Stages of Digital Transformation: Creating a Strategic Roadmap

A product roadmap keeps everyone on the same page as to where a product is and where it’s headed next. Are there duplications across the enterprise that need to be consolidated? Examples include different departments in the company using separate project management tools, storage systems etc. that can be effectively converged.

Examples include migrating an e-commerce platform such as Magento 1 to Magento 2, replacing an ERP such as Dynamics NAV with SAP or vice versa etc. Review and assess potential features – use a scoring mechanism to weigh potential features and decide which of them bring the most value to your initiative. To help you save time, you can download these examples for free (we’ve built them using PowerPoint and the Office Timelineadd-in) so you can get started right away. Releases and milestones – stating when work will start and be delivered.

Review and manage ideas

When asked what their company’s road map looks like, many executives describe something akin to what is shown in Exhibit 2, which is drawn from the historic example of an automotive OEM. For one thing, it shows only the company’s existing projects, which are tightly constrained by current realities. For instance, power train innovations are focused on fulfilling emission requirements.

Return to your original roadmapping goal to define your communication strategy. Audience, culture, and workplace formality should play a crucial role as you make decisions on when, how, and what tool you use. If not, be sure to spend time setting context and reiterating the goal. Consider adjusting the level of detail to fit the audience and directly ask for the kind of feedback you want upfront . How your roadmap looks depends on the information you are communicating — the level of detail you want to show and the audience you are sharing information with.

Steps to Managing Unplanned Work

Once it is built, you will share the roadmap and any progress with stakeholders. You also identify the right roadmaps to build for your team and when. Three Example Roadmaps for Product Managers A product roadmap is a high-level summary that maps out your product vision and overarching product strategy. 7 Secrets for Successful Product Roadmaps How do product teams build successful product roadmaps? We’re sharing best practices based on data from real product teams.

• Explore best practices for product roadmapping to help frame your approach and make your roadmap visually appealing.
• Consider incorporating an idea management process so you can gather everything in a central place without disrupting daily work.
• Therefore, you’ll need a roadmap tool that works the way your clients and colleagues do, and the resulting roadmaps are easy to view, edit, download, or share by anyone, with their usual office tools.
• A product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time.
• If you can, create logical groupings of initiatives to make the roadmap easier to grasp.
• Use a template or tool to put your features into words, add the necessary details in the requirements, and group related ones into epics .

IT project roadmaps are big picture, high-level stuff for stakeholders that don’t need nitty-gritty minutiae. Shows planned releases across multiple products in a single view. Portfolio roadmaps are useful for providing a strategic overview of your plan to leadership and a broad view of how multiple product teams work together. Organizations with a thorough change management strategy are six times more likely to exceed digital transformation objectives. Lack of change management sets up even the most promising projects or implementation plans for failure. If you decide to improve your inner IT processes or add advanced operations, you must think about creating an IT roadmap.

Key Uses and Benefits of Technology Roadmaps

Use this product roadmap template to visualize high-level product goals. This view is helpful when you need to align the team on your product strategy and provide status updates to leadership. Product development teams vary in terms of sophistication and needs. You might be able to get going with static Excel roadmaps, especially early on. But when you are ready, you can use purpose-built tools to quickly create, customize, and share your roadmaps.

For example, a technique like Scenario Analysis may help visualize different scenarios and plan for various alternatives. Royal Dutch Schell pioneered the scenario analysis technique and is useful for understanding the multiple situations and implications of decisions. A typical gap analysis is multidimensional and allows for teams https://www.globalcloudteam.com/what-is-an-it-roadmap-setting-goals-for-your-product/ to leverage the findings in the future for a deep dive. The gap analysis needs to be on multiple dimensions – people, process, technology, data, and governance – to address the shortcomings holistically. Companies conduct “Future State Envisioning Workshops” to facilitate the collective brainstorming and development of ideas.

Step 1: Identify your strategic objectives.

This can be an extremely effective planning approach because it provides a clear way to visualize and communicate what you want to accomplish and when. You can share your roadmap with a variety of audiences https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ — including executives, teammates, other groups in your organization, and customers. Anyone with access to the roadmap can quickly understand the plans and rally behind what you will achieve together.

Releases are often organized by product launch but some teams prefer to arrange their roadmaps based on development capacity. With your goals, initiatives, and prioritized ideas to guide you, identify the specific product features that you want to deliver. Use a template or tool to put your features into words, add the necessary details in the requirements, and group related ones into epics . Anything valuable that does not fit on the first iteration of your product roadmap can be saved for later in your product backlog.

Who is responsible for the product roadmap?

However, each company is unique in the state they are in and the quantum of transformation necessary to get to the next level. Progress bars show how close the team is to achieving the goals. The exercise of roadmapping forces you to think through what is most important.

Data may be transactional, purposed for Business Intelligence or archived for historical purposes. So here are a series of guidelines on how to effectively update, share and present impactful roadmaps that convey relevant information in a quick and clear manner. One of the best ways to earn that buy-in is to include your strategic reasoning for every initiative right alongside that initiative on the roadmap itself. They respond to employee requests for help with their technology tools, and they send out company-wide messages when they’re rolling out new systems or changing company rules for using existing applications. But other than these infrequent instances, IT doesn’t regularly collaborate with the rest of the company. Creating an IT strategy roadmap can yield substantial benefits to both the IT department itself and the company as a whole.

Building an integrated technology road map to drive successful innovation

For this reason, you need to think of your roadmap as a living document. With this in mind, it is a smart strategy to find ways to have your roadmap include your reasoning behind each of the themes, epics, and other initiatives you’ve chosen to include. If it’s on the roadmap, your team and anyone you’ve given access to view the roadmap should be able to learn why you’ve chosen to prioritize it. These teams understood the value of the visual—so much so that they spent an inordinate amount of time and resources creating a roadmap specifically to present well.