Unit Verse

At the agency where I was first hired, web projects when I started there were stiffly broken up into silos of expertise. The sales staff booked the projects, the project manager and designer(s) did the discovery process, the designer(s) crafted the design comps, the comps were handed over to a developer for “slicing” and html (very little CSS if any) and programming, and the CTO launched the projects. Seldom if ever did any of these people intermingle or even converse in a project and the only person who communicated with the client (outside of a discovery meeting) was the project manager.

Over the next couple of years Angela and I (we both worked there) worked hard to break down those walls, amend and repair procedures, and create a better project process that more properly involved and integrated the folks working on projects. Details aside, we basically worked toward the ideals referenced in Karri Ojanen’s excellent piece over at the Threeminds blog. With the thesis: “separate the problems and you’ll mess up the solution” the essay is astute. The part I like best is…

“…The danger is that we separate ourselves from our audience. Because when the audience looks at the campaign we’ve built, the process we’ve engineered on a website or in a mobile app, or the social networking components we’ve brought into a digital billboard ad, the audience doesn’t consume the pieces of the design and the functionality separately. They get the total experience: the sum of all the choices we’ve made in strategy, in tactics, in visual design, copy and code.”

Karri is talking about everything involved in a marketing campaign, but the principles still hold when you narrow the scope to a simple web project. Integration of all the expertise and resources results in a stronger result. This is the way we work here at Unit and the way we work with our strategic partners.

My concept of design is that it is a holistic endeavor; important to every aspect of business and strategic aims. Surely this idea works the other way, too. At least that’s the functional assumption behind integration of all resources on a project. Anyway, so I have the same question that Karri did at the end of her essay:

How do you facilitate inter-disciplinary work?