XD across mulitple enterprise systems

Reposting from http://jasonfurnell.wordpress.com/  Thanks Jason...

ThoughtWorks has a healthy community of people who you can ask random questions… and generally get a pretty good response.
This response to the question “Experience with planning XD across multiple enterprise systems” from Lindsay Ratcliffe was no doubt off the cuff – but it’s a great summary of how to approach large XD problems. Here it is…. (thanks to Lindsay for letting me post it)
“Map out the existing customer experiences across all the touch points relevant to the systems that you are rebuilding. This scale of project can be somewhat daunting but is an excellent opportunity to really affect the total customer experience. Often when experiences are just looked at from a single product perspective the overall experience becomes disjointed and ugly because no-one is looking at the big picture.
Not sure if it’s on the same sort of scale but I was involved in a project at a bank where they did a review of their product portfolio and discovered majority of their customers only had 1.3 products (average metrics obviously). So they went on a drive to ‘increase a share of wallet’. ‘Products’ actually were as simple as:

• An single bank account
• Access to internet banking
• Access to telephone banking
• A card with their account (debit or credit)
• etc..

Each product was built in a seperate legacy system and so as soon as you started to draw out the experience that a new customer to go through just to open a single bank account you immediately saw the pains. Seperate forms for each ‘product’, having to repeat personal information on each form, dependancies between products, lags opening some products, different ID requirements for different products. Urrgggggh it was just all too hard, which actually meant that it was then quite easy to make what seemed like small improvements but that had massive positive impact.
So start with the usual stuff:

• Looking In: undertstand the end customers – sketch out personas that include wants, needs and desires
• Make a list of customer goals – what are the customers trying/desiring to achieve during their interactions
• Map out the existing customer experience – identify where/what the pain points are, where the moments of truth/happy moments are, where the waste is, where the opportunities are (this can be done collaboratively. Do it with the business and get their perspective. Do it again with customers and get their perspective, especially as they won’t give a hoots about technology.
• Looking Out: look at the competitors and other organisations who may not be competitors but have a similar structure and see what the customer experience is like there.
• Analyse the findings from both looking in and out to find out where the true insights are
• Use the as-is state and the insights as a spring board for ideating around the ideal state (again do this collaboratively to get the best results)

The deliverable doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than a big map of the ideal customer experience across the products and systems. This provides a vision of success and a framework for rebuilding that is based on value to both the end customer and the business.