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Duplicate this page into your own Notion workspace so you can work in it. Use the "Duplicate" option from the page menu at the top right. The canvas is meant to be filled in against one real service, so you want your own copy rather than this one.

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This is a working canvas for mapping a service, following the method in How to Map a Service Properly. It runs from the three things worth settling before anything is drawn, through the visible path and what makes it possible, out to the actors a journey map never shows, and finishes with a check on what is still missing.

Use it on one real service you know well enough to name specific people, teams and rules for. A first pass takes about an hour, and works better with two or three people who each see a different part of the service.

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A map earns its keep by making a decision easier. That is the standard to hold this canvas to. Completeness is the wrong target: a service map is never complete, and the pursuit of completeness is what produces the accurate, admired, entirely inert artefact.

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Part 1: What to settle before you draw anything

Skipping this part is the most common reason a mapping session drifts. Fill in all three before writing down a single step.

1.1 Scope

There is no universal boundary, only a boundary that suits the question. Choose it deliberately rather than inheriting it from whoever drew the last version.

The service starts when

For example: when someone first suspects they might need it, rather than when they book.

• write your boundary here

The service ends when

For example: when the person no longer needs the service at all, rather than at the point of delivery.

• write your boundary here

1.2 The decision this map exists to serve

Whether to invest in a new channel. Why a handover between two teams keeps failing. Where effort could be removed without harming the outcome. These produce visibly different maps of the same service, at different resolutions, and naming the decision now prevents the familiar argument about level of detail halfway through.

The decision this map has to make easier:

• write it here, in one sentence

How we will know the map has helped:

• write it here

1.3 The evidence standard

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Mark every item you add to this canvas with one of these. Assumptions are not a problem. Assumptions that look like findings are.

O = observed directly

R = reported by someone who works in the service

A = currently an assumption

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Part 2: The visible path

What the person using the service does, receives and waits for. Keep it to the resolution your decision needs.