Six Ways Stakeholders Use Service Blueprints — From a Real Project
Question: What are all the different ways stakeholders across the org actually make use of blueprints? Do you have some specific examples you can share?
Service blueprints are a bread and butter tool in the service designer toolbox. They take a look at all of the layers and operational aspects that go into producing a service or customer experience. They are a really great way to start to dig into the complexity of how a service is being produced, by capturing the steps, people and processes involved both front and back stage.
Like any tool, how they are used is hugely dependent on the needs of a project. I’m going to illustrate some of the possible ways they can be used through the story of a project I worked on a few years ago, where service blueprinting played a central role in achieving our outcomes.
I was working with a non-profit who needed help to streamline the way they were delivering a program. The goal was to reduce the time it took to serve their clients, and to find efficiencies that would make things smoother and easier for staff.
The project kicked off with intensive stakeholder research, talking to folks on the board, the program manager, and front line staff. I used service blueprinting to synthesize and visualize this data, and to build a comprehensive view of how the program was being delivered.
This blueprint was then used in two ways:
- The first was to go back to folks I had interviewed with the draft blueprint to validate and tweak it. This resulted in a shared view across all the different folks of the current state of program delivery, end to end.
- The second was to build the case for change. Now we could see how complex the process was, and where most of the energy and resources were being used up.
An unintended/unplanned use case for the current state blueprint emerged organically. At the time, the program was bringing some new staff on board. The manager I was working with took the blueprint and used it as a training tool to support new team members’ understanding of the process and service delivery.
So up to this point, we had been using the blueprint as a descriptive and diagnostic tool focused on the current state. We then switched gears and used a simplified blueprint to describe the changes to a chunk of the process that we wanted to pilot. This future state blueprint was used to guide the teams in prototyping and piloting the process changes we were testing, almost like a user manual.
We piloted changes, made tweaks as needed, and measured the pilot results. Once we had made the case for adopting the piloted process fully (using our blueprints to illustrate the transition to a simpler, shorter process), the last thing was to document the new, agreed on process in… you guessed it… a service blueprint.
So, in summary, in this project, blueprints were used to:
- Created a shared view of the current state across different stakeholders
- Diagnose the most resource intensive and painful parts of the process
- Show evidence of the need for change and get buy in to try some changes
- Train and on board new staff members
- Outline the evolved process we were going to prototype and pilot
- Document the newly implemented process
Pretty neat! Long story short, we saw a 70% cost reduction and a reduction in turn around time of 2 days in the service delivery with our process changes. Winning!
I’m pretty sure those service blueprints have long since been forgotten, and I have some crumpled printouts of them in the back of my closet. But that’s ok! As with any kind of mapping, I always like to remind people that the map is not the destination — it’s a guide to help you get to the destination. So the outcomes are what really matter in the end.
If you’re feeling inspired and want to go deeper on service blueprinting, or try it on your current project, here are my favourite blueprinting resources:
- Service Blueprints: Laying the Foundation is an oldie but a goodie that walks through what service blueprints often consist of and gives you the lowdown on blueprint terminology.
- Practical Service Blueprinting is an excellent course that’s well worth the money, IMO. It’s incredibly comprehensive and provides a solid foundation if you’re a complete beginner.
- If you don’t feel you need the course, Practical Service Design’s templates and blueprinting session guides are incredible free resources aligned to their approach. (Look for the ‘get the book’ CTA at the bottom of the page).
- Adaptive Path’s Guide to Service Blueprinting is another awesome resource, there’s a Dropbox link in this Medium post.
Have fun! And let me know how you get on.
P.S. How do you know if service designing Smurfs are around?
Look for blueprints ;)
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