Getting stuck into journey mapping

This week has been fairly positive in work. I've managed to get my head stuck in to new series of journey maps and I'm already feeling like I'm getting a lot of value out of them.

I'm capturing 4 journeys carried out by internal case workers. I've looked into these journeys before, but this time I'm trying to be more accurate with my mapping, and more intentional about how I share the findings.

Findings so far

  • Users aren't always following their own written guidance notes about when to complete to each task. Some tasks have been moved to separate journeys. I think the extent of the change will come as news to the wider time.
  • Many of our changes to the digital service haven't reached the production environment yet, so it's hard to measure our improvements still. Good news is, we have lots of improvements coming down the release pipeline.
  • Some tasks are being picked up by different teams, and the product doesn't really have a native way of clearly capturing when these tasks are done and the case is ready to move to the next team.
  • I'm seeing lots of repeatable patterns, like "upload a file". These tasks are completed multiple times within a journey and across multiple journeys. So, I'm sorting these into themes so the team can see at a glance how much effort and time is spent on each one across the service.

Next steps

I expect I'll spend most of next week mapping too. Once the first drafts are done I want to do a formal review with the wider team and invite BAs (business analysts), URs (user researchers) and others to plot their findings and observations onto the map.

I'm hoping that we'll start to see clusters of areas that need more attention.

A design artefact to cling too

I'm starting to feel like these journey maps will be something I can use to push for the improvements I think need to be made to the service. So far, I've struggled to show the team how I can help turn all the problems I'm identifying into opportunities.

Usually I'd use a prototype for that, but for various reasons that hasn't really worked on this team yet.

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