Scaling up Journey Management

Implementing Journey Management at scale can seem like a daunting task, but many organizations have gone before you. We have collected their best practices and organized them according to our Journey Management Maturity framework. We hope this will inspire you and show you there are many ways to tackle the challenge one step at a time. This guide is an evolving document; we will be adding more best practices as we encounter them.

Governance

Governance indicates how effectively the organization manages, coordinates, and supports the various teams, processes, and technologies related to Journey Management. There are several best practices that can help you to ‘level up’ in this aspect of maturity.

Create a Journey Management roadmap

Implementing Journey Management starts with a clear vision of where you’d like to be, a convincing explanation of why that’s important, and a feasible roadmap of how to get there. Having these things in place helps a great deal to communicate your vision and to rally people behind it.

Become the Journey Management Ambassador

To start implementing TheyDo and Journey Management as a practice, someone will have to take charge. This often starts with one or two ambassadors. As this trailblazer, your main goal is to promote Journey Management, gather support, and start a first initiative in order to prove that it works.

Identify a sponsor

Seek out a key individual within your organization who will champion the Journey Management initiative. This sponsor should ideally be a senior executive or influential leader who understands the importance of customer-centricity and is committed to implementing Journey Management. They will be crucial in securing resources, rallying support from different teams, and fostering a culture that values the customer journey. The sponsor will also play an important role in promoting the initiative’s successes and benefits to the rest of the organization, thereby encouraging wider adoption of Journey Management practices.

Get help from an agency

In order to kickstart a Journey Management transformation, some outside expertise can be helpful – especially when the internal expertise isn’t there yet. An external agency specializing in Journey Management can assist your organization in implementing and optimizing this approach. The agency can provide expert guidance, resources, and support to effectively integrate Journey Management into your operations. This may include conducting workshops, facilitating journey mapping, assisting in creating a customer-centric culture, and offering tools and technologies for managing customer journeys. The agency’s expertise can accelerate the implementation process, identify potential pitfalls, and ensure your organization is leveraging best practices in Journey Management.

Set up a governance team

Once Journey Management expands, you might need to set up a governance team to keep managing it. This team is in charge of promoting Journey Management, executing the plan to implement it, and helping to remove any barriers. Often they will help establish guidelines and best practices for using TheyDo, as well as outline the roles and responsibilities of people working with Theydo. They can also provide ongoing support to teams, ensuring that any issues are addressed promptly. Moreover, a governance team can facilitate communication and collaboration among different teams, promoting the sharing of insights and experiences that can lead to more effective use of TheyDo.

Set up a Journey Management Playbook

A Playbook can serve as a clear explanation of how Journey Management works within the unique context of your organization. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and understands their roles and responsibilities. It can also help to prevent confusion and address common questions that arise when starting to work journey-centric. For more on Journey Management Playbooks and a template for building your own, have a look at our guide here.

Get the Board involved

Getting support from the highest management levels in the organization can help a great deal to promote Journey Management as a way of working. To get the Board on board, TheyDo offers functionality specifically aimed to help them make journey-centric decisions on a strategic level.

Install a Chief Journey Officer

Appoint a senior-level executive with the title of Chief Journey Officer (CJO) to spearhead the Journey Management initiative within the organization. The CJO will be responsible for overseeing the strategy, planning, and execution of journey management across all departments, ensuring alignment with the organization’s overall goals. This person will also act as a champion for customer-centricity within the organization, promoting a culture of understanding and enhancing customer journeys. The role of the CJO will involve coordinating cross-functional teams, managing relevant governance structures, and advocating for the resources and tools needed to successfully implement and optimize journey management.

Process

The process indicates how deeply Journey Management and the triple diamond (or a variation thereof) are integrated and accepted as a way of working in the organization. The more efficient your journey management workflow is, the better you will be able to translate customer insights into product or service deliveries. There are several best practices to improve how you work.

Run a pilot project

Organize a pilot project where you go through all the Journey Management steps. This initial project should aim to test and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, allowing your team to understand how best to apply it in your context. The pilot project will provide valuable insights and learnings, and if successful, it will serve as proof-of-concept that can be used to gain buy-in from stakeholders for wider implementation. It will also help to identify any potential challenges or issues that might need to be addressed before scaling up the Journey Management initiative.

Standardize your Journey Management Workflow

Make sure you have a clear overview of how your triple diamond (or your variation thereof) functions within the unique context of your organization. If you haven’t implemented this way of working yet, sketch out how it should work. Map out what steps you take to go from gathering Insights to implementing Solutions, and make it very clear how the different roles, teams, tools, and ceremonies in your organization contribute to each step. Then run it, capture relevant Insights, and improve it. Sounds familiar? Streamlining your triple diamond is exactly the same process as streamlining any Customer Journey. Therefore, TheyDo is an ideal tool to map and improve it.

Incorporate Journey Management Ceremonies

Just like Agile comes with certain ceremonies like sprint planning or retrospectives, Journey Management also has ceremonies you can incorporate in your way of working. These ceremonies take place at key moments in the Triple Diamond, in order to ensure a smooth and effective collaboration and handover between different teams and roles. They help to make Journey Management an integral part of all business processes, from strategic planning to daily operations.TheyDo can help a great deal to make these ceremonies run smoothly.

Establish Journey Management Retrospectives

Introduce regular retrospective meetings focused on reviewing and evaluating the effectiveness of your Journey Management (JM) practices. These retrospectives should involve key stakeholders and teams involved in JM and aim to discuss what’s working well, what challenges have been encountered, and how the approach can be improved. The findings from these retrospectives should then be used to inform updates to your journey strategies, processes, and tools. These meetings foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement, ensuring your organization remains agile and customer-centric in its Journey Management approach.

Culture

Culture indicates how well the journey-centric mindset and related skills are embedded in the culture and workforce of the organization. There are several things you can address to improve your culture:

Create a business case

Spreading a Journey-centric culture will be much easier when you can ‘prove’ the value of working journey-centric. The sooner you can showcase a good result, the better; so keep this in mind when you plan your first projects in TheyDo. Ideally, a showcase should emphasize the positive impact of Journey Management, highlighting how it can improve customer satisfaction, revenue, and/or collaboration. Such tangible results will help to illustrate the value of working with customer journeys and promote its adoption as a core business practice.

Introduce Journey Management at internal events

To introduce Journey Management, start with an informal process that introduces the JM concept to the organization. This can be through workshops or seminars to raise awareness.

Improve Journey Management expertise

While TheyDo can certainly enhance team productivity and streamline collaboration, it cannot entirely replace the expertise of experienced professionals. To scale up effectively, it therefore helps to build a ‘critical mass’ of people that have significant experience in working with customer journeys. This can be achieved in two ways:

1. Hiring: Hiring candidates with relevant expertise in Service Design, UX-Design, and other relevant fields.

2. Upskilling: Offering training and development opportunities to employees within the organization can be a viable alternative to hiring. Upskilling not only bridges skill gaps but also increases employee engagement and motivation, creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Set up a Journey Management community

Starting a Journey Management community can be a great way to raise interest and overall skill level. By bringing interested people together, you can foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Members can share best practices, collaborate on projects, and provide feedback on how Journey Management and TheyDo is being used. This type of collaborative environment can help to identify areas where people may be struggling, and can provide opportunities to offer targeted training and support to address those challenges. In addition, by building a network of experts and advocates, this community can help to promote the value of Journey Management across the organization, and can encourage wider adoption and more consistent use.

Train TheyDo coaches

Training a group of TheyDo coaches can be an effective way to improve skill levels overall and provide support for newer users. They are often ‘super users’; people who have demonstrated a high level of proficiency and interest in TheyDo, and have a deep understanding of its capabilities and features. These users can become valuable references for other users who may be struggling to learn the tool. They can provide guidance, answer questions, and offer tips and tricks to help users improve their skills. As a result, these super users can help to create a more collaborative and supportive environment, where users are encouraged to share their knowledge and help one another. This can ultimately lead to higher levels of productivity, improved outcomes, and a stronger sense of community within the user base.

Reward accountability for customer satisfaction

In many goal-setting and evaluation processes, the focus tends to be on financial or delivery-based targets. This can result in employees feeling unsupported in their efforts to improve customer satisfaction, as their projects are not assessed based on this criterion. To promote a customer-centric culture, it can help to incorporate customer-focused Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into project and team evaluations. This incentivizes employees to adopt methods like Customer Journey mapping, as their performance will be directly tied to enhancing customer satisfaction. This encourages a mindset that prioritizes the overall customer experience, ultimately leading to enhanced satisfaction for customers. TheyDo is a crucial tool to enable this approach since you can assign direct ownership of Journeys, and track their performance using both qualitative Insights and quantitative Metrics.

Organization

Organization indicates how effectively the organizational structure, teams and roles are organized around the ownership and responsibilities related to journey management. Several things can be done to improve here:

Set up a core Journey Management group

Assemble a core group of individuals to initiate your Journey Management efforts. This team will often include several customer-centric experts (Service Designers, UX’ers) but should ideally be cross-functional, comprising members from various departments such as marketing, customer service, design, and IT. This foundational team can then pilot the initial projects to demonstrate the value of JM, and champion its adoption across the wider organization. Their efforts will lay the groundwork for expanding Journey Management practices throughout the organization. These team members could also grow to become TheyDo Coaches later on.

Involve diverse roles

TheyDo is often adopted first by service designers, UX’ers, or other customer-centric experts. However, we recommend involving a wider variety of roles to take part. TheyDo is uniquely able to centralize all customer knowledge and present it in a way that’s accessible for non-designers as well. Think of including:

• Leadership are often ideal candidates to pick up the ownership of high-level Opportunities in TheyDo. Furthermore, TheyDo’s overviews of the entire journey framework, opportunities and solutions are specifically built to help set company-wide priorities.

• Data scientists are often ideal candidates to pick up the ownership of Metrics in TheyDo. Theydo can also help them a great deal to see their data in relation to the qualitative Insights that help to explain them. As such, it can be an invaluable tool for them.

• Product owners are often ideal candidates to pick up the ownership of Solutions in TheyDo. TheyDo can help them track performance of their Solutions, and better understand their impact on customer experience in the context of all other products and services as well.

• HR when they need to create a better overview of employee experience, and connect this to the customer experience.

• Devops teams to help them understand the context of what they are building and why.

Organize teams around Journey Management

Establish clear roles and responsibilities for teams involved in different aspects of the Triple Diamond model (or your variation of it) to facilitate effective collaboration and a seamless flow from gathering insights to implementing solutions. Determine what teams and roles are involved at what moments, who owns what, and how inbetween results are handed over.

Introduce Journey Management-specific roles and responsibilities

Establish clear role definitions and responsibilities for journey management-related positions. This clarity ensures that each team member knows their duties, and also helps to create time and budget to do these tasks. They might even replace “obsolete” duties. Regularly review and adjust these roles as needed to adapt to the organization’s evolving needs and priorities. For more on these roles, have a look at our guide on the topic.

Measurement

Measurement indicates how effectively the organization determines, measures and tracks key performance indicators related to customer journeys, and how it uses that data to drive improvements. There are several things you can do to help improve your measurement:

Start measuring customer-centric metrics

Ensure that the metrics you track and evaluate are not solely focused on your business objectives but also align with what matters most to your customers. These could include measures of customer satisfaction, customer effort score, or net promoter score.

Integrate Metrics in your Journeys

TheyDo offers an increasing number of integrations with data platforms, allowing you to include KPI’s in your journeys.

Introduce customer-centric goals at the strategic level

Your strategic goals (or OKRs) reflect your organization’s culture and what is deemed valuable. Including customer-centric OKRs next to your financial, business and technology OKRs helps ensure that you stay focused on the customer. You can use TheyDo to create an ‘executive-level’ end-to-end Journey that summarizes the most important Metrics, Insights, Opportunities, and Solutions across your whole customer lifecycle.

Align your Journey and metric frameworks

Develop a measurement structure that mirrors your journey framework to comprehensively evaluate the performance of each customer journey, from the most granular to the high-level macro journeys. This alignment ensures you capture data relevant to each step of a customer’s interaction with your organization, providing a holistic view of their experience. The metrics should be designed to track progress and measure success across all journeys, enabling the identification of areas for improvement, and the effectiveness of changes implemented. This alignment allows for data-driven decision-making, directly linking customer journey insights to strategic business outcomes.

Tools

Tools cover the level of completeness, adoption, and integration of the technology, systems, and toolkits used to support a journey-centric way of working.

Set up TheyDo for Scale

Amongst TheyDo’s many features, there are several that will help you to scale up Journey Management across your organization:

• Set up Journey Templates. Creating Journey Templates helps to standardize your way of working, since it helps teams to work in a consistent manner.

• Set up an example Journey. Using your Journey Template, create a fully populated example Journey that can serve as a reference for new users.

• Set up a Journey Framework. A Journey Framework will help your teams to organize their Journeys in one consistent overview.

• Set up a Taxonomy. A good Taxonomy will help your teams to search, filter, and compare all output you create in TheyDo.

• Set up workspaces. Workspaces help you to manage users across different domains, which comes in handy when you want to scale up.

Integrate your tool ecosystem around Journeys

TheyDo offers increasing integration with commonly used tools. We currently offer integrations with Qualtrics, Jira, and Azure Devops, with many more on the nearby horizon. This means that TheyDo can become the ‘spider in the web’ where you can connect all the output of other tools around your Journey ecosystem.