Service delivery mapping workshops
A facilitated day with the officers who actually take the calls, raise the jobs, and close them — drawing the path a request takes on paper before anyone argues about numbers.
Prepared in Saltcotes. Read in committee rooms that still use blotters.
Citizen requests, drawn for the people who must answer for them
The queue on paper, before it becomes a minute.
Desktop Pathline reads contact-centre logs, repair jobs, and complaint files for public bodies in the United Kingdom, then draws maps and tables a scrutiny chair can follow without a specialist at their elbow.
Last winter’s typical commission: a twelve-month housing-repair extract, two A3 maps, a 32-page pack, and a working-group session in the civic suite. No live wall. No product login.
Who sits with us
Complaints managers, customer-service leads, democratic services, and members who are tired of being shown a single amber column for unlike delays.
What leaves the studio
Bound packs, ward maps, complaint timelines, and a method note Internal Audit can read. The drawings stay yours to reprint.
Where the work starts
A usable extract or a supervised morning in the hub. We do not guess from a screenshot of someone else’s board.
Flagship commission
Citizen request pattern review
Six weeks with one service family — housing repairs, missed collections, planning enforcement, or adult-care contacts — counted, mapped, and written so a committee can see repeat households beside jobs that passed the published timescale.
Miriam Hale reads the extract. Owen Pritchard draws the maps. You keep a named officer in the room for codes that look tidy and are not.
Related work
Workshops, ward packs, complaint sheets
Ward briefing packs
A short, ward-bound set of maps and tables for members who are asked, in the supermarket queue, why their streets look busier on the request list than the next ward.
Complaint and ombudsman visual summaries
A single-sheet timeline and a short map of contacts for a complex complaint file — so a stage-two reviewer or a monitoring officer can see the sequence without rereading two hundred pages.
Quarterly operational review packs
A repeating set of maps and tables for the same service family, produced each quarter so cabinet or the senior leadership team can see whether last quarter’s promises moved the queue.
From a Lancashire chair
The pack arrived with the maps folded so they sat on the blotter, which sounds petty until you have watched members tilt laptops. We could follow missed repairs by estate without Miriam in the room. I still wanted a longer note on why two parishes share a depot code; that gap is printed in the method page, to her credit, rather than smoothed over.
Journal
Notes from logs, rounds, and committee desks
How to read a missed-collection log without arguing about the round
A log that says “not out” and a log that says “access” are not the same delay. This note is for officers about to take either figure into a committee.
The first three questions members ask when a queue is shown as a map
Ward shading is not an accusation. Still, chairs reach for the darkest polygon first. Here is how we caption a map so that instinct does not become a minute.
Drawing a housing repair backlog on paper, not on a wall screen
A3 still fits a committee desk. A live wall does not. This is the sequence we use when damp and mould jobs have to be seen beside kitchen leaks without mixing the clocks.