How to create a useful road-map
Road-maps are aplenty in business. There isn’t a deck I’ve seen last year that didn’t have a road-map included. Everyone has their own opinions on what constitutes a good road-map. Sometimes authors put the look ahead of the usability.
At a recent meeting I was chatting to a colleague who has a lot of experience in producing road-maps. We talked through several examples we’d seen recently and agreed that many didn’t fulfil their purpose.
The majority showed too little or too much information and some gave a false impression of delivery dates. It was the latter point that I found most profound. I then went back and looked at several other road-map examples and found the same issue.
They showed something being delivered or operational when in fact it would only really be realised many months or even a year later.
The example below is how best to show a cross-functional road-map for when something starts and is actually going to be delivered in the real world. Yes you might technically design something in Q1 but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be live in Q2 or even Q3. These type of road-maps are great for giving colleagues downstream a heads-up on changes coming. It also helps senior leaders understand when something they signed off on will actually be tangibly delivered.
Another gripe with road-maps is that they constantly need updating. For those using the likes of PowerPoint or Excel, this is a boring task of constantly updating cells and moving boxes every time something changes. The world’s moved on and now with the likes of Confluence and other tools you can update road-maps much faster and with greater accuracy. Technology also allows you to share road-maps, include more detailed supporting information and also encourage stakeholders to subscribe or ‘follow’ work packages whose progress interests them.
If you are still using PowerPoint, Keynote or Excel there’s still a lot you can do to make your road-maps more user friendly and illuminating. It’s a good idea to always include a brief summary together with a short definition of done. You might also want to include the named Sponsor and Delivery Lead. Viewers would also like to know what effort or impact work packages might have. It helps them identify busy months or weeks. Like any road-map you’ll end up with a collection of Rocks (big projects), Stones (smaller projects) and Sand (mini job fillers). Knowing the effort and impact will help ensure you’re able to see when taking on too much. It helps a project team understand what they might want to re-prioritise or move around to make way for more pressing and impactful builds.
There’s no such thing as a perfect road-map but hopefully these tips will help you start to think about different ways of presenting and showcasing work package information.
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