Challenge:

I am an employee of a Financial Services company and work in the product and service

development department.  The current challenge we are trying to solve for is to create a service in  which our customers can come into one of our Canadian retail locations to cash a US Dollar cheque,

which will in turn create a new revenue stream for the organization. The scope of the project  includes finding a vendor to facilitate this service for us for a reasonable price and create an internal

process for staff to follow to get the USD cheque cashed, the funds paid in real time to the customer  and then deposited to our bank account, while staying compliant within the government rules and

regulations.  Our resources will be employee time and we are working with a small budget for

payment of services to a vendor.  The entire project will need to be in place within 45 days.

Selection:

We have decided to use the Visualization or Visual Thinking tool to help push us beyond using

words or language alone when looking to solve our challenge.  Our goal is to have a shared  understanding of the problem we are facing, end-to-end through using ‘Journey Mapping’.  This will

allow us to depict the stages we will need to go through when implementing this cheque cashing  service for cashing and depositing USD cheques in Canada.  We will share a set of trigger questions

to engage a diverse sample of stakeholders in the effort to pull data about options, needs and pain  points when using this cheque cashing service.  We expect to learn from this data and use it to

create a journey map that will help us to visualize the customer experience and learn the key

elements we will need to address opportunities and solutions.

Application:

To start the process, we will gather a diverse set of cross functional business partners that are

involved in the set up of this new service.  We will then ask them to provide their insights in their  particular stage of the cheque cashing service, along with challenges and pain points and write

these insights onto sticky notes to be added to a large white board journey chart in the middle of the  room.  Once we have all the sticky notes present, we will group them in themes on the journey map,

outlining customer stages, personas, touchpoints and emotions.  We will then hold a group  discussion with each business partner commenting and looking for gaps in the other cross functional

departments to spark possible disagreement and conversation about the common key information  that is emerging.  We will then digitize the journey map in a visually appealing pictograph showing all

the key elements of an executive summary to present to the stakeholders.

Insight:

What we learned from walking through the journey map process is that having visual documentation  of the problem or challenge we are facing, especially from all aspect of every cross functional

business partner that has a role to play in the solution to the problem was extremely helpful and  really was an exercise in bringing the team member together in a productive way in which they

would normally never work.  Not only was the end state of the visual documentation important to  show the more important themes and aspects of the problem, but equaly as important in this

exercise was the group discussion and engagement from all parties involved.  This allowed each  department to empathize with the others on what role everyone has to play to get this challenge

solved.  This will help to motivate and sets the stage for collaboration when the team gets to the  implementation and roll out stage of the project.  The exercise was able to let the group identify

issues very quickly and even how the different department, who normally work in more of a silo, see

how they can assist each other to be more efficient when looking for solutions to the challenge.

Approach:

Since this visualization tool was so valuable in gaining insights from many different business

partners in separate departments at one time, I would definitely use this tool again and not only that  but would also expand it to use outside of internal employees and add customers experience once a

viable solution is in place to gain feedback from the service from a customer perspective.

