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Objective

To give the restaurant managers a better experience, it was felt that the first step in the transformation should be to understand the day-to-day lives of restaurant managers fully, the jobs they have to do to keep the restaurants running, how technology fits into their working lives and their feedback on the tools they are given.

Approach

For product teams to start replacing and improving tools, the first step was to identify all of the journeys and then prioritise them in terms of user and business needs. This was achieved by working with managers, support tools and internal documentation each job was identified alongside its frequency, importance, the tasks required to complete the job and which related tools they used. Using this information, I could prioritise the jobs with the managers and product teams. This prioritised list formed the roadmap and gave us a starting point for the research.

To map out every single task and related journey within the restaurant manager’s lives would be a mammoth task and would take a long time to complete. It was agreed that we could aim towards mapping out every journey and pain point eventually, but to begin with, we should start with the journey at the top of the list, which was creating rotas for restaurant staff. Creating the rotas was a very time-consuming job which used a legacy tool that was no longer supported and was challenging to use.

To document these jobs and associated journeys, I developed a template in Miro which could be used to capture the journeys and the feedback. I also included documentation and an index of the jobs that could be added to over time.

Over several weeks, I spent time visiting restaurants and talking to managers to understand how they created rotas. They showed me the steps they went through to create rotas (it became apparent that each manager had a different way of doing this, and many had developed their own processes, hacks and workarounds). They also gave me feedback and pain points on the journey each had to go through to create rotas.

Using the template, I documented the rota journey alongside the pain points. Working with the product team, it was decided that it would be best to buy a new rota tool and the journey was used to help procure a new tool and help with vendor selection.

Outcome

The journey maps have helped the product teams better understand the restaurant managers’ needs. The maps will be added over time and they will become a valuable resource which can be changed as new processes and tools are developed. It has also helped the product teams with adopting a user focus for the work they do and has helped reduce the friction between the managers, the tools they use and the teams that support them in head office.

Service Design | Journey Mapping | User Research

Client: Nando’s

Deliverable: Service maps, Personas

Challenge

Nando’s currently has 475 restaurants across the UK and Ireland, employing over 18,000 people. To run the restaurants, the managers have over 60 software tools to carry out everything from recruitment and onboarding to stock control and cashing up.

The various tools they use are a mixture of third party tools which have been adapted and tools which have been developed internally. Feedback from the restaurant managers was that the tools are disjointed, time-consuming to use, prone to breaking and hard to learn. Knowledge within the product teams of the working lives of restaurant staff and managers is inconsistent and little is known about how the various tools fit in with those tasks.

Example of process journey map