Practice area 2
Out of 9
80
Total respondants
28
Countries
10+
Experience range
Integrating practices across teams
Integrating practices across teams establishes the collaborative infrastructure required to embed journey management across an enterprise. This practice area focuses on building cross-functional literacy, distributing operational ownership, setting quality standards for shared assets, and piloting new delivery models. It also encompasses the enablement, cultural reinforcement, and change management efforts necessary to sustain these ways of working across functional boundaries.
What activities make up this practice?
Survey respondents first rated the relevance of each practice (0–5, from 'not relevant at all' to 'very relevant'). For practices scoring 3 or higher, respondents scored their organisation's effectiveness in applying them (0–5, from 'not effective at all' to 'very effective'). The chart above shows both the range and average scores for relevance and effectiveness across each practice.
Delivering internal mapping services work well from the start
Internal mapping services are the one practice that doesn’t depend much on an organisation's practice stage. 67% of respondents state that delivering Internal mapping services across the business is either very or extremely relevant when integrating journey management across the business, and almost half (49%) say that they are very or extremely effective at delivering this. Applicability only varies by 0.28 between emerging and advanced practices.
Approaches that change other people’s capability and accountability take time
Other practices that seek to build the capability of others, such as increasing Journey literacy, co-creating and distributing ownership and integrating practices into existing workflows, are harder and have a much wider gap between how relevant they are and how effective organisations are at implementing them. Effectiveness scores for these across emerging and established practices are far lower than for advanced-stage practices.
Organisations don't 'feel' more effective in this practice area until practices are at a more advanced stage
Early-stage and Established practices rate these practices as more relevant than effective by about half a point. On average, they’re “very” relevant but only “moderately” effective. Advanced or Leading practices close the gap completely. They rate them slightly more effective (4.16 out of 5) than relevant (4 out of 5). Effectiveness rises more than twice as much as relevance (+1.09 vs +0.43), and the effectiveness difference is significant (p = .008). Advanced practices don’t consider these more relevant (the relevance gap is only 0.44), but they’re much better at making them work.
Methods, tools and activities that make up this practice area
Journey literacy
Educating and training teams in journey maps and tools, research practices, human-centred design methods or shared terminology
Internal mapping services
Co-creating & distributing ownership
Integration of practices
Gaining and retaining the buy-in of participating teams
Defining tasks and responsibilities
Reviewing quality
What challenges do organisations experience with this practice?
The following challenges summarise the core themes identified across participant interviews. Survey participants rated the frequency of each challenge. The graph below compares average scores by different stages of practice:
All challenges are felt similarly by all organisations regardless of their stage of practice
All challenges scored within an average range of 3.59 out of five and 3.67 out of five. This means, regardless of their stage of practice (emerging, established or advanced) organisations consistently score the frequency of all challenges between "sometimes" to "often".
The frequency of challenges does not diminish the more advanced you get
While there are small fluctuations between practice stages, no challenge shows a statistically significant decline over time or with increased effectiveness. Even the most advanced practices continue to face hurdles in driving cross-team buy-in and adoption. This persistent prevalence indicates that cross-team integration challenges stem largely from structural or cultural factors independent of practice effectiveness. Rather than reflecting a team's proficiency (skill and know-how) in driving alignment or influencing stakeholders, these challenges are shaped by broader organisational and external dynamics unrelated to Journey Management.
Advanced practices face leadership sponsorship challenges most often
55% face it often or very often, the highest of any stage, even though their average score is slightly lower than early-stage practices. This suggests that as Journey Management scales, securing ongoing sponsorship and investment becomes a more frequent issue.
Challenges that organisations experience
Limited leadership sponsorship and investment
Having to defend, justify or secure the time, funding and resources required for research initiatives and journey mapping