Mapping helps us to show what is happening in a service. What type of map and how much detail is needed depends on what you’re trying to understand and who the audience is.
Our alpha deliverables specified a ‘service artefact’, therefore we needed to decide what route to take to meet our needs.
Mapping that already existed
Prior to our alpha, there had been the Communications and Allocations discovery and an alpha. This meant that maps already existed which we could draw from. This included high level interactions when preparing statements and analysing data feeds.
As part of pre-alpha work to prepare for onboarding, we brought together screenshots of the education provider journey - from being told that a new statement was ready through to reading the statement and getting help with a problem.
There was also some work done by the Funding Service to map the steps that happen when calculating and releasing funding allocations through the Calculate Funding Service (CFS).
Deciding on our approach
The service designer and interaction designer on the team held a series of short calls to explore three questions:
- What do we need to understand?
- Who is the map for?
- What type of map do we need right now?
What do we need to understand?
We need to understand:
- What is the education provider experience of receiving and acting on an allocation statement?
- What is the experience of building an allocation statement template today for internal users?
- What are the opportunity areas within building and delivering statements?
- How might we explain the complex space in a simple way?
- Are there any service patterns here that could apply to the rest of the department and cross-government services?
- How do opportunities, experiments and research findings map to the service?
Who is the map for?
The map is for:
- the alpha team - to see how our findings and recommendations impact the service
- the Funding Service Senior Management Team (SMT) – to have confidence that the alpha is making progress and heading in the right direction
- service assessors – to understand the service context and reassure that we’ve understood the whole service
What type of map do we need right now?
In order of complexity, our options were:
- Storyboard (least complex) – this would provide too little detail as we need to understand product interactions.
- User flow – this would provide too little detail, and we would need to understand the internal steps for teams creating statements before they are published.
- Journey map – this would be flexible enough for our needs today, because there can be rows with different information, while also being simple enough for third-party people to understand.
- Service blueprint (most complex) – this can come later to understand what would need to change as part of our solution.
We decided to choose a journey mapping approach as it provides just enough detail to give people context to make decisions while experimenting. This format also meant that we could add extra rows to capture interesting pieces of information, for example how data flows through the service.
How we approached mapping
Our approach was to:
- Choose the rows which are called ‘swim lanes’ and validate with the alpha team.
- Fill the map with existing knowledge.
- Hold conversations to fill gaps in knowledge – for example, we had a big gap in how allocation statements are designed, researched and launched.
- Create a simplified version of the map for communication.
- Layer on opportunities, data flows and research insight.
We then chose to create a simplified version of the map that only showed the stages and steps involved in the journey. This helped us to show that we were impacting many steps for internal teams building the statements as well as the external user journey.
Next steps
We have created our as-is journey map. We will update it during beta to reflect the new to-be journey.
We will also add more detail to show business processes and how they will change. This means the map will become a service blueprint.
Our service blueprint will help us to get approval for our proposed changes from stakeholders.
Reflections
We could have benefitted from being able to flesh out our map earlier in the alpha. We had to pause work on mapping because annual leave reduced our team capacity.
We found that the artefact was particularly useful in bringing the whole team back to the journey and the opportunities. Having this reference point earlier could have prevented some circular conversations relating to scope.