After spending some time becoming acclimated with the new world of MBA program office, I launched a project which I am very excited about.  This project comes straight out of the relatively new discipline of service design (if you don’t know what service design is, check out http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/ or a list of resources which I’ll put together at some later date.)

I chose to begin the project by creating a student journey map.  Although traditional journey maps tend to focus on customer touch points – that is points where customers interact with the service provider, I wanted to document various decision points, pain points, or just points in time, along the journey.  Granted, the overall purpose of the exercise is to create a tighter, deeper relationship with the customer by identifying various points, and then making them into touchpoints, but the distinction I would like to make here is that not all of these points will become touchpoints: we may choose not to engage the students during a particular point, even though we’re aware of it.  To me, touchpoint map is something we can develop from this stage one map.

Because of the number of people involved in the process, the overall goal of the project, and the crazy schedules everyone follows these days, I also chose to not make it a hosted, guided affair.  Instead, we posted some brown paper on one of the walls and invited all staff  to contribute their points at their leisure.   Expectantly  the progress is somewhat slow, but it is moving along nonetheless.