Thoughts: Journey Management is a Thing
Notes on what works in journey management.
Journey management is gaining momentum as a valued tool for organisations. We are now seeing it practiced by large businesses, spawning software start-ups and filling conference venues.
Journey management promises to help organisations align to their users. These users may be customers, citizens, students, patients or clients or even employees. They are the people who use and – in theory – benefit from the services that the organisation provides. Alignment with the needs and experiences of service users helps to make the enterprise more efficient and effective.
This idea of alignment to service users is the key principle of journey management. Focussing on the service user as the orientation point for management is surprisingly radical even though most organisations pay lip service to customer centricity. Evidence shows that using journey tools such as journey maps, to understand users’ needs and experiences of a service leads to improved performance.
Creating cross functional teams that understand and respond to these needs and experiences is the key practice of journey management. Designing journeys that work better for service users delivers the promised gains in efficiency and effectiveness.
Livework has been using journeys as a design tool since we started in 2001. Roughly ten years ago we began to see the potential to not just design journeys but to manage them and developed this practice with clients including British Gas and Nordic telco Telia. Journey management became a capability and competitive advantage.
Today we have a wealth of experience under our belt from working with organisations of different sizes and across different sectors, using journey management for a variety of purposes. We have also recently hosted a number of cross-sector discussion groups where we have heard, and learnt, from some inspiring practitioners. Interesting similarities emerged.
As a service design team we see journey management as the operating model for good design. It provides a way to build customer centricity into an organisation. To connect to strategy and leadership on one end and delivery and metrics on the other.
The risk is that the promise is not delivered on
We are excited by journey management and have seen it work. But we are very aware of the risks too. We know through hard experience that not every journey management initiative survives.
One risk for journey management is that it is seen as a fad that has a moment in the sun before being judged to have not delivered on its promise. The organisation, not seeing value, moves on to the next thing. We can easily get excited about a new method of tool but need to keep focus on real value creation.
Another risk is political. We must also remember that journey management is one ‘management’ alongside so many – product, lean, total quality etc – the risk is that fightingwith other disciplines and their advocates distracts our purpose. Being clear on the value and limits of a method are critical.
A third risk is one of quality. Like many things, journey management can be done well or badly. Not knowing the difference risks degrading the value of good practice.
This is the purpose of this newsletter. To strive for good journey management that delivers value to businesses.
We want to see journey management thrive and deliver impact. So we are going to be a critical friend and challenge ourselves to pursue the promise. This means asking some difficult questions.
This newsletter will consist of posts, interviews and stories that help us dig into the practical questions behind successful journey management that will help us all do a better job and succeed early. Questions such as:
How do we position and apply journey management in a way that is valued and practical in organisations?
How do we set the appropriate level of ambition for journey management to avoid over-reach but achieve significant results?
How do we position journey management in the organisation, is it a tool for delivering on strategic priorities, a way to keep a handle on digital and IT or a continuous improvement methodology?
How do we use journey management in contexts that are not the classic consumer experience examples (retail, banking, telecoms) such as B2B where the service user could be many different people? Healthcare where the experience is one of critical decisions and outcomes? Or government services where the experience may not be chosen by the user such as services in the justice system?
These are the questions that we are going to explore in this newsletter.
To unpack them we will be sharing some examples of how we have used journeys in our work with clients at Livework.
We want to include the stories of others using or considering journey management and would love to hear from you if you have a tale to tell or an approach that you are proud of and think others could benefit from.
