Cross Country is a leading American workforce solutions platform and advisory firm specialising in health and patient care. They connect nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals with permanent, contract, and travel opportunities across the USA.

I successfully pitched and secured a contract to map the current state of their biggest business line and co-design a future vision to form the foundation of their strategic roadmaps. This initial success led to an invitation to complete four additional projects over two years, ultimately mapping 90% of Cross Country’s business operations.

Results

• Mapped 10 Key Customer Journeys: Comprehensive journey maps for the most critical touchpoints.

• Visualised Their Entire Business Ecosystem: A holistic view of operations and interdependencies.

• Identified 255 Improvement Opportunities: Actionable insights prioritized and managed using the journey management tool theydo.

This case study details the process I led, the collaborative journey with the Cross Country team, and the resulting impact on their business strategy and internal alignment.

Starting with Understanding the Current State

To gain a deep understanding of the business, I began with a series of stakeholder interviews, focusing on the executive leadership team. Using the User-Centered Design Canvas framework, I guided conversations to uncover pain points, priorities, and opportunities from multiple perspectives.

Workshops were then planned and facilitated virtually using Zoom and Miro for collaboration. I began each session with an outline of the process to set expectations, and foster a collaborative atmosphere with an engaging icebreaker and interactive Q&A.

The strategic workshops were all hosted on Miro, focused on mapping the current state of experiences, processes, and systems. These sessions enabled the team to identify opportunities for improvement across digital tools, manual processes, and policies.

The First Project: Nursing & Allied Line of Business

The initial project focused on the Travel Nursing & Travel Allied lines of business. From the stakeholder interviews, I identified several key areas of information that needed to be explored when mapping the current state:

• Nurse Customer Experience: Goals and challenges nurses face in achieving them.

• Client (Hospital/Facility) Customer Experience: Goals and challenges of hospital facilities.

• Employee Experience: Goals of customer-facing and backstage teams, their ability to enable customers, and areas of friction or success.

• Partner Experience: Mapping processes for third-party recruitment companies used to fill client contracts.

• Backstage Systems and Processes: Tools, systems, and capabilities supporting the business.

• Data Flow: Key pieces of data collected, their sources, and uses.

• Current Initiatives: Ongoing projects aimed at improving the current state.

• Opportunities: Improvement ideas gathered directly from workshop participants.

All this information was captured during workshops in a “working map” in Miro—a dynamic, collaborative space where ideas and insights could flow freely. I then translated this into TheyDo, organising the data into a clean, actionable, and manageable format.

After completing each current state mapping project, I presented the TheyDo map to both the project and executive teams. During these sessions, I demonstrated how to leverage the map in two key ways:

1. Educating New Team Members: Providing a comprehensive overview of the business to onboard new employees effectively.

2. Prioritising and Planning: Transforming identified improvement opportunities into actionable roadmaps, ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

Future Vision

Working with a client that encouraged “blue sky” thinking was incredibly rewarding, and we embraced the opportunity to design an aspirational future vision.

To prepare for the future vision mapping workshops, I curated a collection of relevant future signals and emerging trends to serve as inspiration for the sessions.

Workshop Process

Workshops began by revisiting goals from the current state mapping, ensuring alignment across all key groups: facilities/hospitals, healthcare professionals, partners/vendors, and internal teams.

I then introduced curated future inspiration signals and trends to spark ideas. Participants collaborated in smaller groups to map out their ideal future state experiences, later reconvening to present and refine their ideas through feedback and discussion.

In select sessions, I introduced Future Vision Journey Design Scorecards to evaluate how well the proposed journeys aligned with goals, ensuring focus on delivering exceptional experiences.

Post-Workshop Outcomes

I documented the future vision in TheyDo, capturing all ideas as actionable opportunities. By linking overlapping opportunities across business lines, we highlighted areas for impactful investment.

To finalize, I facilitated the creation of a service measurement plan, aligning teams on 1-2 key metrics to track progress toward their vision.

The workshops that Amelia led proved to be one of the biggest assets to our organisation in 2024. As a team, we were able to really dive deep into where our bottlenecks were and collaborated on solutions that we are already integrating into our processes. We have already seen a 20% improvement in one of our top metrics.

Melodi Williams, Director of Product Management

Ecosystem mapping

To support Cross Country’s digital transformation strategy, I developed a detailed ecosystem map of their current technology landscape. This visualisation included:

• All systems in use and their associated teams.

• Key customer data—sources, storage, and usage.

• Money flow throughout the business, from contract to cash.

Building on the future vision workshops, I proposed a simplified, future-focused ecosystem architecture. This streamlined approach supported the collaboratively crafted ideal journey vision, reducing complexity and enhancing manageability.