Service mapping and design for Wellcome Connecting Science’s event registration service
Wellcome Connecting Science (WCS) aims to enable everyone to explore genomic science and its impact on research, health and society. Part of how they achieve this is to run courses and conferences for researchers, healthcare and public health workers around the world.
Project overview
The WCS learning and training team has recently been through some changes, bringing two separate teams together into one, and reviewing their use of event registration software systems.
The Team are preparing to procure a new registration system which is able to manage all events. They approached us initially to help the team articulate and prioritise their user need requirements in order to input and steer this procurement.
Completing this initial journey mapping revealed the complexity of the current processes that make up the end-to-end service journey and the resulting burden for those involved in the service, both as end users and internally at WCS.
We then worked with the team on a series of workshops, with the aim to articulate a ‘target’ service journey that significantly reduced the complexity and burden.
Project goals
The client initially wanted to understand::
- What user needs does a registration system/s (service) need to meet?
- What are the key differences [needs] between registering for different types of events (for example, conferences compared to courses?)
- What are the current data and user experience pain points in event registration (to remediate)?
- What other systems does the event registration system/s need to interact and exchange data with?
The goals for the second phase of the project were:
- To design out the complex, redundant and burdensome elements identified in the ‘as is’ service journey
- To be able to articulate a target service journey for the next generation of event registration that could be shared with shortlisted system suppliers and to evaluate their bids
- Identify the off-line and non-solution elements of the service journey that the Team need to address to simplify the implementation of any new technical solution/s
Multidisciplinary project team
To deliver the necessary work, the Lagom project team consisted of a dedicated User Researcher, Service Designer, Delivery Manager, and a Lead Digital Strategist.
What we did
- Facilitated a service journey mapping workshop with members of the Events Team
- Created a digitised version of the ‘as is’ service journey
- Developed backlog of 57 user needs
- Analysed 40 responses to a user needs validation survey
- Facilitated a series of service design workshops with members of the Events Team
- Created a target service journey blueprint for event registrations
- Developed a 56 item procurement scoring checklist
- Developed 15 supplementary recommendations
Initially we carried out a series of workshops with members of the Events Team to firstly map out the ‘as-is’ service journey, identifying the activities, data, systems, and who is involved, as well as user needs and pain points and any differences between event types (such as courses and conferences).
We used the outputs from this workshop to develop a digitised version of the ‘as is’ service journey, as well as a user needs backlog, which we then validated with users in a survey.
To address the complexity revealed as part of this initial phase of work, we then facilitated a series of workshops with the Events Team to:
- Identify and prioritise the complex, redundant and burdensome elements of the ‘as is’ journey
- Rapidly develop rough ideas around how these elements could be redesigned or improved
- Consider in more detail how the most effective ideas could work in practice, including the system features and business processes that would need to be in place to support this
From this, we created a target service blueprint to articulate an ideal events service. We also developed a procurement scoring checklist that can be used to evaluate how well the vendors match the target service journey.
In addition to this, we also developed a set of supplementary recommendations for off-line actions the Team can take to support the implementation of the target service journey.
Project outcomes
The WCS Events Team now have a clearly articulated target service journey and are using the scoring checklist and blueprint within their procurement process, to evaluate potential vendors and technical solutions for events registration.
The supplementary recommendations also mean they have a number of action items they are carrying out before the new system is procured to best support its implementation.
