Peace

weeknotes

Aug 16

Since my last weeknote, I have been gracefully challenged at work, reinforced new skills, celebrated an academic milestone, had a generous share of quality time with old and new people, and found home in a person and my dog Nara. Peaceful.

This week

Template development: building the blueprint and splitting this out by 4 types of ‘service’
Service design taxonomy: thinking about how we see a service, journey, stages, needs and activities
Defining the purpose of the service blueprint, and ensuring effective internal communication with leadership, peer reviews and across different teams within
Salesforce training (preparing for the Associate exam)
Attended UR interviews with existing app users and experience
Liaising with business, functional and technical architecture to translate their work to blueprint language
Started a Career Management Document (CMD) aka hype doc, as a place to regularly update my progress at work, notable moments, inform feedback praise etc…

Co-developing a template

We’re week 3 of 16 into the project and the service blueprint is around 85% template-ready. Hopefully we can get this signed off next week, and with the remaining 12 weeks or so, start filling this out with other key workstreams like product, business, functional and tech. Last week I got some valuable, non-biased feedback from our experience design lead on the importance of stakeholder selection, and how to get the right people to inform a service blueprint.

This looks something like wearing a ‘research’ hat: aka going to different disciplines, evangelising service design, and advocating for the blueprint without it resulting as a duplicate of other process maps and outputs.

Having these conversations have really been reinforcing my own understanding of the blueprint and the why in what we do. We spent a week establishing a project-specific taxonomy for what we mean by service, journey, phases, and stages. Whilst the external (customer) journey is less controversial, it’s now up to us to interpret other outputs like process maps and solution blueprints, and translate this into the ‘common service language’ to enable a holistic organisational understanding.

This means anyone should be able to read this blueprint and understand the impact of their decisions, identify dependencies and uncover some pain points along the way. It’s very easy to fall into silos in a system (as we’ve seen in this service already), and sometimes a visual source of truth can help remedy that.

Research roads ahead

On a super positive note, I had my ethics application approved in record time (6 days)!

This means I have an official green light to start recruitment. In true research fashion, I’m filling in the shoes of a participant by attending a few death cafe sessions myself (some virtual, and one in person). I hate to dilute my experience with a research motive, but I’m hoping that that this experience can funnel some empathy as a facilitator of my own ‘research cafe’ in the next few months. Priority for the week is to document, think further about recruitment and outline a detailed research guide.