A journey map is a boundary object, it makes the intangible tangible.
Klaus Schwarzenberger, Co-founder and CTO of More Than Metrics, held this Thursday the second of six Service Design Masterclasses, a special format of the Master in Service Design that aims at investigating cutting-edge topics connected to the world of Service Design.
The topic of the Masterclass was Journey Map Operations, a new system of bringing change and managing coordination inside an organization through the adoption of several levels of journey maps. In order to best introduce the concept to the audience, Schwarzenberger divided the lecture in three parts: an overview of the journey map as a tool, a practice-based experiment to simulate a real organization scenario, and the explanation of how to intervene in the scenario with structured journey mapping, the mentioned operations.
It’s a long way from waterfall to agile.
In the first part it was shown how many organizations are now willing to move from a waterfall design process, which is rigorous and linear, to an agile one, centered around iteration at each phase. However, according to the lecturer there is often a lack of methodology on how to actually change the way the organization operates. Since companies are very often split into teams, managing such a high level shift as moving to agile seems optimal on paper but becomes full of obstacles when put into practice, due to lack of communication, synchronization or understanding.
To better convey the problem, the central part of the Masterclass was dedicated to an exercise where the audience simulated to be different teams of an airline company and had to create maps of a passenger journey and present to the other teams. It was evident from the following comparison of the results that each team had clearly worked separated and there were overlaps or inconsistencies in the duties of the teams. According to Schwarzenberger this is a perfect scenario to introduce Journey Map Operations.
The idea, explained in the last part, is to use a series of journey maps across the organization, creating various levels of mapping, and to have then coordinators in charge of analyzing the maps of the different departments, pinpoint all the redundancies, conflicts and possible improvements, and report back to the teams. These operations have to be performed at regular intervals, so that the company is kept in sync and running smoothy. The journey map becomes therefore the central tool to break the silos inside the organization and make sure that everyone is speaking in the same language.