Stakeholder Map and Value Flow Diagrams
03/25/17 — 03/28/17
03/25:
Over the weekend, we met to begin working on deliverables for the following Thursday. In the last class, we discussed our interests in two domains, Medical and Recreational services. Today, we started out by deciding to choose a focus for our service proposal. After considering our limitations for the project and the data we would have access to, we ultimately chose to focus on a recreational service. While the medical service was an interesting idea, it seemed like it would be difficult to get doctors and specialists to meet with us due to their busy schedules and it was a domain that all of us had very little understanding of. On the other hand, tackling a recreational service was something that we’ve all had some sort of understanding while growing up, and it seemed like there would be more resources available to us. Apart from these practical issues, we found in our research that a lot of children suffer from behavioral as well as psychological issues to various reasons related to having asthma and we found it could prove more impactful in the longer run.
From that point, we began thinking about the stakeholders involved and began drawing a stakeholder map, as shown below:
As you can see, parents have the most connections in the map and seem to be a primary stakeholder. We also felt that the stakeholder bubble that makes up schools should be differentiated from those that make up community center — for example, even though there are both teachers at school and teachers at community centers, they’re different because teachers at school are your primary academic instructors while teachers at community centers could be anyone that is leading an extracurricular activity (ex: music teachers giving a student music lessons, coaches, tutors, etc). We also created a digital version of our map in order to clean it up as well as edit the map in a collaborative setting, using Figma.
After mapping all the stakeholders, we started to discussing the value exchange between each of the stakeholder.
Our next step was to create scenarios that kids with asthma face from our research findings and understanding of the interviews within these settings. We think this exercise might help us find some of the pain points that our service could eventually address. We came up with three broad categories that we would each come up with a scenario for:
Behavioral and psychological issues (non-medical)
Self-management knowledge about triggers like food allergies, physical activities etc.
Activities that kids with asthma participate in and don’t participate in.
We agreed to each come up with at least one scenario for each before our next class.
03/27 : Finding Intervention Opportunities
Our next meeting was in class. We shared our scenarios, gave each other updates on interviews we were scheduling, and ongoing research. Each one of us came up with one scenario under the broad categories of possible interventions. This exercise was helpful to understand the different aspects of the categories we have been talking about and to come on common grounds of understanding. We explored the three areas through different scenarios:
DEALING WITH BEHAVIORAL/ PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES
- Social Anxiety- It is a found that children with asthma find it hard to deal with social stigma and anxiety of being judged. This many a times leads to behavioral issues in children at a very early age.
2. Depression- For various reasons, children often get confined to their homes which also gives in to depression. We imagine our service to support the children in this situation and find a way to connect the children with the other kids .
3. Losing Confidence- Jake is an 8 year old who has asthma. He loves playing soccer outside during recess and he is quite skilled. One time while playing he had trouble breathing and had to pull out his inhaler. He now worries that the other kids will think he is not very athletic thus avoids playing soccer.
4. Friction in relationship with Parents
AWARENESS OF ASTHMA TRIGGERS AND SELF MANAGEMENT
- Self Management- Asthmatic kids lose out on a lot of opportunities since they have to be in constant supervision of either parents, teachers, drivers etc. Research shows that after the age of 7, children start being more aware of the self-management techniques.
2. Finding Food Allergies: Through our interview with parents with asthmatic kids, we were really struck by the issue of food allergies. The treatment to find out the food allergies requires a complex procedure of pricking needles on the arm or in the neck and is complicated. The minimum age for this treatment is set at 14 years, and thus, the small kids are not allowed to get this done. Thus, it is a constant struggle for the parents to be mindful of the food items consumed by child every single day in order to be able to get hold of any signs of allergies occurring from specific food items. This also sometimes works against the parents, in the way that, children might start getting misconceptions against parents stopping them from eating their favorite fruit etc. This seems to be an interesting area of opportunity to intervene.
3. Dependency on Inhaler: Craig is a 5 year old who doesn’t understand how asthma affects his body. His mom gets mad at him because he runs outside and forgets his inhaler. He associates it with his mother’s scolding so he doesn’t like to use it even though he needs it.
ACTIVITES THAT ASTHMATIC KIDS AVOID
This category helped us explore different areas around which a service may be designed.
We also began thinking about the foundations of a journey map. The map displays the flow from the child’s first experience of asthma symptoms, to diagnosis, to experiences he or she deals with in the course of having asthma. The end of the journey map shows when the child grows out of his/her symptoms. We included this as the end of our map because we found that many people we talked to who had asthma as a child eventually grew out of it. Moving forward, we intend to do more field research as well as secondary research and dive deeper into these opportunity areas to find one idea to move forward with.
