Anchoring digital transformation through service blueprinting

Context & challenge

The organisation was in the midst of a major digital transformation, driven by the need to modernise its IT infrastructure and improve customer experience. While there was strong intent and investment, teams across the business held fragmented views of how services actually operated - from customer touchpoints through to supporting systems and processes.

This lack of shared understanding made it difficult to prioritise initiatives, coordinate across departments, and assess the downstream impact of change. Customer and employee experiences were tightly interconnected, yet often addressed in isolation, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies.

The challenge was not simply to document the service, but to create a clear, system-level view that could be understood and used by diverse stakeholders. The work needed to bridge customer insight, operational reality, and technology constraints - enabling teams to move forward with greater clarity and confidence.


My role & lens

I was responsible for creating a system-level view of the service and using that insight to support decision-making across product, delivery, and operations. I surfaced key problem areas, presented evidence to demonstrate the impact of improvement opportunities, and translated ideas into clear recommendations.

I worked closely with product managers to advise on what to build, when to build it, and why, ensuring prioritisation decisions were grounded in customer experience, operational reality, and delivery constraints. I also partnered with delivery leads and managers across agile squads to align progress and dependencies across the broader transformation.

Throughout the work, my focus was on maintaining alignment across people, process, and technology, so intended experiences could be delivered consistently and efficiently - not just designed in theory.


Approach

I approached the work by first creating a shared understanding of how the service operated end to end. I focused on framing the service as a connected system, where changes in one area had clear implications elsewhere.

The work prioritised early alignment. I surfaced areas of friction and dependency, tested assumptions with stakeholders across functions, and used evidence to focus conversations on impact rather than opinion. This enabled clearer prioritisation decisions and reduced misalignment between teams working in parallel.

Throughout the engagement, I balanced momentum with rigour, moving quickly enough to support delivery while ensuring decisions were grounded in a realistic understanding of customer experience, operational constraints, and technology capability.


Methods & artefacts

• Service blueprinting across customer, operational, and technology layers
• Stakeholder interviews and working sessions with product, delivery, and operations teams
• Synthesis of qualitative insight with performance and operational data
• Identification of key pain points, dependencies, and moments of failure
• Alignment workshops to support cross-squad understanding and prioritisation
• Iterative refinement of artefacts as delivery progressed


Outcomes & impact

The work created a shared, system-level understanding of how the service operated end to end, giving teams a common reference for discussion and decision-making. This reduced misalignment across functions and enabled more focused conversations.

The service blueprint informed sequencing decisions and helped product managers make more confident calls about where to invest effort and when. Cross-squad alignment improved as teams gained clearer visibility into how their work connected to the broader service and to each other.

The work also shifted conversations from isolated initiatives to the experience of the service as a whole. This strengthened alignment across people, process, and technology, and supported a transformation that could more consistently meet both customer and organisational needs.