Journey Mapping - By Monika Wolf

The South African, State Owned, THE CYBER SPACE HUB (Triple Play) tasked me, as part of a two man  performance coaching team, with the following:  Increase participation and collaboration of engineers during *Production Meetings in order to

a. Establish plant stability and optimisation.  b. Increase productivity and Mega Watts produced

*Production Meeting: A daily morning meeting where all the relevant engineers (Boiler, Turbine,  Auxiliary, Chemical Services, Maintenance and Control & Instrumentation) and Management meet  to familiarise themselves with the plant condition and current production related challenges

Back Ground:

Power Generation in SA is in crisis. This has been true since 2003 when a moratorium was placed on  planned maintenance for the period 2009 until the conclusion of the Soccer World Cup event that  was hosted in SA during 2003.  Triple Play, to this day, has not recovered from the back log and  the subsequent increased damage and anomalies that has occurred right across power plants since  2009. Myself and another coach had been working on the Plant for about 6 months and had  established trust relationships with all stakeholders by then.    Selected Tool:  During the “What if?” phase, we decided to use Journey Mapping  as design tool to really  understand a day in life of an SA THE CYBER SPACE HUB engineer. In order to understand the lack of  participation and collaboration in the Production Meetings, we wanted to use a Customer Centric  approach to really dive deep and understand how these engineers experienced their working  conditions in an attempt to gain insights into their practical and emotional challenges being faced.  (As demonstrated in the lecture Video “The Good Kitchen”)    Application  During the course of 4 weeks we literally shadowed each engineer on the plant wearing hard hats  and safety boots, going into the belly of the power generating beast with them. There were nothing  off limits meetings for the coaches. We tracked and documented the following per engineer, on an  individualised journey map:

c. Name and Surname  d. Engineering Division and Job description.  e. Hourly activity log, including but not limited to:

i. Distance walked  ii. Plant Areas visited  iii. Conversations had with whom?  iv. Collaborated with whom?  v. Conflict experienced: with whom, why, where, was it personal or

professional?

vi. Communication: Clear?, Precise? Succinct?, Was the message received the same one

that was communicated?

vii. What did this engineer try to do? (Job to be done)  viii. What practical challenges were experienced?  ix. Engineer’s state of mind.  x. Reason for state of mind.

The gathering of this information naturally included a substantial amount of constant  interviewing.

Insights gained:  On completion of the Journey Mapping we consolidated the data gathered and started looking for  patterns, trends and commonalities. The insights gained were astonishing:

Emotions Experienced  Reason

Exhaustion  Average walking distance per day: 9km

Stress  Working under constant pressure due to unsustainability of work being done.

Frustration  Very poor communication between engineers and artisans. Lack of line of site  on work being logged - has it started and what the progress status is.

Disconnect  between  engineers and artisans

The incident log management platform was on their PCs and they did not  have constant line of sight on tasks logged and progress made.

Hopelessness and lack of  Pride

(** Note: Triple Play is a controversial brand and not loved by the public  due to being notoriously unreliable)  -  This led to a lack of Pride in the work  they were doing.  Hopelessness: The engineers felt invisible due to a lack of recognition by  Management.

Animosity  There was a lack of trust between Management, the Engineering

team and the artisans

Lack of Confidence  Due to the mistrust between Management and Engineering team, they did  not feel confident offering solutions nor that they had a voice.

Through the use of Journey Mapping I realised that the definition of the challenge as provided by the  SA Utility Management was extremely narrow and conservative. Production and plant stability could  not increase by solving the issue of collaboration and participation of people on a single level. The  level of dependency between engineers and artisan is so intertwined that applying Design Thinking  and a solution on one level only would have limited results.   Management did not realise that this challenge related to the culture of this organisation and  solutions had to be found for, and applied to every level of the organisation.    We invited all stake holders to share in the solution by co creating (inter alia) an app where  engineers and artisans and management can connect through offering a safe space to create a  personal profile containing “I am accountable for” and “what you do not know about me” space. On  this app we offered a life feed for participants vote anonymously during meetings on controversial  topics, rate the participation in the production meeting and reward people for making a  contribution, not only in the meeting but also through the work being done and the results thereof.  We added a life feed to the app from the Incident Management system to provide line of sight when  engineers was on the plant on not in their offices and provided scooters to relieve physical  exhaustion and just add a bit of fun.    Alternative Design Tools that could have been used:

Workshops and mind mapping were viable alternative Design tools, Yet, in retrospect, I realise that  the public nature of mind mapping and workshops, coupled with the lack of confidence and fear of  being judged, would not have yielded honest feedback and would have been detrimental to  understanding the true issues -  both practical and emotional .

