Feb 1 - Journey Map Operations: https://www.thisisdoing.com/courses/journey-map-ops-february-2022
In this episode, Ben MacLaren speaks with Marc Stickdorn (main author of the seminal service design books, This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing) about understanding zoom levels and how this related to Marc's framework for Journey Map Operations.
The framework helps teams and organisations work better together to manage innovation projects and bridge between organisational silos.
Auto generated transcript
May contain minor errors
00:00:20
S1: Welcome to the Doing Design podcast on This is HCD hosted by all the world's best live design and innovation trainers. Actresses Two-Income the Doing Design podcast focuses on all the behind the scene, things related to actually doing innovation and design, such as design, research, facilitation, prototyping, visualization, and it's a great sounding board for industries like service design, user experience, content design, product management and a lot more in there as well. In the lead up to the Doing Design Festival V3 on February the 11th. We will be hearing from our strategic designer Ben McLaren. He'll be interviewing some of the trainers and talking about their sessions and what they will cover in the session to hear from Ben and Marc, stick to one who chat about his session and what he hopes people will learn and take away from the session. Let's hear what they had to say.
00:01:09
S2: So I guess I also want to know what it is. I'm also very curious how does journey map operations connect with the theme better together? What's what's the connections and the linkages there?
00:01:22
S3: So Jenny Map Ops is an information system that helps you to bring loads of information in a visual way and put information in context. It works like this. You can imagine a journey map as that's compared with a map and geography. If you go and things like Google Maps, you can zoom in and out. If you zoom out, you see less detail to get a good overview. If you zoom in, you see more details. And the same is true for journey maps. The more you zoom out to see and high level overview like the customer lifecycle, for example, or the manually employee lives site and so on of a citizen experience, it might be even your life journey, everything from birth to you. And that is really like the highest level we can look at, right? But then you can zoom into specific aspects. The more you zoom in, the more details you see, and it's always a different journey map at a different scale. So when we talk about scaling geography, we talk about meters or kilometers or miles. If we talk about scale and journey maps, it's time. It's a duration. So the more you zoom in, the shorter the duration you look at, which means you see more details because you'll see more steps of a smaller amount of time. Now what judgment obstacles is you create these maps, and that's a whole governance structure around it, how you can keep them up to date, and that people are responsible for certain parts of that and you add data to it. This data is actually life data. You can connect it with different sources so you can pull in data like what are the pain points for this part of the experience? You can pull in different KPI. So instead of having the one KPI that rules everything, you have really KPIs that are focused on parts of the experience that makes sense. One of the biggest issues we have when we talk about KPIs in terms of customer experience and organization is that we're often missing the context of that. But if you see it in context of a journey map, you suddenly understand what these KPIs mean and you can think of a kind of a balanced scorecard approach her journey map so per AP support detail. So it's a way, more granular way to look at journey maps. Now, if you have this data, you can do things like compare your most important pain points or the most important needs with what are the projects that are going on right now? And that just gives you loads of information pulled from different sources. So the theme of this year's Better Together, which means if we think of an organization, we are often talking about being customer focused and so on. But actually, we are often siloed centre, right? We manage within silos. We look at success within silos. We we have KPIs that are silos centric. We have language within silos. This system allows you to actually cross silos, build bridges between silos, really establish a customer centric perspective. Human centric can use it for employee experience, citizen experience and so on. And since you're putting data in from different silos, you work together and this is better together.
00:04:30
S2: Hmm. I like that. That's that's really nice. I like I to add that together. So. Why did journey map operations emerge? Why this topic as, say, one of your focuses because I know you've been involved a lot in research on this many different areas, especially around research operations. But but why do any map operations, what what's what's different or what does it, I guess promising comparison to what's that need?
00:04:59
S3: So journey mapping in general is very close to my heart. I mean, there's a reason why ten years ago I started a company together with Jacob and Clouds called Smartplay, and it was the first digital tool to create journey maps at that time because there was nothing at that time. And we thought there is there is so much more behind journey maps than just like visualization of some posts up the wall. So with the focus of our company, of course, we did a lot of research. We saw a lot of use cases of our clients, how they use journey maps, and we also heard again and again the same problems that our clients have. A particular large organizations struggled a lot with the scientists. And if you if you then think about how service design or however you call what we're doing, design within organizations scales and suddenly you have dozens of teams, you have hundreds of designers working in different projects and then you want to scale it even further and there are different teams and other silos then starting doing service design even without being in touch with a core team and someone. How can you pull all this data together? How can you make sure that the projects you are running are in sync with all of the other projects, particularly when you work in that agile way, which means projects can develop into a set direction and you're not aware of? Then suddenly something get launched there, which is in contradiction to your own project. All you see an overlap between projects. Different teams just courted differently and you wasted budget and time for doing the same thing twice. And that was the starting point for us to see. Well, maybe we can use journey maps in a completely different way as a visual management tool, bringing all this data and give context to data from a customer perspective. And that's how it all started. I think it was about six years ago or so that we started with that. We tried it with a few of our clients and that worked well. And now we're helping more and more organizations to embed it. And we see that it. It is. It gets applied in very different areas, from public service to human resources. Thinking about employee experience during the pandemic, that was a real game changer there. And and of course, customer and user experience, that's great.
00:07:27
S2: So does does journey map operations fit with particular types of company? Is it broadly accessible for everyone? Is is there like a best fit that it kind of really shines in? Or what kind of when is an organization or a team or a business ready to kind of take that step? Or when does it best fit them?
00:07:51
S3: Well, there are few things that determine if if it's a good fit or not. If you have a very fragmented organization with loads of different products that are not tied together, like think about a fast moving consumer goods company that has loads and loads of different products and services, and they're all over the place. It's hard to bring it all to one system. It won't work because it's too fragmented, and the use case for each of the services and products is so widely different. However, what might work days if you if you go down one level and look at, for example, product families and within one product family where you have basically a use case around a group of products or services, then it starts to work well. It works brilliantly if you have a leading high level experience for any sort of people so brilliantly it works with employee experience for itself because our experience as as humans by definition, is linear because our life is linear, right? We don't have time machines yet. So if we think of employee experience it works with, it starts with how do you get to know of this company? Maybe even further, it starts with your own education and so on. And how did you ever heard for the first time about this? This employee is probably a branding is part of it. Then it goes to all of the application process that maybe you do assessment centres and what have you until you actually start onboarding goes to an onboarding experience. You start your job. How did you get into the culture? How do you understand how the processes work and the organization takes? And then you go through a. And so all these are actually rather linear experience. You might leave the company, you might come back a. So you can actually get a whole level overview, then you can zoom into the details that matters. So for these kind of use cases, it's brilliant. If it's very fragmented, you need to tweak it to make it work, but also that has some benefits.
00:09:53
S2: So I know from definitely some of my workplaces, leading from the top is often very difficult for a lot of these things. How do companies when is this something that really only works when you have that strategy from the top? Or are there ways people can start to advocate for that sort of system or to start covertly? If you will start showing the benefits that might emerge if you kind of do journey map operations or anything similar?
00:10:21
S3: Yeah, in general, if you want to scale it, you always need both. You need management buy-in because you need budget for it to and with budget. The main issue is not financial budget, but time. My people need to be allowed to do this and work in this way, and you need a team that is focusing on that. But at the same time, you need a small team, at least in the beginning, that is dedicated to working this way that is motivated to work this way. And you can start anywhere. You can start top-down or Bottom-Up, but you always need to assess where, where are we and what is missing right now? Because the radius scale it, you need both. But it doesn't matter where you start. You can start as a small team, so you do it on the smaller scale. You build it for your own context and you actually build a use case that you can show within your organization will never work. If you show examples from big companies who are doing it, build a small case within your own organization, even if it's just a small part of the experience, but it's already proving the value that this could bring. And through that, try to get that management by and try to get their attention. Well, explain it as an information system for the organizations so organizations can take rather database decisions and do better decisions in the end. But it also works the other way around like top down, so identify what is missing and then work towards what you need. Mm hmm.
00:11:49
S2: It's very, very awesome. I know some of the things that really leapt journey mapping a bit more often. One of my previous roles was when we did start with that employee experience when working in a digital delivery role where we started mapping the developer experience. And all of a sudden, some of the slippages on projects and the issues on timelines and budgets started to be a bit more obvious. You could kind of see, Oh, I see why, why? It took a lot longer to develop these very particular types of features, because that lead time and that development time was was so long they had to work on their own personal computers instead of being able to use any of the work facilities. Um, so that's that's I guess one of the benefits we got from just just implementing some degree of journey mapping internally rather than as we might only use it externally. So what are some of the, I guess, the highest priority benefits that when people start using journey map operations that come about, I know that there's always a financial focus and sometimes the most obvious benefits can be difficult to relate to what people find urgent, but not necessarily important.
00:13:02
S3: Yeah, so there are few benefits, yes, what you're building is basically an information system that means you get an overview of data and you put data in context. So what you would see is across the different sub level journey maps. What are the most urgent pain points? What should we focus on if it's implemented? Well, you get even a quantification of the pain points, if sometimes even in the financial value, then you see like, OK, in the last month, this pain point cost us amount of X and this painful and cost us amount of why. So it's easy. Then again, it's a basis for discussion, but it's easier to get budget for project because if you know, OK, this pain points actually cost us money. Internally, you had talk on a different level about do we get budget for project to fix it? You also have a ranking of your pain points across the fields, but you know these are the most urgent ones. On the other hand, you see projects and often different parts of the organisation run projects without being in touch, without even knowing of each other. And if you look at where projects impact customer experience, you will quickly see that projects overlap or contradict each other. So if you see where the different projects of the organisation impact customer or employee experience, you can identify that and then bring those teams in touch with each other. The other benefits as well like it helps you to connect with what the different silos of the organisation you build bridges and but that you're actually connecting people. So talking about the theme of the conference better together, that is one of the thing. Right. And you give them a common focus, which is the customer experience or the employee experience. Usually, people think about with their own silos, like the set of KPIs where they define success and suddenly they realise that we're actually we're all doing this for a better customer experience because that in the end brings us revenue or whatever you focus on in your organisation because it works for public organisation, we might be not about revenue or non-governmental organisations where the impact is not measured in how much money do we make, but how much impact do we have? But you always focus around the human side of it, whoever you care about, and that should be the focus of all silos in the organisation. So it gives you a common focus on anything bad is the most important part of the whole thing.
00:15:39
S2: Awesome. And how how other than the February 11 doing design festival, how can people learn more about journey map operations?
00:15:50
S3: Well, it's not rocket science. I gave a few talks about that already, and I give obviously more details in my talk on February 11. I gave some public courses on journey map operations. Also, as part of this is doing so. There are two courses scheduled, but I think they start right after the festival. I think one is in February, one in April or something. Um, and and I heard there might be a book on the horizon, but that will take somewhat time until we see that
00:16:26
S2: the secrets and secrets? Awesome. Well, thank you very much. This has been a great chat and hopefully if people want to, they can find out more by visiting this doing site and see some of the latest courses upcoming.
00:16:40
S3: Looking forward to see you then. Thanks for having me.
00:16:44
S1: So there you have it, folks. At the end of this episode, we'll be sharing it more information with more the trainers that are going to be there on the day on February 11th at the Doing Design Festival. For more information, see this is doing to come and get your tickets there. Hopefully see their folks.
