In a recent survey of UX practitioners, we asked 97 practitioners about their experience with service blueprinting. This article summarizes their responses to the question What are the biggest frustrations with creating and using service blueprints? and provides strategies for addressing these difficulties.

Problem: Finding Allies and Setting Expectations

Respondents expressed frustration with obtaining organizational commitment, support, and resources for their service-blueprinting initiatives — in particular, about:

  • Navigating organizational politics
  • Justifying the need for blueprinting
  • Motivating others to contribute and care
  • Determining method and process ownership
  • Aligning on best practices and goals

Here are some steps that can help mitigate these issues:

1. Establish a crossfunctional core team of 2–4 allies. As with any large initiative, it is vital to establish a core team of allies that will support the initiative and advocate for the process, from research to artifact creation. The first step of service blueprinting is finding this support team, which, if it stays engaged and informed, will ensure project and outcome buy-in.

Start small (2–4 people, in addition to yourself), especially if it is your first blueprint. A small team allows you to focus on the method without being overwhelmed by the demands of communication with a large team. While including more people would result in even greater organizational buy-in, facilitating a small group of the most influential individuals from each business unit is easier to manage and can be just as effective for first-time service-blueprinting efforts.

2. Strategically involve individuals who have strong political pull. In order to decide who in your organization should be on the team, identify business units that will have a direct role in the experience you want to map. From there, prioritize individuals who are well known throughout your organization and have some decision-making pull, as these team members can bring positive sentiment to your service-blueprinting initiative by association.

3. Prioritize synchronous collaboration. At the beginning of the project, plan working sessions to bring everyone together and align on completing a single task like determining the scope or the user segment for your blueprint. Coworking sessions, particularly with small teams, bolster collaboration and motivation and make obvious who contributes far too much or too little. Additionally, working meetings can highlight results and build a sense of ownership, especially when the meeting outcome is a tangible artifact. To keep team members engaged outside of working meetings, end each session with action items and aim to spread responsibility.

4. Align on the purpose and goals of the blueprinting initiative before starting work. Before diving deep into the mapping process, make sure everybody knows what a service blueprint is and what benefits your organization will reap from mapping the experience. Some typical benefits include:

  • Helping businesses uncover service weaknesses
  • Identifying opportunities for optimization
  • Bridging crossdepartmental efforts

If you’re working with a stubborn group, change the way you pitch service blueprints. Instead of focusing on defining service gaps and fail points, center your pitch around documenting known processes. You can then invalidate these known processes and prove the benefit of blueprinting.

Problem: Determining the Scope of the Blueprint

The scope of a blueprint is the focus area or the parameters that the service blueprint covers. Determining focus was a commonly referenced pain point from our survey respondents. We heard that “Scoping the right segment can be frustrating. We sometimes scope the journey too short” and “We’ve made the mistake of going into too much detail for the blueprint and therefore the client has a hard time digesting the information”.

Here are some ways in which you can address this issue:

1. Focus on a scope that you can control. For your first blueprinting initiative, aim for an easy win by blueprinting a service you have authority over: you, or your immediate peers, should be the primary frontstage, backstage, or support actors. This approach helps for few reasons: (1) presumably, you’ll need to do less research since you already know a lot about the service and may even carry out the actions of interest, (2) you’ll build confidence in the blueprinting process by working on something tangible and close to your everyday role, and (3) you can make immediate changes to the service since you work directly in the scenario you’ve mapped.

2. Target 8–12 customer actions as part of the customer-journey section of the blueprint. To set the stage right, you want to have the right granularity from the start. Aim to have between 8 and12 customer actions across the top of your blueprint. If you have over 15 customer actions, you are likely too specific. If you have fewer than 5, you are probably too general and the blueprint won’t be as informative as it could be. It’s worth noting that this tip does not change the scope of the enclosed journey, but it does change the granularity of the depicted actions. For example, a large-granularity customer action may be ‘pick up prescription’ whereas a low-granularity one may be ‘give pharmacist personal details to look up prescription.’

3. Create consistent criteria for comparing scopes for different potential blueprints. Especially organizations planning for long-term service-blueprinting initiatives (i.e., planning to map the entire end-to-end experience across multiple scenarios) will benefit from creating a criterion used to score and prioritize different scopes. As potential blueprinting initiatives are suggested (either by stakeholders or team members), weigh them against the previously agreed-upon criteria set. Example criteria include:

  • You have access to frontstage and backstage actors for the potential scope.
  • The scope covers an issue that is discovered in more than 40% of the user interviews.
  • The scope covers a content type that is a critical part of the purchase pathway.
  • You have quantitative data and insights about the potential scope.
  • There is stakeholder buy-in and support about the potential scope.

If suggested initiatives don’t meet the majority of the criteria, they may not be worth your resources,  and energy. Further, if you are acting in a role that serves other internal groups, try openly sharing your team’s criteria for accepting blueprinting requests. This can incentivize other teams to gather research, seek stakeholder support, and invest their own effort before approaching your team with a potential service-blueprinting initiative.

Problem: Gathering Research

Gathering research data, accessing study participants, and compiling insights were a common frustration amongst practitioners. Respondents said “Gathering enough research takes time and not everyone wants to take that time. “Without research the work is at best a guess” and “Getting the necessary data from the client and then organizing interviews and workshops” is hard and takes time.

Solutions include:

1. Split responsibilities with your allies. Gathering internal research is much easier when you have a core team of allies at your side.

2. Start with a scope you already have research for to familiarize and build comfort amongst your team and stakeholders with the blueprinting process. Then expand your efforts — use the first blueprint as a case study to advocate for the research needed for the next blueprinting initiative. Once you’ve established service blueprints as valuable in your organization, people will be more willing to provide help through data.

3. Start with a hypothesis blueprint. Another option is to create a hypothesis blueprint and document what you know as of now. Then, use that blueprint to identify knowledge gaps, which in turn, can be used to craft a relevant research plan. You can also collaborate with others to refine your hypothesis blueprint — hang it in a hallway or email it to knowledge experts and ask for revisions and feedback based on their expertise.

Problem: Facilitating Blueprinting Workshops

A handful of survey respondents commented on their frustration of facilitating workshops. We heard a range of pitfalls related to workshop facilitation:

  • Maintaining focus for a long time
  • Prompting participants to contribute
  • Creating a shared visualization on a wall
  • Playing the role of facilitator while also contributing

1. Divide and assign facilitator responsibilities. If you are new to facilitation, a service-blueprinting workshop can be intimidating. If you are first time facilitator, work with a small group (2–4 people ). Additionally, decide whether you will facilitate or participate; doing both is ill advised.

2. Pull in someone from the “outside.” If you’re in need of a facilitator, find someone around your organization that you could swap with — she can facilitate one of your workshops and you can facilitate one of hers. Having facilitators that aren’t immersed in your field of research has its benefits, as they are often free of hidden intents and can focus on their role.

Problem: Communicating and Maintaining Blueprints

Multiple respondents shared grievances around visualizing and communicating their service-blueprint artifacts. Here’s a representative quote: “Sharing the blueprint deliverable was probably the most difficult because they get pretty complicated. Most people consuming the blueprint did not want to read all the individual touchpoints or support system details. They became overwhelmed instead of focusing on the actual content in the blueprint.”

Along the same lines, we heard the common pitfall of not keeping the blueprint updated over time. One respondent mentioned having the ”classic problem of visibility…making sure that it is a living document used by stakeholders over time.”

Solutions include:

1. Skip high-fidelity altogether. Before jumping to visualization tools, ask yourself, does the blueprint need to be high-fidelity? If your blueprinting goal is to align an immediate team, then you may not need a high-fidelity blueprint in the first place. However, if your goal is to use this blueprint across stakeholders and departments, a visual system that can be copied and reused can save you time in the long run. (This approach will also result in more consistent visualizations across blueprinting initiatives.)

2. Test your artifact like you test your interface. If you truly need a polished artifact, share early versions of your blueprint with team members unfamiliar with it and ask them to explain it back to you. If they can’t comprehend certain elements or imagery, change them (and test again).

3. Share your blueprint in an engaging way. When it comes time to share the blueprint, consider a readout with your team of allies (remember to involve stakeholders early and often in the process, so the artifact isn’t a surprise). Considering the wider audience, don’t expect every viewer of the blueprint to take in every chunk of information. Make it easy on your readers and highlight key takeaways in a clear, but engaging, way.

4. Update the blueprint after each significant service change. Service blueprints need to be updated to stay relevant and reliable. Be sure to include version numbers and the date of last update on the artifact itself. (We usually recommend to include the date in the upper right hand corner, alongside your team name.)  Also, schedule a meeting to review and update the blueprint six months out from its creation. Depending on how fast your organization operates, you can also set up a consistent cadence to update the blueprint.

Conclusion

Lack of organizational understanding and support is at the core of many of these frustrations. Before your next blueprinting initiative, build a crossdisciplinary team that will be there for support. This highly underutilized step will make it easier for you to gather internal research, foster trust and stronger communication on tough decisions, and  provide you with a sounding board as you visualize the blueprint. Keeping your team motivated and engaged throughout the initiative can build confidence in the blueprinting process, resulting in new blueprinting evangelists and supporters of service design as a whole.

Service blueprints can be a powerful tool, but before you begin your next initiative, refer to this list of common problems and possible solutions.