Design System: Adoption and Change Management

Project Areas:
Governance Modeling, Road Mapping, Communications, Process Design

Then & Now

Creation of the Lilly Design System required the retirement of two earlier iterations of design systems present in the organization, including my own which I had stared within the Business Unit marketing organization. Creating success entailed taking the lessons learned from both systems, while creating a clear path of legacy retirements and implementation of new design and development practices.

Today, the Lilly Design System continues to empower the organization and teams it was designed to serve, while expanding its usage into additional teams building both external web properties and internal business process applications.

Approach & Role

As the leader of the design system, I worked directly with the architects in the space to establish a plan and gain buy-in of the executives sponsoring the project. We worked collaboratively to create models of governance in order to provide clear and concise guidance to the teams to resolve conflicts between differing design philosophies, and to establish a plan for go-live and post-implementation.

The largest challenge was merging two differing design philosophies while bringing others with opposing points of view along on the journey.

Exploration & Discovery

  • Executive Objectives
  • Team Design Philosophies
  • System Strengths & Weaknesses
  • Timeline Estimations

Identify Themes & Focus Areas

Lead Design and Execution

  • Go-live Roadmap
  • Retirement Plan
  • Team Delivery Process
  • Progress Comms
  • Minimize Delivery Impact

Output

Created a framework to lead discovery and reinvested learnings into information architecture deliverables.

Picture of governance model flowchart

Governance Model

  • Decision chart adopting existing design patterns/components or building new solutions.

    • Picture of operational model

    Operational Model

  • Methodology for merging existing work, legacy decisions, and goals.

    • Picture illuststrating the iterative prodcution process

    Production Methodology

  • Defined the flow of component and design pattern research, design, development, and adoption.

    • “When creating a response to the global pandemic, we were quoted five to six months to build a Covid testing portal with an external vendor. The design system and its standardized UI building blocks accelerated development of the Covid testing portal, allowing a HIPPA-regulated system to be launched in ten days. “

    -Daniel Mitchell, Solutions Architect

    Team Output

    Strong investments into governance and effective operations enabled production across diverse brand teams using the system and style tokens.

    Image showing an example of a site using the Design System
    Image showing an example of a site using the Design System
    Image showing an example of a site using the Design System