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Visualizing Work

November 17-21, 2024 | Lowes Sapphire Falls Resort | Orlando, FL

Unclear work destroys confidence, undermines trust and provides a terrible employee experience.

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Visualizing Work

November 17-21, 2024 | Lowes Sapphire Falls Resort | Orlando, FL

Unclear work destroys confidence, undermines trust and provides a terrible employee experience.

SMWorld.com | #SMWorld

Thank you for your time and attention today! If you need to have the presentation to follow along - I’ve put the QR code here, but you can also just go to mattberan.com so grab that while we get started. There’s a code at the end too, so if you like this presentation you can grab it.

We are going to go fast so that we pack in the value and leave out all the fluff. Please ask questions - THIS IS FOR YOU! I want YOU to be able to share your ideas, questions and visualization techniques!

I’m Matt Beran - and I’m a visual thinker and a visual worker.

By the end of this presentation I hope to illustrate to you how visualizing work leads to better customer service, better customer experiences and better employee engagement along with a host of other benefits.

Okay - let’s go.

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Contents

Why visualize work?

Types of visualization

Tools for visualization

Best Practices

Q/A

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Why visualize work?

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By Jean Leon Gerome Ferris - http://www.neatorama.com/2007/10/22/pirate-lore-7-myths-and-trrrrruths-about-pirates/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8643114

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Mutiny

And although I doubt your IT department could take over the whole organization, the feelings can remain the same.

You see - when every sailor finally had a copy of the map,- they would know where the dangerous passages were - they knew where they were heading and could work more efficiently.

The fact of the matter is that once this valuable information was shared, mutinies plummeted, shipwrecks plummeted and teams were able to accomplish a LOT more.

So maps are one of first examples of shared visualization tools for work. And the scarcity of maps and protections of map information continued through world war II and even CONTINUES TO THIS VERY DAY!

Apple, Google and Microsoft have been battling over the best maps for years. And now, the self-driving car companies are going to battle over the data.

So - let’s look at something a bit more practical for this conference’s topic - Service and Support.

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“when people use visual representations of their work, they are more satisfied with their jobs because they feel more in control of their work and more connected to their colleagues. The study also found that visualizing work can help to reduce stress and improve employee morale.”

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/143415/Carnahan.pdf

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Mutual collaboration toward a common goal creates BELONGING.

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Which can lead to them feeling valued, rewarded, a part of a team, a sense of fairness and a more balanced workload.

Visualizing work gives people control, autonomy and opportunity.

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Types of visualizations

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Simple Charts

Bar charts and line charts are used to show trends over time.
Pie charts and doughnut charts are used to show the relative size of different parts of a whole.
Scatter plots are used to show the relationship between two variables.
Histograms are used to show the distribution of data.
Heatmaps are used to show the density of data in a two-dimensional space.
Treemaps are used to show the hierarchical structure of data.
Sankey diagrams are used to show the flow of data through a system.
Radar charts are used to compare multiple variables across multiple categories.
Word clouds are used to visualize the frequency of words in a text.
Geospatial maps are used to show the location of data points on a map.

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Mind Maps

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Flow Charts and Process Maps

ITIL Foundation ITIL 4 Edition. -. London: Axelos, 2019. MyAxelos Practices.

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Flow Charts and Process Maps

https://wiki.en.it-processmaps.com/index.php/Incident_Management

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Gantt charts and Timelines

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Kanban boards and Tasks

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Infographics and data visualization

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Dashboards

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Value Stream Mapping

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Value Streams are the new kid on the block, and I have to say - this one feels VERY luxurious. If you have your processes and standard operating procedures all mapped out and version controlled:

1 - good for you

2 - This might be your next effort

This example is from the framework called IT4IT from the OpenGroup. It’s detailed AND useful - and I love that.

Here is the Service Value Chain from ITIL - kind of conceptual only… after some digging I found a pretty awesome interpretation of this… CLICK I don’t have the rights to this, but you can search for Service Value Chain Poster and you’ll find it and you can purchase it. Very useful version of this.

And finally CLICK- here’s what most people think of when they hear value stream mapping - this is more for manufacturing, but you could see how this kind of thing might help you if you’re trying to make advanced value streams in IT.

Again, Toyota- a bit later though- more during the LEAN days in the 90’s

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https://readysetvr.com/

https://Jern, Mikael. (2007). An Information Visualization Approach to Retail Space Management (VisMT). Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualisation. 109-116. 10.1109/IV.2007.24. .com/

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Here’s a new one I hadn’t heard of before I started building this content - it’s a planogram. These are used heavily in retail.

I met a retailer named Sara and she described her aging business as “proud to have no standard operating procedures” - when I was done peeling myself off the floor she showed me how implementing planograms removed the THINKING the whole store staff had to do each time new product was introduced.

She put a more rudimentary version of these in place and that freed up around 10-12 hours per week. She said they NOW use that time to provide better customer service!

Sound familiar? Be like Sara. Free up time to provide better service right?

I could see this for walkup centers, corporate building design…

Where else could this be used?

(data centers)

I mean if you think about it, this would useful data in your CMDB, don’t just tell me room my equipment is in, show me.

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By Vic 1976 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8777504

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And there are many…

MANY…

more.

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Experiences

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Research

Analysis

Plan Ideas

Prototype and Iterate

Implement

Document and Learn

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Personas

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This is a figma template.

And you’ve probably seen these before - you might even have some. But I’m here to tell you that these are great for B2C - but in IT and service management we have different needs.

We’re NOT trying to get someone to buy apparel, or the latest tech - or more candy - at least we're not doing that directly

We are trying to support our colleagues and coworkers!

So something like “Age” doesn’t really matter. What they do in their free time, not totally relevant.

It’s relevant to the INDIVIDUAL, but not the archetype.

Now, Introvert/Extrovert - that would be nice to know, especially during onboarding, or the first time they call the service desk. However, it is a LUXURY to get to that kind of detail. If you’re just getting into experience management - this is not what you’re looking for.

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Here’s a journey map I built just for this presentation - so this is NOT BASED ON RESEARCH.

This journey map is meant to visualize the experience of a new college recruit. So I conduct the research - and after talking to HR, IT, Facilities, Corporate security - and a BUNCH of college hires, we identify these main stages.

Now, these can change - they aren’t set in stone - and really it just gives us a construct to work within.

Next - you’ll add steps. (CLICK) This is really where the data becomes useful. The only way to know what steps people take during their experience is to ask them.

This is a great moment to get your journey map in front of the actor - or persona. Showing them the steps is an easy way to validate - add more detail or remove steps that are skipped.

The next step is to add layers and details. (CLICK) This is where you need to have a goal, scope and objective in mind. How details are you going to get? You could list organizational goals here - I’ve just listed some assumptive new hire goals

But I go through the research and I keep adding layers (CLICK)

And I show this to the team and we walk through it and people list opportunities (CLICK)

Then they list pains(CLICK)

- and eventually have a pretty decent journey map.

And I’m skipping over weeks of work to get to this point, right - there are tons of workshops and review sessions to pour through the research again - to listen to people’s ideas - to hone in on defining AN experience.

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You cannot build a Customer Journey Map if you’ve never talked to a customer.

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Stakeholder Maps - are used to illustrate the various stakeholders of a specific interaction or experience. These maps are used to understand who is involved. This is super-useful if you have multiple vendors involved in processes - or in security to understand who sees, touches or owns specific data.

These maps are not only good at determining who needs to be included, but also as a template for the next projects you participate in. I also encourage service teams to use these with devops and infrastructure teams to illustrate the impact of their changes.

For instance, we used these as consultants when we started project with new clients. It was an easy way to understand who we needed to invite. Also, very useful at making sure that big decisions had the proper exposure.

Some similar visuals include

Value network maps - demonstrates or illustrates the value that each of the stakeholders derives or provides for each other. Money, goods, services, information or trust.

Ecosystem maps - these are amazing tools - and usually very common for CMDB and network topology.

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By Bertrand GRONDIN - Wikimedia image in French relabelled in English, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64179142

Kubler-Ross Change Model

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Source: Indeed.com

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Okay one last one before we get to tooling.

An empathy map is an exercise to help teams empathize LOL.

This really helps when innovating and building new ideas and changes. You can read through these to determine if your proposed changes helps with any of their emotional needs.

This is great on service desks to help understand behaviors.

And you can use this for your staff too!

I had a team member I was managing once that was hyper-fixated on sustainability and ecological living. He resisted a lot of change because of it’s impact on the earth. So, after a few projects where he wasn’t on-board, I realized that getting out his empathy map helped me understand how he was going to respond to new change. This saved me SO many headaches - and really, it helped me align with what he needed in his work.

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Tools for visualization

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Paper and Pencil

Accessible

Whiteboards everywhere

Hold it up to the webcam

Insta360 Link

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Paper and Pencil – who uses?

Almost all of my best visualizations start on paper and pencil

We spent thousands of dollars painting walls with whiteboard paint and hanging up expensive whiteboard everywhere - USE THEM - the best process and system discussion have happened over whiteboards.

And there’s a ton of innovation in the space, not only these peel and stick whiteboards (which I use at home) but this amazing webcam.

Probably the best webcamera I’ve ever used. High def, looks great - if you’ve seen my podcast it competes with that quality.

AND it has this awesome recognition tags so it will zoom in on your whiteboard and even skew the video to fill your screen, amazing.

It also has a desktop mode where it will show what you’re working on in front of you and flip the image for your team. AMAZING.

So let’s go digital. Next is my favorite tool of all time.

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MIRO

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MIRO has everything

Comments
History/Versions
Tasks
Progress tracking
Integrations
Plugins to DO EVEN MORE

Multi-user editing
Pre-built templates
Infinite Icon Library
“Stickies”
Notes - agenda - todos
Voting
Timers
URLS
Presentations

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Data visualization

Process/Flow

PowerBI
Tableau
Knowi
Grafana (OSS)
Metabase
Redash
Knime
Plotly
Oracle

Vi$io
LucidChart
LucidChart
Draw.io
SmartDraw
Creately
Gliffy
Notion
OmniGraffle

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Experiences

Research

MIRO
Figma
Adobe XD
Maze.co
UXPin
Balsamiq
InVision

optimalworkshop.com
UXTweak
Mouseflow
Glassbox
LogRocket
Heap
qualtric$

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Simulations

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The last visual tool I wanted to highlight was SIMulations.��These are called model pits - they are both an ancient and modern tool for warfare and defense applications.

And these exist for businesses! Imagine running a model service desk - or an IT team. ��Gaming Works, SXP and CDW are known for their IT and business simulations and they can be used not only for training your team on best practices, but are immensely useful for disaster planning, recovery scenario planning - but also for continual process improvement and procedural level training.

If you haven’t experienced a simulation, I highly recommend you look into it. I was so hooked on my first SIM that I applied to work for the company building them - AND - instead of getting hired, got trained to deliver them and did so for a few years.��Immense learning AND team building in those rooms.

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Best practices for visualized work

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Involve everyone and work together

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A project is like a river. Operations flows too… right?

The only way to know why there is water there is to look upstream.

Involving decision makers and influencers early on avoids the need to explain:

The research - and the contents therein
The analysis - and any conclusions the team has reached

And the same goes for downstream impacts.

Having agents and customers involved in the analysis and coming changes removes fear, creates ownership and streamlines organizational change.

Change hearts along the journey of the project and you’ll have a MUCH easier time when things ACTUALLY change.

This isn’t easy, because it means conducting regular working session (note: I did not say meetings). And the results are amazing.

My favorite projects of all time are the ones that seem impossible, but then through teamwork and awkward silence - we get through and agree and truly change.

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Version Control and Governance

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Outcomes and Goals

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Visualization enables teams to collaborate and improve services at a fraction of the cost and risk of other methods.

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Session #406

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Thank you for �attending this session.

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