REFLECTION – VISUALISATION

Challenge and Selection:

I am a member of a bank’s Transformation and Change department and my challenge was to merge 3  different customer onboarding processes into a single streamlined process to achieve operational  efficiencies and improve transparency. The project scope involved a variety of internal stakeholders  such as 3 customer onboarding teams, the technology support team, customer relationship  management team and external stakeholders such as brokers and technology vendors. Managing and  aligning stakeholders’ understanding, objectives and expectations with the that of the project team  was a key driver to the project’s success.

Selection

I used the tool of Visualisation to explore the current reality, identify patterns and attain a shared  understanding of current reality and the challenges among a diverse group of stakeholders before  defining possible resolutions. Through verbal discussions, stakeholders tend to interpret the same  matter/thought in slightly different ways. Visualisation assists in overcoming this challenge by making  the discussions tangible and concrete so that the understanding is common and aligned. I used the  practice of creating straw man visualisations of the current processes with question prompts and key  task objective definitions to allow the diverse group of stakeholders understand in a common aligned  manner and learn from one another while assimilating the reality, defining the scope, boundaries,  relationships between key elements and above all, comprehend challenges which other teams face.

Application

I started the process by creating a straw man process map on big chart paper stuck on a wall. I created  swim-lanes for different teams and scheduled process walkthroughs with the teams to understand  the current process. I asked each of the teams to represent their key tasks within the swim-lanes using  basic shapes easy to comprehend and allocated different coloured post-it notes for different kinds of  tasks. Once a first version of the processes was represented on the chart, I scheduled workshop  sessions for teams to use question prompts to probe why certain tasks were conducted in a particular  manner which brought out unique challenges other teams faced in their process. With this we had 3  exclusive customer onboarding processes with uniquely coloured post-it notes clearly highlighting  similar activities occurring across multiple process, key relationships and dependencies between  teams which made it easier to identify patterns and demonstrate the as-is process reality in a manner  commonly understood by all teams.

The next stage of the process was to streamline the current stage process maps using common task  definitions and form a customer-to-customer view of the various onboarding processes. A customer- to-customer process view means identifying all internal and external customers of various tasks within  processes and uniquely defining the process outputs which satisfy the customer needs.

For the final stage of the application process, I split all stakeholders into 4 groups and asked them to  note down their view of success/their expectations from the future customer onboarding process.  Once this was done, the same groups were asked to identify what aspects of the current customer  onboarding processes should change, in their opinion, to achieve the desired success criteria they had

defined. These success criteria along with the list of expected changes were then attached to the  current process maps.

Thus, by the end of the exercise we had a comprehensive view of 3 different onboarding processes,  the common activities and outputs across all processes, unique challenges and dependencies each of  the processes had and a list of desired changes and success criteria.

Insight

The insight I gained out of the exercise was that the visual representation of the process along with  stakeholder comments was important for reinforcing a common understanding of the process and the  unique challenges faced. Having a focal point of discussion guided the stakeholders to share  perspectives and insights which were specific, relevant and sequenced in order of importance rather  than talking randomly about everything at the same time. The most valuable insight I gained was that  while visual representation shapes the flow of the discussion, more important is the shared insights  and shared learning that occurs while they are working to define reality and problem. Having  stakeholders across multiple teams as part of the workshop working collaboratively enabled them to  be more open, empathetic and understanding to others challenges and at the same time provided  them with an opportunity to learn certain best practices which other teams had been following.  Having a visual process map along with key insights such as success factors and list of changes enabled  a relatively easy and data driven process to identify patterns which were used in subsequent stages  of the project to drive transformation and change decisions without any political hinderance.

Approach

This course made me see this as a tool in a new way. When I've done it before it was really "ad hoc"  but now I can prepare ahead. The next time I use this tool for current stage understanding, I will try  and use the tool ‘COPIS/SIPOC’ simultaneously (a tool used in six-sigma and lean process management  to define Customers, Output, Process, Input and Suppliers). This is because, while the visualisation of  the process assisted greatly and provided a common focal point for discussions, in some instances I  felt the information derived was a bit unstructured and very judgemental. Clubbing this exercise with  the COPIS tool may allow the information to be gathered and presented in a more structured manner.

