EventStorming:
How to Ensure Your Customer Journey Strategy Becomes a Reality

There it hangs. The beautiful diagram of your future-state customer journey. It decorates the office landscape, but what else does it achieve? A frustrating reminder that it never really took off? EventStorming can be your salvation.

Too many visions for the customer journey never really come to life. EventStorming can change that. The method brings the implementation of the digital solution into the project’s early, strategic phase and connects technology with business and users.

With EventStorming, you can create visionary and actionable customer journeys that extend beyond the office and deliver results for you and your customers.

Here, we share Mjølner’s experiences using EventStorming as a tool to elevate the customer journey strategy from paper to reality.

Can the customer journey actually be realized – Technically and Economically?

The customer journey – manifested in a Service Blueprint, Customer Journey, Omnichannel Map, or something entirely different – is a central element in designing new digital products and services, and for good reason.

The map of the customer’s journey highlights business opportunities and challenges across your organization’s silos.

“The user experience can be refined into a subtle but effective business driver that leaves your competitors behind.”

But what value does your customer journey strategy have if the otherwise fine vision is technically impossible or too expensive to realize?

The holy trinity of the customer journey: Business, users and technology

When we at Mjølner start a new project for our customers, we always view the digital solution from three perspectives:

With this holistic approach, where we not only look at the perfect solution but also consider what can be achieved technically and economically, we get the most value quickly and with the least effort.

“The classic methods for designing future-state customer journeys typically focus solely on business and users. They risk overlooking the actual implementation of the solution.”

EventStorming overcomes this pitfall by being an extremely effective link between all three perspectives.

EventStorming makes the technical discussion more accessible to all stakeholders – domain experts, users, designers, and business decision-makers. This strengthens the shared understanding of the solution across the board and ties the strategic design work to the feasibility of the solution.

EventStorming: 1-2-3 Now!

For EventStorming, we use a workshop format where a group of typically 6-10 people participate.

The participants are representatives from the various roles in the customer journey who possess relevant knowledge. The work is facilitated by a user experience designer and a software architect, who ensure the right questions are asked.

“In its simplest form, EventStorming consists of a long wall on which a sea of sticky notes is placed.”

The wall represents a timeline on which participants place all the ‘events’ from a customer journey or process flow in relation to each other. There is no marked start or end point. All participants add ‘events’ to the customer journey at the same time.

When all ‘events’ are exhausted, layers of detail and complexity can subsequently be built on with great versatility and flexibility. This can include concepts for process modeling such as users and external systems, but there is also room for concepts from customer journeys such as ‘pains’ and ‘gains’.

“The great strength of EventStorming is that the method engages all experts and stakeholders in the mapping work.”

Knowledge about an organization’s customer journey is often spread across all the roles that perform the process.

EventStorming gathers this knowledge in the same room and puts all perspectives into play against each other. This means that even invisible processes and issues are unfolded and identified very early.

From ’current-state’ to ’future-state’

EventStorming can move from the big picture to more and more concrete ‘events’, which ultimately approach real implementation. The method’s flexibility means that it can serve many purposes – both for mapping an existing customer journey and as a modeling tool for a future software solution.

The level of detail in each EventStorming session can be adjusted as needed, but it can generally be divided into three levels.

Big Picture: Overview of ’current-state’

As the name suggests, ‘Big Picture’ maps out the broad overview of the customer journey and the context of processes, dependencies, actors, and other domains it involves. At this high level, the focus is on exploring the domain across departments and silos within the organization.

We use Big Picture at the start of new projects before selecting areas to be further detailed.

“Big Picture is excellent for mapping the ‘current-state’ of the customer journey and identifying problems and opportunities that can be addressed with a digital solution.”

With these insights in hand, we begin ideation on the solution. We concretize the ideas in the customer journey’s ‘future-state’ by using EventStorming for process modeling.

Process modeling: From sticky note to code

In process modeling, we insert the future digital solution into the existing customer journey. This highlights the solution’s impact on the journey and the process dependencies.

Process modeling focuses on a selected sequence identified in ‘Big Picture’ and maps its complexity in depth. The process is made explicit for all participants, revealing implicit knowledge and allowing it to be challenged and optimized.

The level of detail is so rich that the software architect can take content from individual sticky notes and translate them directly into code. Beautifully, there is no transfer of knowledge from design to software architecture because the implementation is handled directly in the EventStorming format.

Software design: Edge cases, rules, and policies

Software design adds further details to ‘Process Modeling’. The focus is on actual implementation. Therefore, the group of relevant participants is different from ‘Big Picture’ and ‘Process Modeling’. Here, edge cases, rules, policies, and similar aspects are examined.

“EventStorming provides incredible insight into a future digital solution from all perspectives in a very short time.”

Very early in the design process, the consequences of both business and implementation decisions become visible to all stakeholders. This is particularly valuable if the solution needs to be realized within a tight deadline.

Want to know more about EventStorming and agile requirements gathering?

At Mjølner, we have trained a team of experts in EventStorming – with a wide range of skills represented.

👉 Contact Senior UX Consultant, Agnete Røberg Horup, if you want to know more.

Email: aho@mjolner.dk
Phone: +45 41 95 36 18