How Large Corporations Manage and Upgrade Their System Designs
Systems design is an area of computer systems management that entails overseeing a company’s current data, interfaces, modules, and systems architecture to ensure it’s up to par. Yet when your company grows to such a point that systems design is bordering on unmanageable, it’s time to reassess. What should you do?
Here’s how systems design should work for large corporations:
- Draft the goals that all members of the company are working towards
- Find the necessary parties for goal fulfillment
- Follow the triangle approach
- Audit and test to determine the best approach to system design management
- Create rules or directions for better consistency
- Distribute the system
If you’re looking for more information on systems design in Dallas, we encourage you to keep reading. Ahead, we’ll elaborate on the protocols and steps outlined above. Whether your company has some form of systems design in place already or you’re lacking any thought-out strategy, you’ll soon be ready to spearhead advancement for your corporation!
6 Steps to Follow for Large Corporations That Need to Manage or Upgrade Their System Designs
Have Well-Defined Goals That Incorporate All Parts of the Corporation
When most companies begin paying attention to systems design, it’s usually because product development is not too far behind. Having a product or service with your company’s name on it can increase your revenue, grow your audience, and bolster your reputation.
Well, usually. An ill-thought systems design strategy or–even worse–foregoing a strategy altogether will almost assuredly lead to product failure and the opposite of those intended goals.
Goals are the first part of what entails your systems design in Dallas. What your corporation is aspiring towards will set the framework for the system designs going forward, so this stage of the process must be given the prioritization it deserves.
What does that mean for you? Ideally, all key stakeholders should gather in one place. If that’s not possible, then they all must be present for the same call or conference.
When defining what your system design goals look like, it’s important to keep two things in mind. The first of these is realism, which may require a bit of humility. Since your company has reached the status of a corporation, undoubtedly, you’ve figured out the needs of your customers and continue to taste both success and growth.
Yet overshooting can lead to a systems design process that doesn’t work because certain areas are underperforming. You’ll soon have to upgrade your entire process, bringing it down to earth a few notches. The result is a lot of wasted time, energy, manpower, and often money that was poured into the original design.
Regardless of how well the current design process works, it won’t be one you use forever, so upgrading is inevitable. That said, doing so prematurely isn’t advisable.
The second thing to keep in mind when setting your system design goals is the entirety of the company. A corporation is comprised of many moving parts that altogether make things happen. Skipping a few cogs in the wheel, no matter how small, can throw the whole system out of whack.
Hire the Parties Needed for Goal Fulfillment
Now that you know what your goals in systems design will be or at least have a better idea, it’s time to start the process of achieving them. This will make clear the parties that are necessary for doing just that. Depending on the size of your corporation, you may already have some of the needed experts staffed on your payroll.
If you don’t, then you’ll have to hire these parties, either on a freelance or a more permanent basis. Which route you go is your choice, and freelance vs. permanent hires isn’t as important as hiring quality team members is. These people must have demonstrable skills in the areas in which they’re being hired as well as relevant experience. If they’ve had a part in establishing, managing, and/or upgrading system designs in the past, that’s even better.
The vetting process shouldn’t be rushed, nor should any part of system designs, realistically. Part of your goal-setting should involve a loose but followable timetable for how long it will take to progress from one phase of systems design to another.
Take your time hiring the professionals you need, as they’ll be more valuable to your company.
Use the Triangle Approach When Forming Your Strategy
Before your corporation’s systems design strategy is set in place, you should be made aware of the triangle approach, which is part of any system design that will work efficiently. A triangle is a three-sided shape, and thus this approach has three prongs to it.
These are quality, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness. Let’s talk more about each of these three points now.
The first is quality, which encompasses not only your product or service, but the system designs as well. As we’ve already established, you could have the best product in the world, but if it’s buried under inefficient systems design, few members of your target audience will ever find out about the product’s existence.
We’ll discuss quality more in the next section, but it’s of the utmost importance. You only have one chance to make a first impression, which is something to remember. Although failure won’t dent your bottom line as a corporation as much as it would for a smaller or mid-sized company, it’s still not something you want to hurtle towards due to carelessness and lack of quality control.
The third part of the triangle approach is timeliness. This goes back to what we said about the creation of a timeline for your systems design process. Timeliness doesn’t mean you rush, but it does require you to take a cold, hard, honest assessment of your current system design. Is part of the process going to drag things on too much?
The more time any project sucks up, that’s creative attention and money that could have been funneled into more productive jobs. The risks cannot outweigh the rewards in system designs or the design won’t be efficient in the long-term.
Tying closely into that is the last part of the triangle: cost-effectiveness. Everyone has big, bold ideas, but the reason most of those ideas don’t come to fruition is that they’re simply not financially feasible.
Just like your corporation shouldn’t greenlight a systems design that would take more time than the final outcome warrants, the same is true of how much money it will cost. You might be able to afford to do so given your status, but hemorrhaging money is a bad look for any corporation.
Remember that all three sides of a triangle are equal angles. To follow the triangle approach successfully, you cannot give one area more prioritization than the other. All areas deserve equal care.
Audit and Test
The parts of your system design are coming together more clearly than ever. The triangle approach helped you sharpen your ideas and goals for what’s to come, but that isn’t enough. We also recommend an audit before any part of replacing or upgrading your system designs gets seriously underway.
Auditing will ensure your corporation is of secure enough financial footing that undertaking the systems design is viable. As we’ve said this whole time, since you’re a larger corporation, financial security is probably of little concern, but getting confirmation of that doesn’t hurt. Thus, this is one of the steps you don’t want to skip.
With a successful audit on your record, it’s off to the races. You have the staff you need to create the system designs that will benefit your corporation. You’ll soon be up to your ears in betas, demos, and test versions of your product, all of which require your time and attention. Failed versions are part of getting it right, as sometimes it takes seeing what doesn’t work to discover what does.
Once your digital product is at a point where it’s somewhat presentable, it’s time to test it inside and out. If you don’t already have inhouse staff to do this, then your hired professionals will be able to handle the job, as you will have accounted for this need already (hopefully).
Bug testing is a normal part of any new product, service, or design. Glitches and errors will occur, but the idea is to fix them before your product gets released to the public. At that point, there’s no way to easily take it back if it’s buggy without admitting such. That degrades public trust in your corporation and can tarnish the reputation of the product you’ve worked so hard on.
Have Rules or Directions in Place for Consistency
According to UXPin’s Enterprise UX Industry Report for 2017 to 2018, 60 percent of companies said their most significant UX issue was consistency.
Why is that? It’s like we’ve mentioned throughout this post. A sizable company has a lot of moving parts while large corporations have maybe twice, thrice, or even four times that many. The more moving parts, the better the chances that discrepancies can arise.
It only takes one staff member in a different department to mishear or misunderstand instructions before they pass on that erroneous information to the rest of their department. Then that whole department approaches system designs one way.
A different department that maybe was left in the dark on some of the directions could come up with yet their own approach to systems design. At this point, that’s now three different ways your systems design is being interpreted when it should have just been one.
You can understand how this can be extremely problematic. These employees unwittingly derailed the entire systems design process that you poured blood, sweat, and tears into creating. By this point, you’ve made quite a good deal of progress, having already tested your digital product. To put it all away now would be the biggest waste of all.
Since so many companies already have a hard time with UX consistency, take the extra time to make rules or directions for systems design. These rules should apply to everyone within your company. If certain departments need specific rules, then that’s something you need to accommodate for.
Do quality checks to ensure consistent design, especially once the systems design process gets well underway. Catching bottlenecks early enough can prevent them from becoming significantly bigger problems.
Distribute the Systems Design
Distribution is the last step of systems design in Dallas. With rigorous testing and quality control standards as well as clear directions and rules for consistency, this phase should transpire easily enough.
Conclusion
Systems design in Dallas for large corporations doesn’t have to be difficult. Although your company needs more foresight, planning, and rule-setting for consistency due to your large staff size, you’re ready to begin the systems design process with this post!
