Journey-centric thinking

weeknotes

10 Jun

Inpromptu weeknote. The last few months have been hills over hills, and suddenly I’m a Masters graduate (almost, and hopefully), working 5 days a week again, and doing lots of exciting things at work—including a new project!

What’s new

Completed my viva in May. It felt like a forever ago, but it was an fantastic experience—I’ve never had the chance to speak about something I’ve been working on for so long, for that long, and I enjoyed the questions more than I expected!
Lots of showcasing TheyDo internally. It’s a brilliant tool, and I’m really excited to see how this impacts our ways of understanding, measuring and improving CX.
Participated in my first client pitch!
Starting a 5-week discovery for a field service project. Watch this space!
Testing a new morning routine, to kick the habit of diving straight into work the moment I wake up
Also testing a ‘shut down’ routine, to get into the habit of unwinding after 5-6pm properly

New project

For the last 2 weeks, I’ve been mobilising for a B2B field service discovery project. The goal is to assess the current experience to inform the target-state, starting with a business case. The fun part is getting to put on my research hat, to own a wider piece of design—lots of interviews, speaking to customers and employees, even service safaris! I haven’t had the chance to involve myself in the ‘raw’ side of discovery before, so this is a first and exciting one.

Now that I’ve experienced working in a variety of phases—from detailed implementation to detailed discovery—and somehow in that order—I realise how often I end up losing myself to the doing, and sight of the wider picture (e.g. why I’m doing this, and for how long it stays relevant). It’s very easy to get stuck in the details as a designer, which is why some of my goals this year is to lean towards more of the strategy side.

Learning about journey management

Having worked on countless journey maps and service blueprints, I’ve been learning to do something new called journey ‘management’. TheyDo has been one tool that does exactly that. The shift to management appreciates that experience is a dynamic thing: changes in customer needs, evolution of business objectives and influences from technical feasibility.

Addressing this in the traditional way of static mapping makes accurate capturing and implementing very difficult. The concept of breaking down experience into journeys makes transformation an easier tackle. Managing each piece of experience proactively—rather than manually mapping, validating and re-versioning—is what how we start.