At the JourneyOps Helsinki event in January, Anni Leppänen, Lead Service Designer at the City of Helsinki, delivered an insightful presentation titled "Leading with Journeys - Learnings from One of the Largest Website Renewals in Finland." She shared her experiences and key learnings from a massive digital transformation project that spanned four years and involved renewing the city's website. Here are the main highlights and takeaways from her presentation.
Setting the Context
Anni began by asking the audience to reflect on their experiences and journeys within the city of Helsinki, emphasising the importance of considering the city's physical and community aspects. She highlighted the complexity of managing such a vast organisation and the necessity of adopting a customer-centric approach.
Strategic Imperative
Anni discussed the strategic imperative of journey management within the context of Helsinki's organisational structure and strategic goals. The city's large size and distributed design structure posed significant challenges, but the focus on digital customer experience provided a unifying goal. The project's aim was to align various services and teams around the end-to-end customer journey.
Building Blocks of Journey Management
Anni outlined the foundational elements of their journey management approach, which included:
Themes as Anchors: The city used themes derived from user research to anchor their journeys. These themes represented cross-functional needs that transcended organisational silos.
Customer Personas and User Profiles: To capture a rich picture of user needs, the team developed personas based on behaviour patterns, abilities, and lived experiences.
Service Design Principles: The renewal project was guided by principles such as being human-centred, prioritising services over communications, and ensuring consistency and inclusivity.
Journey Mapping and Transformation
The team mapped out 25 detailed thematic concepts, each with its own current and future state journeys. This comprehensive mapping helped identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Anni emphasised the importance of continuously updating these journeys to reflect the current state and vision for customer experience.
Agile and Product Thinking
Anni highlighted the significance of adopting agile and product management practices to support continuous delivery and transformation. These practices enabled the team to launch services regularly, justify their work, and maintain momentum. The city developed various models to support user research, development, and delivery, ensuring a steady pace of progress.
Challenges and Future Directions
Despite significant progress, Anni acknowledged ongoing challenges, such as avoiding the regression into silos and ensuring continuous focus on journey management. She stressed the need for a strategic, tactical, and operational alignment around journey management, with a particular focus on critical journeys and continuous training.
Conclusion
Anni Leppänen's presentation provided a comprehensive overview of the City of Helsinki's journey management approach and the lessons learned from their extensive website renewal project. By focusing on customer-centric themes, adopting agile practices, and continuously updating journey maps, the city was able to drive significant digital transformation. However, the journey is ongoing, and continuous effort is required to maintain and improve upon these achievements.
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If you are interested in exploring how journey management can transform your organisation, we would love to hear from you. Let's discuss how we can tailor these strategies to fit your unique needs and drive success in your business. Please feel free to contact us to start this exciting journey together.
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