross functional teams and a review of the design work to date to perform a “health check” of the project before detailed design began. A series of stakeholder interviews followed to inform the requirements of the disparate teams that needed to be unified by the governance working model.

A definition of the project structure was created. This included

  • A project management framework.
  • The definition of working groups, who was involved, their role and responsibilities, and their time commitment required during design phases.
  • A project plan for design sprints to tackle the vastness of the redesign.
  • A process to ensure best practice UX methods were followed that complied with existing user-centred design tools to create consistent outcomes from different teams.