Service blueprints help organizations form a shared language and understanding of the experiences they provide. Additionally, these artifacts and the process to create them tend to force holistic thinking and inform project planning. For these reasons, service blueprints often have the greatest impact when they are created collaboratively. This article will focus on cocreating service blueprints in a workshop.
This article will touch on all aspects of the 5-step framework for service blueprinting, with focus on mapping and refining a service blueprint in a workshop. (Workshops can be virtual or in-person. Unless otherwise stated, the advice in this article applies to either format.)
Before the Workshop
Establish a Core Team and Workshop Goals
Bring together an interdisciplinary team of 4–6 stakeholders and executives. That is, people that know about the experience you want to map and leadership that has the power to ignite action.
What is your goal in blueprinting? Define a scenario and customer perspective to focus on during the workshop. For example, in a university setting, you might focus on a student registering for classes.
If you are already comfortable with facilitating workshops, you may take into account multiple scenarios and assign a different one to each group in your workshop. For instance, in our university example, one group might focus on students registering for classes while another on students applying for financial aid. Of course, this approach will require additional research efforts, but it can be an effective use of time. However, the rest of this article will assume you are facilitating a workshop focused on a single user group and scenario.
Collect and Synthesize Research
Gather internal research and external customer data that relates to the scenario you are blueprinting. To get started, you’ll need a baseline understanding of the customer actions that occur in the scenario you’ve selected. If you have created a journey map with the same scenario, you can use the customer actions from that artifact (as long as that experience has not significantly changed since the artifact was created). Once you have established the customer actions, the rest of your research will primarily be internal.
When collecting internal data, look for information your organization already has (for example, employee surveys or customer-support tickets). Then, conduct stakeholder interviews to gain a holistic understanding of the frontstage and backstage actions at play. You may also consider conducting a field study or diary study with these employees to get an in-depth view of their actions and the role they play in the overall experience.
Involve your core team throughout your research to keep them engaged and informed throughout the process.
Create an Agenda with Timing
Construct a realistic workshop agenda to assist with planning and help set participant’s expectations. Below is a template agenda you can use as a starting point. Scale this template up or down as needed. For example, instead of giving 30 minutes for research, you could shorten it to 15 (but you’ll need to synthesize the data down to core findings rather than full transcripts or diary-study excerpts).
Example Agenda (3 hours)
- Introductions and ice breakers (20 mins)
- Research overview and share (30 mins)
- Blueprinting (60 mins)
- Break (15 mins)
- Playback blueprints (15 mins)
- Prioritize and discuss fail points (30 mins)
- Identify next steps (10 mins)
Select Workshop Tools and Materials
Whether you are facilitating a workshop in person or virtually, you’ll need to decide how people will build the artifact.
For in-person workshops, you’ll want sticky notes, large poster boards or pieces of paper, markers, tape, and sticky dots for dot voting.
For virtual workshops, select a tool your attendees are most familiar with. This method saves time with tool onboarding and helps people focus on the content in the map. Oftentimes, teams are familiar with spreadsheets (see our service-blueprinting template).
Set Roles and Responsibilities
There are several responsibilities, such as notetaker and timekeeper, that can be delegated to workshop attendees. Sharing these responsibilities allows the facilitator to focus on core responsibilities while increasing buy-in and interaction among participants.
Assign a few participants to handle responsibilities like managing the parking lot, timekeeping, handing out materials, and so on. Of course, as facilitator, you may have to take on one or more of these responsibilities, but don’t shy away from delegating them, too!
Aim to have 1 facilitator per 12 attendees. Even skilled facilitators benefit from this rule, as it allows for high-quality hands-on facilitation. For virtual workshops, assign a backup facilitator or create a backup plan of action in case of technical issues.
During the Workshop
Introductions and Icebreakers
The start of your workshop should include three components: an overview of the workshop goals, a list of expectations, and a warmup activity.
Begin by stating the goals of the workshop — that is, present the scenario that participants will blueprint during the workshop.
Here are a few expectations to set at the beginning of your workshop:
- The workshop will be interactive.
- Every group member will contribute to the blueprint.
- We won’t map every single interaction in the scenario — just the most important ones (we’re telling a story, not making a comprehensive list).
- There may be knowledge gaps and open questions at the end of the workshop.
- We won’t leave the workshop with a polished or complete blueprint.
Consider including a warmup activity where participants can get energized for the workshop and get to know each other (if they don’t already). For example, two truths and a lie is a common warmup activity which is appropriate for new or familiar group members. In the game, players share three statements about themselves, two truths and one lie, and other players guess which statement is the lie.
If your workshop is virtual, add in some time to review your toolset for the day. Come up with a warmup activity to complete in the tool. This technique gives people a chance to also get familiar with the tool.
Research Overview
Allow time during the workshop for participants to review the underlying research, which you should have gathered and synthesized before the workshop. Aim to have no more than 10–15 minutes of reading to avoid fatigue. Even if you shared the research ahead of time, don’t expect people to have read it. Allow time during the workshop for everyone to review the research and take notes independently, then share interpretations in small groups.
For in-person workshops, print the research and give people materials like highlighters, markers, and sticky notes to take notes. For virtual workshops, create a workshop repository where attendees can find everything they need for the workshop. For instance, this might be a folder with a workshop-overview document (links to tools, team members, etc.), the research, and group blueprint documents (with a service-blueprinting template and space for notes).
Blueprint Key Elements
After everyone has reviewed the research, it’s time to start working on the service blueprint. Focus on documenting the key elements: customer actions, frontstage, backstage, and support processes.
We recommend facilitating this part of the workshop using the diverge-and-converge technique. That is, give workshop participants around 10 minutes to quietly and independently generate sticky notes (or the digital equivalent) with the key elements. From there, the groups will get together, post all of their notes on the blueprint, and talk through their findings. The diverge-and-converge technique allows participants time to thoughtfully identify insights and patterns in the research and then align and build a shared understanding of the experience. As groups talk through the blueprint, more notes will be added and some will be taken down or rephrased.
Overall, this blueprinting activity should be presented so that participants focus on the content and not the visualization. For example, for an in-person template, give people approximately 5 minutes to set up the structure of the blueprint. In a virtual workshop, give them a blueprint template. Remember, the priority is the content and the attendees shouldn’t expect to leave the workshop with a polished graphic.
Track Questions and Assign Action Items
To document questions that will inevitably come up, use a parking lot for tracking assignments. For example, you might uncover a gap in your blueprint where you don’t have a lot of knowledge of what’s going on. In this case, you’ll want to document that area, some questions you have around it, and assign someone to take ownership. Even better, schedule a followup meeting with the owner so that you all stay accountable and progress forward.
Playback
A playback is a short, often informal, talk about what just happened. In this case, you’ll want to take a moment for groups to play back their service-blueprint discussions for the whole audience. How did it go? What did they learn? Did anything surprise them? What open questions do they have?
Prioritize and Discuss Fail Points
With your experience blueprinted, you’ll be able to visualize a service and look at your service delivery holistically. Take a moment to reflect and consider the service’s fail points — any service gaps, weaknesses, or pain points. Determine which of these fail points are the most important using a prioritization technique such as dot voting, which works in person or virtually. There are many ways to implement this technique, but, for instance, you could give participants 2 votes on what the most significant fail points are. Everyone will then take turns placing their votes one at time on the 2 most significant fail points. Once voting has completed, review which points received the most votes.
It’s natural that this activity will lead to problem-solving discussions. So, have some space or method for people to document ideas and opportunities. For example, you could have attendees document their ideas with a new-color sticky note and add these stickies directly to the selected fail points. Or, you could document them in a parking-lot area. (You could include approximately 30 minutes of ideation time to address these fail points during your workshop or conduct ideation separately synchronously or asynchronously.)
After the Workshop
Follow Up on Action Items
After the workshop, follow up on action items, work on answering your questions, and progress in your blueprinting efforts.
Layer in Quantitative Data
During your internal research, you may have discovered quantitative data that relates to your service-blueprinting scope. For instance, let’s say you documented employee pain points around online chat and during your research you found data from an employee survey where users of the online chat tool rated their satisfaction using the tool. Let’s say that the overall satisfaction with the tool was 3.6 (1=very unsatisfied, 7=very satisfied). You would definitely want to include this data in your blueprint as it supports your qualitative findings that chat is a valid pain point.
Refine and Share the Blueprint
Whether your blueprint was created in person or virtually, take time to clean it up into a sharable format. As you refine your blueprint, add flow lines to show relationships and dependencies, be clear about different emotions felt throughout the journey (frustrated versus content), and write clearly and consistently. Service blueprints are information-rich documents, so make them easy to scan. As you refine the document, test it like you test your interface. Present it to someone who has never seen it and ask that person to play it back to you — if she doesn’t understand certain icons or verbiage, try again. Service blueprints lie at the intersection of UX and business, so do your best to speak the business’s language and make sure these artifacts are easily communicated.
Conclusion
Service blueprints take a holistic look at the experiences we provide, not just from the customers’ perspective but also from that of the people delivering those experiences. These artifacts create the biggest impact when they are cocreated with a crossfunctional team. Effective cocreation of service blueprints in a workshop requires extensive planning, active facilitation, and meaningful followup.
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