Reflection: Journey mapping & Mind mapping

Challenge

I work with a client which is the biggest French tool rental company. Their business is renting tools  and machinery to building companys, craftmens and customers who are doing DIY work in weekends.  They have rental agencies all over France with a sale counter and a repair and maintenance  workshop.

I work with the team who is developing software applications for the mechanics in the workshops.  Agencies vary in sizes and the needs of a workshop with 5 mechanics and a manager are not the  same as the needs of a workshop with 1 senior mechanics and an assistant.

When I started working with them, they had a list of projects that had been set up and prioritized  according to their technical knowledge and new features of existing tools. The agencies’ staff were  not satisfied with the existing tools. The team had very little contact with the agencies and did not  have much knowledge about their needs. They thought they knew and that their expertise was to  know for them, even if they sat in an office in Paris very far from the agencies.

Selection

I proposed to meet the people of the agencies in order to find out about their needs and come up  with solutions that had value for the business. We held key users workshops using personae, their  journey mapping and finished with a mind mapping of the needs.

Application

Selecting the key users

We created personae of each profile of users that would be using or would be impacted by the  software applications. For example, we had a mechanics manager with a team of 8 mechanics, one  with a team of 3 and one who only had an assistant. We then invited key users who could represent  the different personae. We hold 5 workshops with 10 different key users each time.

Presenting the context

Each workshop started with the key users completing the personae posters with information about  their tasks/constraints/interactions… We also completed with them the journey mapping of a  machinery in the workshop. “Whats is?”

Collecting data

We then asked the key users in 3 groups to look at the different steps of the journey mapping and to  write on post-its of different colors: What works well, what was painful, what would be a “wow”  effect. The “what works well” was important to keep a positive mindset and to make sure the  development team did not go backwards with the new projects. After sharing the groups post-its, the  participants regrouped them by topics to create a list of their needs.  “what is ?” and “What if ?”

Prioritizing

The key users then used the dot voting method to choose the most valuable topics. This gave  priorities for the development team. All ideas are kept but the most valuable will be explored in the  future.   The team now knows what to explore and experiment. They are prototyping a few ideas and added  quick wins to existing applications. “what wows ?”

Insight

The development team was thrilled with this approach. They got very valuable information from the  field and planned for future interactions with the key users. They realized that they did not know  enough the needs and constraints of their own end-users and they wished they had done this long  before.

The key users were very happy and shared that they had the feeling they had been listened to and  acknowledged. They left asking “what’s next ?”

Approach

With this course, I mapped out this approach to the design thinking approach. I have done this  exercise with several teams and used different tools but always around the personae, the journey  mapping, the value stream mapping and the mind mapping.

Now, I will try to explore more the “what wows” step as I feel I haven’t worked this enough with  them. I think that there is a risk that on some topics they will just do as they initially planned without  looking for the most relevant solution.

