the company I work for started small and has been growing exponentially, problem is the way we are organized hasn’t changed! as a personal/ professional growth thing, I would like to propose to split the all encompassing " design department" into “creative” and “production” dapartments. the reasons are manifold, but in essence I would need to present this to the owner as improving his business. anyone ever done this before and have any advice/results? I’m also looking for some effective organizational ideas.
I do design work at a medium sized national architectural products manufacturing firm. We’re going through some Lean flow, efficiency stuff right now to streamline our work flow and ultimately keep us more organized. You might consider that. Usually lean flow is implemented in the production end of the industry, but lately companies have begun to use the same workflow principles and apply them to the office environment. Things seem to be working well so far, but it takes a lot of commitment from the top down, so be sure everyone is on board before going into that.
all I’m finding is consultants extoling “lean” techniques and why they should be hired to consult… any resources for finding out more about lean?
Essentially, I’m looking to differentiate a design dept into “production” and “creative” groups. we go about our jobs so differently and do not mesh well especially with the # of employees growing and the business getting more sophisticated.
…nothing intrisically wrong with what you want to do…i’ve worked projects in which the team ‘core members’ (usually one marketing, one engineering, one design) remain throughout the project, but secondary members come and go as the project progressed through the phases. the ‘launch phase’ team was staffed quite different from the ‘fuzzy front end’ as were each phase in between…you just have to be sure that you do not build ‘silos’ or a ‘throw-it-over-the-wall’ mentality in your process…when you work lean you have watch your project loading very closely…the biggest bottle neck for us is always at preproduction, when we can only handle about one new product launch about everyother week, because our production lines still have to get the current product out as well.