Service Ecosystem Mapping x South Magazine
Duration: 10 Weeks Team Members: Vidihika Khanna, Felisha Duran Role: Service Designer
Objective: Immersion into the current state business practices of local publication, South Magazine. Our team was tasked with creating a current state ecosystem map of their current practices and see where we could present opportunities for improvement.
Research Methodologies: Employee interviews, Ethnographic research
We spent the first two weeks of our project shadowing and interviewing employees of the company to find where we could help streamline their bi-monthly publication cycle.
We focused on the journey of the owner, Michael Brooks, who felt like he was “spread too thin.”
“Michael’s doing jobs which other people should be doing, because he doesn’t trust them.”
-South Magazine Employee
Barriers:
1. Uneven delegation of work .
2. Multiple Inconsistent form of communication between Michael and employees.
3. Tight deadline, employee scrambling to get content together days before print.
Michael’s Journey
We mapped Michael’s journey from Week 0, the beginning of the publishing cycle to Week 8, when the publication must be sent to print.
Michael’s Journey + Magazine Departments
After understanding Michael’s journey we wanted to see where and when involvement from other departments, like Design, Editorial, and Sales began.
THE “AS IS” ECOSYSTEM:
This map takes us through the original 8 week cycle of the magazine, beginning with Michael as the main source for communication and delegation of tasks.
THE FUTURE ECOSYSTEM:
This map takes us through a reimagined 8 week cycle. Michael’s responsibilities are delegated evenly between departments, and lines of communication are more transparent and predictable.
Takeaways:
This project was a great exercise in understanding how faulty communication channels can impact the outcomes of a business. Going beyond the journey, to map the entire ecosystem of the magazine, helped us get a better understanding of the practices of each department and their timelines. Mapping these complex relationships was a lesson in organizing complex data into easy to read and follow visualizations for the aid of the people in business.