From my monthly col­umn in form mag­a­zine. About con­trollers tak­ing over design studios.

Effec­tive, not efficient

Design com­pa­nies call them­selves stu­dio, office, agency or even ate­lier, depend­ing on were they come from and where they think they’re going. All these legal enti­ties are usu­ally run by design­ers. They may have stud­ied prod­uct design or graphic design, often labeled as visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions, but they never took courses in account­ing, man­age­ment, human resources or mar­ket­ing. That knowl­edge comes along over time, grad­u­ally turn­ing design­ers into man­agers and entrepreneurs.

Learn­ing by doing works well for smaller out­fits, where it is fairly easy to esti­mate how long a job will take and who’s doing what in the stu­dio at any given time. As soon as more than a hand­ful of employ­ees have to be coor­di­nated, it gets pretty tough to keep on top of things. You have to watch out for projects not only to be kept on track as far as the design part goes, but also to stay within the num­bers given in the pro­posal and to make sure the client is still going along with it.

Enter the con­troller. I never prop­erly under­stood what con­trol­ling is – that could well be a men­tal block on my part. In essence, I think, the idea is to gen­er­ate num­bers in order to have some con­trol (sic) over expenses and rev­enues. That should enable you to tell whether a project is gen­er­at­ing profit or going down the tubes. Once con­trol­ling has estab­lished the key fig­ures and fac­tors, it should not only be able to doc­u­ment who spent how much time on which project and for how much money, but should also pre­dict future trends. Esti­mates could then be writ­ten more accu­rately and resources planned more easily.

So much for the the­ory. In the real world, con­trol­ling in a design stu­dio meets two chal­lenges: firstly, every­body knows that timesheets are usu­ally filled out at the end of the week, with every­body try­ing to match the plan­ners’ expec­ta­tions. And sec­ondly, this approach looks at the effi­ciency of the process, not the effect, ie the work. Not the result becomes the ref­er­ence for suc­cess, but the way it was achieved. This totally dis­torts the real­ity in our pro­fes­sion. Our clients do not judge our work by how it came about, but by how it works for them. Is their brand stronger after the redesign? Does the prod­uct sell more? Is it man­u­fac­tured more cheaply and swiftly? Whether we get there by work­ing day and night or with hand­made soft­ware, under the influ­ence of sub­stances or by being exposed to loud music – nobody cares, as long as the client is happy.

Own­ers or senior employ­ees are respon­si­ble for the qual­ity of the design work, as this is what clients look for in design offices, firms, ate­liers, agen­cies and stu­dios. Of course, they have to earn money, and con­trol­ling can pro­vide very use­ful tools and stan­dards for judg­ing busi­ness para­me­ters. If, how­ever, effi­ciency of process becomes the most impor­tant one, the qual­ity of work will even­tu­ally be com­pro­mised. No con­troller or accoun­tant can decide whether design work is good or bad. They can only reward those who obe­di­ently filled out their timesheets – in my expe­ri­ence not the most cre­ative peo­ple. Once the work gets mediocre because design qual­ity is no longer appre­ci­ated by the sys­tem, design fees go down. Then one starts to make economies – like hir­ing cheaper employ­ees, and the qual­ity of the out­put sinks even lower. The whole pur­pose of con­trol­ling – earn­ing more through effi­ciency – is turned on its head. Ergo: con­trol­ling in the design busi­ness is good, as long as it is con­trolled by designers.