The City of Whittlesea wanted to see two high-volume resident services the way residents actually experience them — not the way the org chart describes them. Rates and damaged-bin requests look simple from the inside, but both stretch across multiple touchpoints, teams, and systems, which is exactly where friction hides and accountability blurs. Residents feel the seams; the organisation rarely sees them end to end. The challenge was to surface that lived experience in a single day and turn it into something the team could act on, rather than another workshop that generates sticky notes and no change.

A one-day customer journey mapping workshop, focused deliberately on two concrete processes rather than trying to boil the ocean. Anchoring on council rates and the damaged bin process gave the day a tight scope and made the output immediately usable. The session walked each journey through the resident's eyes stage by stage — mapping touchpoints, surfacing the moments of friction and effort, and pinpointing where handoffs between teams and channels quietly break the experience. Working across two contrasting journeys in parallel let patterns emerge: the pain points that were specific to one process versus the systemic ones showing up in both.