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Personal Exercise: Preparation for your participation in a forthcoming

Services Blueprinting workshop

Howard SmithCSC Office of Innovation

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Context and background

• You are going to attend a Services Blueprinting workshop in the near future

• This will be a first for you, and potentially for your unit

• We will all be learning, including the facilitator

• To prepare for this important workshop it is vital that you attempt the exercise described in this slide deck

• Bear in mind: –Service Blueprinting is not done to you by a fancy consultant

–Service Blueprints are something that you and your colleagues create and use on a regular basis

• Others who have done this exercise confirm it saved considerable time at the workshop itself

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Why service blueprints?

• Supports services innovation

• A shared tool between a client and a service provider and delivery partners

• From napkin models to sophisticated analysis

• Widely applicable - design of a customer site visit, consulting engagement, repeated services, multi-year complex transformational engagement

• Used in both new service development and service improvement

• Clarifies roles for everyone in delivering the total customer experience

• Drives a clearer organizational vision

• Fosters a culture of caring for the customer throughout the organization

• Can reveal interdependencies between blueprints that impact the customer experience positively or negativity

• Effect ‘workshop’ tool for customer-led improvement initiatives

• Helps designers make explicit decisions about the required ‘moments of truth’ in client or internal interactions

• Service gap analysis can clarity competitive positioning

• Bottom up or top down approach – decompose or add detail

• Can be input to systems design to support high quality customer experiences

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Service blueprint concept

Backstage - invisible

Front of stage - visible

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What you will need for the exercise

• Not much

• One or more large sheet of paper e.g. from a flip chart pad

• Some post-it notes or equivalent

• A normal pen

• A thick black marker pen

• You will bring your completed blueprint to the workshop, where colleagues will share theirs with you

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What you will do now, before the workshop

• Select any every day customer experience in your life where you or your family are the customer and there is a service or service provider

• Create a clear service blueprint of your experience - on the sheet of paper and using post-it notes - encompassing the both the customer point of view and actions and those of the service provider

• Tidy up the blueprint in any way you like to bring to the workshop so that you can show it to others

Aim for:- Clarity- Completeness- A blueprint of the end to end experience- On one A3 sheet if possible but more if necessary

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Steps

• 1. Choose your subject

• 2. Mark out the 5 swim lanes required for a standard service blueprint using the thick black marker

• 3. Use post-it notes to model the customer actions, the service provider “onstage” actions, the service provider “backstage” actions, the support systems/actions and the crucial “evidence”

• 4. Place the post-it notes in the corresponding swim lanes and left to right (time flows to the right)

• 5. Pair up actions to create the customer “moments of truth”

• 6. Ensure there is adequate “evidence” for each moment of truth

• 7. Add in arrows between the post-it notes to indicate who is responsible for the proactive step to the next action, e.g. customer, provider, etc.

• 8. Tidy up and complete your blueprint – keep it safe

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How to draw a services blueprint – basic form

• Horizontal swim lanes - chronologically left to right

– Customer actions – the steps that customer takes (in this exercise you) as part of the service interaction

– Onstage actions – the steps that the service provider takes as part of the service interaction and which are visible to the customer (you)

– Backstage actions – the steps that the service provider takes in support of the onstage actions but which are invisible to the customer (you)

– Support actions – carried out by other functions – service provider employees & systems - necessary for the service to be delivered to the customer (you)

– Evidence (upper swim lane) – for each customer action corresponding to an onstage action where does it takes place and what is produced/consumed/changed – i.e. The evidence that an interaction occurred

• Every time a line of visibility is crossed a moment of truth has occurred

– Line of interaction between customer actions (you) and onstage employee actions

– Line of visibility for the customer between onstage and backstage employee actions

– Line of internal interaction between support processes and backstage actions in support of visible actions

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The basic service blueprint

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Get inspired!

• Visit Google and find Google Image search

• Search for “services blueprint”

• Take a look at a few examples

• You will note there is no standard way to approach this

• For this exercise, do what you think is right

• fyi–CSC is developing a standard for Services

Blueprinting which is being included in Catalyst

–You will learn more about this at the forthcoming workshop

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A simple style blank service blueprint to help you to get started

One or more A3 sheets

Post-It notes

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FAQ

• Q: How much time should I spend on this exercise

• A: Not more than two evenings

• Q: What will happen to my blueprint at the workshop

• A: It will be discussed, in sub-groups, during a short period of group learning in order to ‘kick start’ the workshop

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Further reading

• Service blueprinting can be simple or sophisticated depending on need

• For your personal exercise here you will need only basic knowledge

• If you are stuck, or wish to read more, visit our C3 to view/read the presentations in the “Featured Content” area (top center of page) of the Services Blueprinting group

https://c3.csc.com/groups/services-blueprinting

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hsmith23@csc.com