Vocational Guidance Operations Discovery

The organization has spent more than fifty years helping teenagers work out what to study and what to do next. Its guidance programs run through counselors, individual and group sessions, and a sequence of activities, with teams spread across several sites. Over the years the operation grew into a mix of a portal, spreadsheets, forms, shared folders and chat, and the real information ended up living in the folders rather than in the portal.

Base Flows was brought in for a discovery, not a build. The work started with what already existed: the portal in use, the forms, the spreadsheets and the folders where each case is kept. From there we interviewed the counselors who run the process every day, because they are the ones who know where it bends.

The core of the discovery was one journey per role, end to end. Everyone in the operation, from the student to the administrator, got their own map: what they do, in what order, with which tool, and what they need from everybody else. On top of those maps we marked the friction, which is where the work gets slow and confusing: the manual steps, the waiting, and the points where the same information is written down twice.

We also modeled the information behind every step, so the team could look at its operation as data and not only as a sequence of tasks. Then the whole map went back to the team in a working session and was validated piece by piece, until the picture matched what actually happens on a normal week.

The organization already works on Softr, which is where its public presence lives. The discovery closed with a written report in the client's hands: the journeys, the findings and the information model behind them. It is their map, and it stays with them.