Mark Boulton’s How we work is a great post about their design process. I particularly like his point about personas, a method that I have defended before as well:
The tool is not the important thing here, [what’s important is] how you can use something to help people think of other people. To help an organisation to think of their customers, or designers to think of the audience they’re designing for, or the CEO to think in terms of someone’s disability rather than the P&L.
What I find generally useful about running a workshop like this is that it exposes weaknesses in an organisation. If a client pays lip-service to a customer-centric approach, it will soon become very evident in a meeting that that’s what’s going on.
I also like his view on agile in an agency environment: “We make things and then fix things as we go.”