Defining Journeys
Driving Organizational Alignment with Advisor Journey and Service Blueprint Mapping, Aviso Wealth, 2019
Context & Challenges
In early 2019, the company launched a major initiative called eAdvisor, aimed at unifying three separate client onboarding and management processes into a single streamlined system while digitizing several manual workflows.
The eAdvisor initiative encompassed over twelve workstreams and had a wide-reaching impact to:
External users - financial advisors and Credit Union members across Canada
Internal teams - including customer service, operations, compliance, and practice management etc.
Yet, the effort lacked a common view of audience needs or a cohesive definition of success. The project quickly faced significant hurdles: a lack of clear vision, fragmented collaboration between teams, and no shared understanding of end-user needs. Recognizing these challenges, the internal change management team engaged us to help create a unified vision and align cross-functional teams.
Objective
To address the challenge, I partnered with a UX researcher and the change management team to identify user personas, map the full advisor journey, pinpoint challenges, and uncover opportunities.
Our ultimate goal: unify the project’s vision and establish a shared understanding across diverse internal departments.
My Role
As UX strategy lead, my work focused on the following:
Developed a collaborative framework
Co-hosted workshops and journey mapping sessions
Translated findings into actionable design artifacts
I provided practical solutions to align stakeholders toward a common goal. Collaborating closely with the User Researcher, I conducted workshops with internal business leaders, planned the sessions, and managed stakeholder expectations. Then, I transformed workshop insights into a comprehensive journey map and service blueprint design artifacts.
Determining the Focal Point
The eAdvisor audience spanned four distinct user groups, each with four potential journey variations — mapping every scenario would have required significant time and resources.
To stay focused, I proposed an MVP approach: start with the largest user segment, validated by data, and scale from there.
We defined a representative persona using data from focus group advisors, then mapped the primary journey — client onboarding with an advisor. By identifying key pain points and opportunities, we aimed to find opportunities to improve both the advisor-client relationship and internal workflow efficiency.
Method
The working group agreed that an experience map would highlight the business value propositions and key messages, convey the end-to-end journeys of both internal and external audiences, and show how eAdvisor fits into their experience.
Workshops
I co-facilitated more than six workshops with 6 to 8 internal business leaders.
Establishing Guardrails
For the workshop series, I created and shared guidelines to keep the discussions focused and prevent off-topic conversations.
Rules included:
Keep the conversation at a high level - avoid ‘feature’ discussions
Focus on the behaviour, not the systems
Capture the typical journey vs exceptions and edgy scenarios
Avoid using internal jargons and sub-workstream/platform nicknames
I also encouraged the participants to collectively build upon ideas, which greatly helped create shared understanding as a united front, vs a fragmented departmental approach.
All participants followed the ground rules, which helped each session to be constructive and efficient.
Workshops and Collaboration
During the sessions, I observed that business leaders organically began aligning with each other as they discussed different aspects of the advisor journey.
The co-creation approach proved to be a critical success factor. It not only surfaced ideas and identified gaps but also fostered alignment around scope and priorities. By focusing discussions on the value we aimed to deliver collectively, leaders were able to move from siloed thinking to a unified, solution-oriented mindset.
Validation
By the end of the workshops, we were able to define the key stages of the advisor onboarding a new client and uncovered how they’re building a relationship.
To validate our assumptions, we interviewed five focus group advisors. Most of the information we captured was accurate, but one of the pain points we identified turned out to be an enjoyable part of their workflow. We reflected these findings in the final version of the journey map.
Journey Map
The journey map, validated with insights from focus group advisors, illustrated the advisor's experience with a new client persona named Linda, capturing her core needs.
This detailed map delineated Linda's progression as she interacts with clients, reflecting her mindset and emotional states at various stages.
Additionally, it highlighted the specific tools and systems she employs throughout the process.
The analysis revealed potential opportunities for enhancing the eAdvisor experience, showcasing areas for growth and innovation that align with Linda's evolving expectations and requirements.
This journey map served as a crucial reference point, preventing duplicate solutions and establishing a single source of truth for design, development, and support teams.
Service Blueprint
In addition to the advisor's journey map, we also mapped the company's staff experience alongside the advisor's journey. To highlight the organizational challenges, shared goals, working relationships, and both positive and negative impacts of the eAdvisor roll-out, we adapted the Service Blueprint methodology.
The service blueprint identified backend opportunities and clarified team ownership.
Result
The change management team — our project ambassador — leveraged the experience maps to clearly communicate the vision and goals for eAdvisor across the organization.
The maps became a directional guide that realigned teams and kept business discussions focused on the most critical user and stakeholder needs.
Beyond the artifacts themselves, the experience mapping process fostered early alignment among internal function leads. It gave them a shared language and framework, accelerating collaboration and decision-making in later phases.
“Thanks Kay for sharing and excellent work to you and T! I love how this pulls together the backstage “actors” and “props” in a view that keeps the customer journey (in our case, the advisor) in mind as we look to deliver a seamless experience.”
“Thank you to you and T, you both did an exceptional job with this and the working group meetings.”
“Thanks for the great team effort and enjoyable experience! It was a pleasure and there’s more to come!
Internally, we will use this journey map as the end-to-end view to refer to as we drill down into specific changes by stakeholder group during our engagement activities.”
