Future of facilitation: digital blueprinting on a global scale (Part 1)
You’ll often see service designers working in big rooms with walls of post-it notes and rolls of butcher’s paper, trying to synthesise feedback about the customer’s world and map out their experience. But when you need five service designers to run 56 workshops with 146 stakeholders in three countries (all with different time zones) over 17 weeks, it gets a little trickier. The answer, of course, is to go 100% digital. But how?
Creating a new team to connect the dots
Let’s take a step back. We officially established our service design team in May this year, to make sure that our people, processes and technologies were aligned behind the scenes and we were continuing to deliver a beautiful experience ‘on stage’ for our two million customers around the world.
Our remit was to map the current and future states for these customers and make it a living artefact. To do this, we needed to develop a set of service blueprints. Blueprints are an operational tool that visualise the components of a service in enough detail to analyse, implement and improve it. They show the orchestration of people, touchpoints, processes and technology both front stage (what customers see) and backstage (behind the scenes).
In total, our blueprints mapped 35 channels and functions (e.g. website, phone, education team) covering more than 65 core customer actions across two key audiences.
Abandoning traditional design methods
We had a huge blueprinting project and a team of service designers ready to go. The problem was that our team is based in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, so the time difference was a killer. When we start work for the day in Australia and New Zealand, our service designer Heather is sleeping in London, and vice versa.
So we had to abandon the traditional methods of sticking post-it notes on the wall and face-to-face chats, for a digital co-working space that allowed everyone to work together.
It was an epic effort to set up and run, and really broke new ground in terms of scaling the way we work as service designers and as an organisation.
Here’s how we made it happen:
- 17 weeks
- 36+ departments
- 3 countries
- 146 workshop participants
- 5 service designers
- 24/7 service designers working and facilitating
- 50+ online working spaces or boards
- 170 coworking workshop hours
- ~3,000 digital post-its
One team, one dream
Mobilising 140+ Xeros (our people) across three countries
Before starting the project, it was critical that we were working as one team and there wasn’t an ‘us’ (service designers) versus ‘them’ (everyone else) mentality. We spent a couple of months seeking out Xeros from across the organisation, then split stakeholders into tiers and developed engagement plans accordingly. This helped us embed practices and benchmark our standards of digital workshopping, to ensure our blueprints became living documents.
We regularly conducted workshop briefings over hangouts, mobilised a set of champions to help enlist Xeros into workshops and ultimately built a rapport with every participant to ensure they were heard. So often during the workshops, we found ourselves adapting our facilitation and digital styles depending on who was in the room and how they responded to this new way of digital working.
Working agile remotely, collaborating online
Mapping the current and future states of two complex services in less than 20 weeks means you have to move fast.
We managed and delivered the project remotely using agile ceremonies, such as breaking our process into digestible sprints.
Our rituals were designed for three time zones. First, we storymapped our approach in Miro (an online whiteboard tool), which made the process incredibly fast, efficient and tangible. We then exported our storymaps into Trello (an online task collaboration tool), where we managed our tasks. Finally, we held a virtual meeting once a week to plan and prepare for the next cycle.
It was so important to retro our process and improve our tools, templates and approaches as we went. As a service design team, we became more efficient and built an agile way of working that other teams are now beginning to adopt.
Using video to make time zones our friend
The time difference and tight schedule meant we didn’t have time for endless Slack messages or emails.
Instead, we recorded daily video diaries and mini-demos using Google Hangouts to quickly and effectively handover the project to other members of the service design team and explain what had been achieved that day (and what needed to be achieved in the next timezone). These five-minute videos became our favourite co-working method. We also met up once a week using Google Hangouts to chat through the bigger actions. This allowed us to stay on top of the project, without working crazy hours.
The anatomy of the digital workshop
Make it fun: create that vibe!
We created digital icebreaker exercises that served two purposes: to help everyone get to know each other, and to get people comfortable with using Miro. Keeping things light worked for our audiences and a few jokes to start off each session helped keep the mood positive.
Activity ideas:
- Intro cards: hello my name is, my role at Xero is, if I was an ice cream flavour I’d be (the global differences were fascinating — there were some ice-creams we’d never heard of before!)
- Franken-animals: in pairs, use the drawing tools to create an animal version of yourself
- Cross the river: in teams, think up unique ways to cross a river without everyday tools such as hammers and nails
Make it easy and intuitive, but be ready to adapt
We pre-built custom templates in Miro to form a foundation for mapping in each session. The beauty of digital is that we could evolve and change these as our understanding developed. This meant we could rename and recut the maps quite easily throughout the project.
We also ran one-on-ones with two or three key stakeholders before the workshop, so there was a skeleton of the blueprint for groups to work from. It was a great opportunity to form allies early.
Quick tips:
- Get to know your room. Sometimes the templates can become too overwhelming, so start a new board, work with your participants to get the information out and retrofit it back in later
- Colour-coding allowed participants to place touchpoints on a blueprint while clearly differentiating them from a previous workshop
- Starting with Miro post-its was easy for everyone to participate, and as we cleaned-up the blueprints post-workshop, we converted post-its to cards so we could add more detail and link to artefacts
- We created digital piles of post-its beside each activity on boards for ease of use
- Tagging was very handy for assigning owners and teams to touchpoints or identifying a touchpoint as digital versus human
- LOCK IT DOWNNNNNN: when you have 20 people collaborating on one board, locking frames and templates became critical for things to stay in one place
- Add the activity instructions next to each board
Make it unforgettable
In order to get value out of our weeks of service mapping, we needed to know what to focus on afterwards. Our workshop participants used emojis like fires, teardrops, unicorns and sirens to highlight moments that matter on the blueprints. We then created service transition plans with them to help us understand what needed to change.
This simple structure has given us enough information to know who we should involve, the steps we should take, and how to prioritise each action.
Quick tips:
- You can hyperlink items in a Miro board. We linked our action plans to touchpoints on the blueprint, which will provide extra context for teams when they deliver on those actions
For tips on getting the most out of your virtual blueprinting workshop, read Part 2.
Special thanks to Charlotte Willcocks, Heather Madden, Georgia Allen from Xero, as well as Alex Moshovelis, Mark Ayres and Kathryn Denton from Today for your contribution to this project.
