User Interviews/Service Blueprint

Mapping the lockout/tagout process for an electric utility

As the electric utility expands into new territories in other states, there is a need to standardize safety procedures across operating companies. This simplifies documentation and ensures the safest procedures for everyone involved. We used this service blueprint to map out the current process and understand all the systems in use on the front and back end.

Working with stakeholders, the change management team, and users, my role focused on user interviews, mapping out the process in a service blueprint, and presenting our solution to those stakeholders.
Audience
Field workers and engineers

Goals
Maintain safety, streamline documentation

Metrics & Results
After mapping out and comparing the lockout/tagout safety procedures, we hit our goals of:
• Field worker safety: A 0% safety incident metric remains intact
• Employee training: 66% drop in training time to support all three operating companies
• Process documentation: 53% decrease in the number of pages documenting the different switching processes

Timeline
2 months



Research & Discovery


User Interviews:
I conducted and documented interviews with 3 field supervisors who support and oversee the lockout/tagout process within one operating company.

Key Insights:
• Extreme importance on keeping field workers safe
• Desire to simplify training employees across three operating companies
• Too many documents make finding the right information time consuming and harder to maintain


Design Solution


A service blueprint was created to document the process and compare to other operating companies. A service blueprint was chosen because it shows the full process, front stage and back stage, from the perspective of our user. This makes it clear what happens at each step and what tools and systems are being used. After presenting this documentation to our stakeholders, we worked closely with the change management team to streamline documentation and roll out these updates for the different operating companies.

Next Steps


During the interview process, I uncovered many opportunities to simplify and automate the lockout/tagout process. I created a proposal around them that highlighted the potential business impacts and shared them with the leadership team as well as key stakeholders in the process.