In the Lab: This Journey Mapping Workshop Unlocks Insights, Alignment, and Action to Improve Your Wild Process

IMAGE: It takes a cross functional team to get any big job done in the cloud. Who is doing what, when?

My clients tell me that building end-to-end processes for their orgs, teams, and customers is trickier than ever, thanks to unprecedented scale and complexity in the cloud. We assemble our tools, align calendars, keep compliant, set up systems, rearrange teams, and budget resources. But staffing churn, a revolving set oftools, moving-target data, organizational change, and miscommunication keep us feeling underwater.

Sometimes, in order to get the job done, we have to become wranglers, hackers, spies, and even beggars. How do we stop feeling so reactive, and rise above our challenge to get a bird’s eye view, to strategize, and to execute?

To this complexity, add the “hive” nature of so many of our jobs to be done. It takes an entire team of taskers, each wearing multiple hats (or passing them around), to push through our most important processes. Amidst these shifting sands, our customers — or our own internal teams — end up relying on “best guesses” and complicated workarounds. Our customers fail to adopt and find full value in our products. Our processes feel incomplete, our tools are far from optimized, and our costs and timelines go out of control.

• What if there were a way to cut through the complexity of our end-to-end processes, to clarify and capture the most important business process problems, and to spot and align on solutions?

A decade ago, I asked myself this as I partnered with teams to improve their (and/or their customers’) end-to-end work processes, and to tune up the tooling and people ecosystems involved in getting jobs done. I needed to capture this in a single deliverable: a graphic everyone can point to to align on action and to benchmark progress. Many years in the lab (and a deep dive into the fields of business anthropology, organizational communication, and HCI white papers) later, a series of MainStage talks and conference workshops, and dozens of onsite observations helped me to develop a new approach to journey mapping.

This is an outline of how we leverage data on end-to-end business process at Maaxa Labs, and how it can help you, your team, and/or your customers hone in on solutions, fast. It has been a powerful tool for supply-chain planners, city recycling managers, and reliability incident commanders alike.

Ali Maaxa collects insights on the yearly financial planning journey from 70 stakeholders at a 2022 industry conference

JOURNEY MAPPING HELPS *ANYONE* WHO NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX PROCESS

Those who approach me for help with understanding process tend to fall into three groups:

• Product teams invested in making or attuning their tools to their customers’ lived experience so that they can anticipate and strategize accordingly;
• Customer-facing teams (often Customer Success, Solutions, and Marketing) who hope to document their customers’ drags on time to value, total cost of operation, user pain points, and potential issues with renewal;
• Business units, cross-functional teams, project cohorts, and leaders hoping to map the current state of internal organizational processes (financial cycles, supply-chain planning, onboarding, hiring, AOP, hiring & promotion, etc.) and improve their tooling, people and procedures.

CRAFTING AN END-TO-END JOURNEY MAP: THE ELEMENTS

Across these contexts, journey mapping offers clients the opportunity to:

• Document *the current state* of their end-to-end business process: who’s doing what, when…as their process unfolds.
• Record the tooling ecosystem in play as teams move through each phase of their journey, especially those used to work around inadequacies in current tooling ( i.e.: “half of our team is not trained on this custom tool and opt to use Excel or work offline instead.”)
• Call out types of friction encountered along the way. These tend to involve four degrees of friction, which all overlap but deserve their own call-outs:
• Time Wasters — Things that take longer than they should; mining this usually involves hearing from cross-functional players who experience these themselves. I find that these workshops are often the first opportunity to surface some of the friction individuals experience as part of their jobs, which drives frustration, churn, and cut corners)
• Extra Costs — these are extra tools, calls to consultants, inefficient use of funds, employee overtime, operational inefficiencies, customer impact, and missed cost-saving opportunities, among others
• Interpersonal or cross-functional friction (usually communication or process issues) — the “fuzz” around communication, role definition, employee frustration and burnout, operational misalignment, turnover and stress. Discussing these in a room full of those participants with a skillful facilitator is often a game changer for my customers
• Blockers — anything that fully blocks an essential part of a job from being done accurately and completely. These are the elements that keep our orgs relying on guesswork, data “fudging,” partial calculations, and other kinds of organizational hacking

Finally, these workshops need to prioritize the impact of these types of friction and agree on recommendations for short- and long- term improvements.

Over years of testing and honing, Maaxa Labs has nailed down the essential of capturing these journeys and deeply impacting outcomes. Hire Maaxa Labs to get the insights you need to deliver the whole package to your team and/or customers.

JOURNEY MAPPING CAPTURES THE ELUSIVE BIRD’S EYE VIEW

There is a little bit of magic to having an impartial facilitator turn over team or customer pain points, to push through the phases of a business journey to get a look at the bigger picture, and to drive alignment on areas for improvement. It also takes some expertise to boil down the complexity of a team-based process into a single journey map and drive it to completion in a single session. This is where Maaxa Labs comes in.

This is what it looks like to have an applied anthropologist roll into your all-hands, strategy offsite, customer council, and/or implementation process. A few quotes from a 2022 workshop:

• “I feel heard! I had a hard time explaining how difficulties with ever-changing data affected my ability to own our process, but this helped me show, not tell, my teammates how impactful change could be.”
• “It can be hard for mid-level IC’s to raise process issues at my org, but this workshop democratized our voices across levels and functions.”
• “For a decade, we’ve been trying to put our finger on why half of our customer teams refuses to adopt [this tool], but the journey map makes the reasons for that clear and actionable.”

With a little magic, a diverse group of particpants collaborates on prioritizing pain points and improvements

PROCEEDINGS and PREPARATION

A successful journey map requires a little pre-work with key stakeholders to outline the problems we are trying to solve, outline “known known” issues, “known unknowns,” and understand how we can best facilitate discovering the “unknown unknowns” that will maximize impact.

• I work with key stakeholders to understand the end-to-end framing of the process itself, define the “hats” and main tasks of those involved in making it work, and the various phases the process entails. This becomes a proto-journey map: a hypothesis we’ll revise, enrich, and test in our workshop

An end-to-end journey map for the financial planning process created by working with workshop stakeholders. This will become the end-to-end journey map (below) we’ll used to collaboratively walk through our end-to-end process in ourworkshop.

For the workshop, I boil down our journey map into a wall-sized map that asks participants what tasks each team member does, what kinds of friction they encounter, and opportunities for improvement on each phase of the journey

• After synthesizing this expertise, I line up and prepare participants with an early view of the journey map, some prompts participants can use for thinking through their unique perspectives on that journey, and a schedule for what to expect
• I produce artifacts for the workshop itself that will keep everyone on the same page, while allowing for unknown unknowns — ideas or insights that may arise that are new to the group at large, and the facilitator herself
• A reference board showing which “hats”, or roles, are involved in the process and what their motivations are
• A wall-sized journey map big enough to accommodate all the sticky notes we’ll generate, as well as individual handouts for quick reference
• A large “What’s on your radar” grid for collaboratively prioritizing which kinds of friction need to be approached first

PROCEEDINGS THE DAY OF THE WORKSHOP:

PART 1: Introduction

I offer a schedule proceedings and get everybody loosened up and ready to share. Participants will already have seen an agenda and had an opportunity to think through the journey map, so they’ll be ready to share their take on friction and opportunities for improvement.

We take a look at the list of “hats” involved in completing the process: who is missing? Who needs more refining? I always ask who in the room wears the hats we’re discussing, interacts with them, or supervises them. It’s a great way for participants to feel seen and get engaged.

I then walk through a bird’s eye view of the journey map; participants will already have had a chance to review this as they prep for the workshop.

PART 2: JOURNEY MAPPING

• Together, we work through he journey map, end to end, allocating about ten minutes per segment. Who is involved in this segment? What are they doing? What kinds of friction are they encountering? I use different shapes of sticky notes to delineate whether each point of friction is a time waster, an extra cost, interpersonal friction, or a process blocker — this will be important for the next phase of the workshop.
• A brief break for informal conversation and digestion

PART 3: PRIORITIZING SOLUTIONS

The third phase of the workshop takes all the insights we’ve gathered on friction and allows us to collectively identify the heaviest issues and prioritize action. For this, I turn to a method from the LUMA institute meant to democratize problem definition and innovation called “What’s on your Radar?” This method allows all participants to dot vote on — depending on the needs of the workshop organizers — most impactful, most actionable, or a combination of the two — problems to be solved. We identify the top- second- and third- tier blockers, time wasters, extra costs, and sources of interpersonal friction with a single focus point for improvement in each area.

PART 4: CO-SOLUTIONING

• Now that top sources of friction — everything from understaffing to data delays to inadequate tooling — have been identified, I facilitate a conversation about potential action items. As we discuss these, I use our collective journey map to point out where in the process these changes will have impact. I am always excited to see how certain potential solutions can improve multiple journey phases or solve for multiple types of friction. It’s where alignment and impact really snap into place. We generate an index of horizon 1, 2 and 3 tooling, people, and process solutions and a list of next steps.

POST-WORKSHOP BELLS AND WHISTLES

• At Maaxa Labs, we produce both a report and a blog-length recap for internal or vendor-customer comms, tools for reporting and benchmarking improvements, and offer a quick method for gathering improvement metrics. I’m also happy to produce decks and video share-outs.
• I offer leaders a follow-up session to review and assess the changes that have been made, produce an updated end-to-end journey map, and strategize new horizons for continuous improvement

• Over the years, many clients have asked me back to help map other journeys, team, processes, and perspectives, and/or to coach internal folks to lead their own journey mapping workshops!
• Note: if clients want to benchmark their improvements over time, I recommend a second map documenting a “future/ideal state” or repeating the workshop after changes have bene implemented of continuous improvement.

Hire Maaxa Labs to get the insights you need to deliver the whole package to your team and/or your customers.