Running a Digital Design Agency in Rural Kenya: A Working Process to Foster Teamwork and Ownership

Abstract

This graduation project aimed to support Digital Lions, a digital design agency in rural Kenya, in improving their working process on client projects. Digital Lions is a Fair Trade agency that delivers digital products in the areas of graphic design and web development to international clientele. The agency is a sister organization of an NGO that provides IT education in rural areas. Digital Lions serves as a stepping stone for some of the graduates from this IT education program. The mission of Digital Lions is to create jobs and skills development opportunities to these talents through real client projects.

Digital Lions’ context and working process were researched through interviews, observations, and informal interactions with key stakeholders, during a 7-week field research phase. This research consisted of living and working on the campus where Digital LIons is hosted in Loropio, Turkana, Kenya. The main findings from this field research were that Digital Lions’ founder desired to have a team that is self-managing. However, the employees of Digital LIons still lacked knowledge and experience in teamwork within an agency. Moreover, due to remote working arrangements and colliding activities outside of the agency, it was difficult for the team to align their schedules and collaborate synchronously. Consequently, there was little responsibility and ownership to address important matters that could improve the agency.

Thus, the design goal for this project was to enhance collaboration within the Digital Lions team, in order to initiate their transition from a collective of freelancers to a self-managing agency.

A list of design requirements was generated from an exploratory prototyping phase. This consisted of rapidly creating prototypes of possible interventions and testing them with subjects in close proximity. This provided quick insights into what could and could not work, as well as new design requirements.

The final design solution was three-fold.

1. The team of 7 employees are divided into two subteams, called the Think&Do Teams. This makes aligning schedules to communicate and collaborate synchronously significantly easier.

2. The Think&Do Teams are provided with Action Sheets that guide them through a series of outlined activities or tasks within a given strategy to address an important agency matter. An example of such matter is to collaboratively create a coherent Instagram content strategy for the agency. The Action Sheets provide high level instructions and links to useful resources, serving as a catalyst for effective teamwork on real tasks.

3. The Think&Do teams are facilitated by the agency leader and foreign volunteers that support the agency. They are provided with an Action Sheets template and a filled in example, as well as a handbook on how to prepare the Action Sheets, so that the team is enabled to address important agency matters effectively.

By implementing this solution, the team slowly transitions from working like a collective of freelancers to a collaborative team. Over time the employees gain ownership of important agency matters and experience in truly working as a team. This solution accelerates the team in becoming a self-managing agency.