Challenge & Selection    I have used Visualization tool many times and have helped my team & customer stakeholders to achieve common  ground for defining problem and possible solution. The visualization tool is essential and adds more benefits to  build a direct connect with the customer & their core problems and issues. I am a business consultant and have  worked for many Telecom projects. My customers’ faces critical issues like faster time to market, technology  upgrades and customer churn due to steep competition. Constant and consistent performance to achieve higher  growth with better cost control wears them down. The only way to sustain in the competitive Telecom market is to  identify growth wheels, new approach to achieve higher growth with cost optimization. The visualization tool helps  me and my customers in introspecting about how things are moving and at which direction, where do they want to  go and how we should approach. I personally like this tool because it opens the creative side of me and helps me  think beyond the problem areas to identify possible ideas. This tool gives me the much needed power to  empathize towards customer issues and helps me in ethnography mapping.    Application    I have used visualization tool in various ways. With telecom industry best practices and available customer  information, I first draw the organization chart and also the customer journey maps. Although these journey maps  are only for reference yet those are pure play drawings which have very basic information about every customer  stakeholder, its role and process to achieve desired output or outcome. During discussions, workshops and  meetings I use these maps as ice breakers. Neither these are final journey maps nor do those maps have all the  information. Hence these maps are used only for discussion to gather more information.    I also use drawing board to start mapping departments involved in the process. This helps me identify which  departments are involved in customer facing activities. This defines the Moment of Truth for the process. I use a  lot of post-its/sticky-notes and ask the participants to put their challenges and paste it on the board. Most of the  time, I create four to five vertical blocks on the board dedicated for each department and then start pasting all the  post-its received from the participants. This helps all the participants to see what information we have got and  what can be the real problem the organization is facing. Sometimes, more participants provide same/similar  problem or artifact in different words. Even though participants may represent different departments, yet their  inputs for the problem can be same. This helps me understand how deep this problem is impacting the  organization and helps me in prioritizing it for further investigation.    In my meetings, I expect at least 5 to 8 participants representing mostly the impacted departments. This helps me  get a better view of the journey that I mapped and also helps me understand the problem statement better. I  circulate post-its, color pens and papers to my participants. I take 3ft by 3ft size print-outs of the journeys and put  those on the meeting room walls. I also define customer touch points in my journey and ensure those are clearly  visible to the participants. I ask every participant to validate the process and identify the possible issues with the  journey. The participant has to put his point on the post-it and paste it on the process where he/she thinks a  problem area. I ask the participants following questions –

1. Is the journey map having all the relevant information?  2. Is the flow of the journey map correct for your organization?  3. According to you, what are the problem areas in this journey map?  4. What needs to improve in this journey?

Above points/questions are mainly to help them think what is the current situation of the organization and how  they think it can be solved. For me, it gives great insight into the organization and its people. Roughly after 15-20  mins of group discussion and small talk, each participant comes up with their own inputs and start pasting them on  the journey maps. First, I ask them to post only the relevant information inputs so that I can update the journey.  Secondly, I ask them to post only the issues / problems using key or power words and paste on the journey. I group  common inputs / suggestions and prioritize after discussing with the participants. After meeting with participants, I  recreate journey map with updated information based on the inputs received from the participants. I again share  the information with the same participant group and again try to get the inputs to improve the journey map till it is

accepted by the participant group. This data gathering helps both participants and me in understanding problem  areas, journey map and also defining the goal for the transformation.    Insight & Approach    The power of the visualization tool is immense. The diverse group can come together and start drawing their  thoughts either in the form of process maps, journey maps or even simple plane boxes that helps being every  participant on the common ground. As I mentioned earlier, I personally like this tool as it opens up creative  thinking side of human brain. It pushes the participant think beyond what he is seeing and it brings the best out of  him/her. The visualization tool enables participants and users to identify what are the various ways to look at  problem and solution. The use of this tool is diverse. It allows the third party consultants to empathize by  visualizing customer pain areas. It allows the diverse participant groups to empathize by visualizing beyond their  own problem areas. It creates the common ground for all the participants and also acts as an ice breaker most of  the time. Most of the time visualization tool allows the less speaking or shy participants a mean to communicate  with others and helps achieve desire result, if possible.    This tool I have used in my personal life also. Whenever my daughter wants to tell problem which she cannot  explain, I have taught her to draw & highlight the problem areas. Most of the time, I get what she wants to explain.  She uses this tool to help understand me and my wife about her problem so that we can help her better.

