The concept of the Microjourney® is fundamental to the Pega Express™ delivery approach and is our way of breaking down the complexity of the larger customer journeys into smaller journeys that can be delivered more quickly increasing your speed to value in your transformation program.

What is a Microjourney?

Microjourneys are the life cycles, or units of work, that deliver a meaningful result to customers and users. Microjourneys are a part of the overall customer journey that achieves all or a subset of the required business outcomes.  In a Pega Platform™ project, a journey for a business customer can represent multiple and related business outcomes and cross multiple teams and channels (multiple touchpoints). With this complexity, customer journeys might become too large to deliver in just 60-90 days. In Pega Express™, you can use Microjourneys to simplify complex processes. A Microjourney can be:

• Delivered to more than one customer type (persona).
• Delivered by one or more channels.
• Achieved by one or more case types.
• Delivered to one channel and one persona, and then re-used for a different channel or persona.
• Implemented in around 90 days (the perfect size for an application release).

The following figure shows how the end to end customer journey of a Roadside Assistance Membership policy can be broken down into three distinct Microjourneys with each delivering value to the business and their customers.

Why do Microjourneys add value? 

Identifying Microjourneys requires you to consider an end-to-end experience for end users. This exercise delivers an incremental piece of functionality that teams can put into production quickly, which adds immediate value. You can capture Microjourneys directly in Pega Platform™ by breaking the Microjourney down into the the building blocks, which we call the three pillars, of your application. 

The diagram below shows the three pillars of your application comprises the Case Types or Strategies, Personas and Channels  and the Data and Interfaces associated with the Microjourney. 

Capturing the three pillars directly in App Studio, allows you to quickly and easily build consensus around the solution by visually documenting the case design, stages and steps, personas, channels, and integrations. This approach reduces risk by directly recording the scope and simultaneously developing a common understanding of the solution to achieve the desired business outcomes.  With this information captured in App Studio you can also create an estimate of the effort required to complete your application.  The estimator functionality is available in Pega Platform from version 8.5 and later.

When do Microjourneys take place? 

Microjourneys are relevant from the start of your project where you define your roadmap of incremental  Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) releases through to your application delivery process and go live of each MLP. 

After you identify and prioritize your Microjourneys, at the start of your transformation, you can the capture the building blocks of the Microjourneys in App Studio.  This gives you a head start on your project delivery. During your project initiation activities, Microjourneys focus on the high-level architecture and design that prepares the project to start the build activities.  During your build sprints the Microjourneys become a cornerstone for the scrum team to configure the solution iteratively.  Whilst in build, Microjourneys provide the structure to focus testing activities that are aligned to the business outcomes. As part of the business readiness activities ahead of Go Live, Microjourneys give the context of the change so that end users can adopt the solution and support the business to achieve the business outcomes.