Module 4: Operational Excellence – Delivering and enhancing organisational outcomes
Topic 4.4: Creating Systems and Processes
A powerful process that we will explore in the Workshop is Service Blueprinting.
This tool is a crucial element of developing an effective business process mindset in organisations. Business processes that are clearly focused on chosen and desirable outcomes that fit with the organisation’s values, mission and vision, and can be readily shared and understood by those who must deliver, greatly enable people in their ongoing roles as service providers.
Such processes also allow individuals, teams and organisations to more readily explore failures and successes, and enact innovations both incremental and substantial.
The crucial element of the Service Blueprinting process is that the tool uses the customer, client or end user, as the continual focal point and beginning of each step in system, process and service design. The belief is that the organisation should align its people, processes and resources so that all are customer facing and acting to support each other in the service design and delivery system.
As the development process progresses, the SBP allows the ideas to become more concrete so that customers, employees and managers can ‘see’ and interact with it.
Roles can be clarified. The process can be specified and equipment, quality, and cost factors explored. An actual system can begin to take shape.
Employees, customers, and managers can participate in its design and potential delivery.
Figure 4.1 Service Blueprint Template
Figure 4.2 A Service Blueprint Process for a Hypothetical Hotel Stay[1]
Required
80 mins
Please ensure you read the excerpt pages 11-12 and Exhibit 1 from this working paper.
Before the workshop, identify a system, process or service activity within your organisation, ideally that may relate to your workplace project, that you can share with your cohort. A small sample of the ideas will be chosen and explored in the workshop.
Conclusion
Budget tools and processes, financial models and indicators, risk management and mitigation practices and tools such as the blueprint process and others such as the business model canvas, are crucial elements of developing an effective business success mindset in organisations.
Business processes that are clearly focused on chosen and desirable outcomes that fit with the organisation’s values, mission and vision, and can be readily shared and understood by those who must deliver, greatly enable people in their ongoing roles as service providers. Such processes also allow individuals, teams and organisations to more readily explore failures and successes, and enact innovations both incremental and substantial.
- Bitner, M., Ostrom, A. & Morgan, F. (2007). Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. California. ↵