One project per practitioner
by petermeI took part in a panel at the IA Summit, and in response to a question from the audience, found myself passionately responding about how practitioners should be on no more than one interactive project at a time. I explained myself more fully on an internal Adaptive Path mailing list:
I firmly believe practitioners should be on only one interaction design project at any time. An interaction design project takes over your brain. If a practitioner is on more than one, they will doubtless favor only one, and any other project will not get the attention it deserves. Only one of those projects will be the one they think about as they wake up or are in the shower. Only one will be the one their mind wanders to as they commute home, etc.
Now, Adaptive Path folks are on more than one project at a time, but only on one interaction design project. They might also be preparing for an event or training, or working on something internal, but are on just one client interaction design project.
There are two reasons I was emphatic about this: 1) because I have come to believe it; 2) because the person whom I was addressing comes from a doing-interaction-design-at-a-graphic-design-agency background, and the culture of graphic design agencies is for designers to be on more than one project. And for many graphic design projects, that’s acceptable — they’re simply not as complex (there are exceptions, of course). But when graphic designers started taking on interactive work, they thought they could treat it like graphic design work, and the quality of the work, and the esteem of the interaction designer, suffers.
I think this is particularly true for those of us in a services position, where we cannot play favorites with client work. In-house folks are in a different situation — they might have multiple projects, but many of those projects don’t really require them to deliver their best… the projects just need to be executed.
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March 30th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Peter, I didn’t know this was an AP policy (being new and all). It’s great to know and I completely agree with the need for one project per practitioner — not having to switch gears is ideal for good idea development. But I disagree with your comment that in-house folks don’t need to deliver their best. Having worked both as an in-house and consulting designer I can say that the challenges to switch gears are the same. There may not be a client to please, but there are definitely high demands from internal management as well as deadlines to meet.
Why would an in-house designer not have to deliver their best?
March 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Because an in-house designer is often given work where it’s not required that they deliver their best. People working “in the enterprise” often have to design all kinds of things, and they don’t have to do the best work — just deliver something that’s good enough. In-house, the priority is more often to simply keep things moving, get things done. On the services side, we have to always deliver exceptional work. That is what we’re paid for.
March 30th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
How to square this with the cross-pollination of similar, concurrent projects on related themes? We’ve been working almost exclusively on maps for the past month or two, with as many as four projects at a time benefiting from one another.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » blog archive » One project per practitioner I agree with Merholz that doing a maximum of one IxD project at a time is ideal. Sadly this is hardly ever feasible in these busy times. (tags: petermerholz interactiondesign IxD projects attention planning) [...]
March 31st, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Amen.
Although, I think it’s a particular instance of the more general “not following a project from start to finish” problem.
The folk who think that spending a week doing wireframes and interaction mock ups at the start of a project is enough to get it to a successful conclusion. If it doesn’t work? Well - that’s the developers/management/the-custoemrs fault for not following through on the designers wonderful vision.
That’s where people’s work falls down. Unless it’s trivial working on project B means that you’re not working on project A. Not tracking those changes in requirements. Not looking at the new knowledge that affects the design. Not taking note of feedback. Not being there to help resolve the issues and misunderstandings that always show up during the development process.
Hmm… I appear to be ranting :-)… I’ll shush now…
March 31st, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Like this approach as people are also bombarded by a host of other attention diversions including: email, RSS feeds, mobile phone calls, IM, life
Engineering a “focus” into any process can really help a person concentrate - http://news.com.com/Slow+down,+all+you+multitaskers/2100-1008_3-6170323.html