Visualization

Challenge:

I work for a public sector agency responsible for issuing and managing licenses for over a  million active license holders. There are at any point in time with over 100K applicants applying

for new licenses annually across 250 different license categories.

One of the strategic goals identified was to improve time it takes to issues new professional

licenses in the State. Before we could improve, we needed to understand what it took issue  licenses today. Based on initial analysis it took anywhere between 3 days – 60 days to issues

licenses based on the type and circumstance the licensee were involved.

The end-to-end process of a licensing was not documented or understood among all  stakeholders; There was some data available that was not accurate or unlikely to help us  determine the time needed for licensing. A myriad of systems and paper forms was used to  capture data throughout the life cycle of a licensing process.

Selection:

It was clear that the problem we have to first solve is to understand and define the customer  journey through the process of getting a license from the State before we could agree on how to  calculate the length of time it takes to acquire a license. Stakeholders included customer,  testing entities, law enforcement, reviewers, inspectors, lawyers, IT, and associations  representing each license groups. The tool we selected was journey mapping to detail the

customer interactions with various stakeholders and systems.

One of the benefits of customer journey mapping is that it will help us to pick out where we may  be falling short, and where silos exist within our process. We believed that viewing the journey  from the lens of the customers gives us the ability to pinpoint any areas where we may be  missing interaction point.

Application:

We brought together a team representing the various stakeholders involved in the process.

Created a baseline flow of customer experience as a large poster and displayed it the  conference room for team to consume. We also provided post-it notes to users so they can  add their comments and notes about the process. Scheduled sessions where teams would  get to gather and place their notes on the workflow. The next several sessions each note  was discussed and either added to workflow, discarded, or combined with similar comments

from others.

Using a simple tool like post-it notes help us move notes around as discussions proceeded  and allowed users to create new notes as the discussion happened. There were few times  when we discovered a key piece of information that changed the process, we had to retrace  our path through the process.

Insight:

The tool highlighted the collective lack of understanding of customer’s experience. It was

clear the number of assumptions made by various stakeholders on how and what the  customer did during each phase. Going through this has given us information and ideas that  would take us using other design thinking tools like brainstorming, concept development,  customer co-creation and learning launch.

Approach:

Based on the experience that makes sense to use the same tool next time with some  changes to it. By organizing meeting in smaller groups and it makes it efficient to incorporate  feedback and frequently into the model. Organizing feedback better – Use of color

coordinated post-it notes to organize suggestions, ideas, and process steps. Better customer  engagement of external customer in the process from the start should help us capture their  perspective.

