Maintaining Strategic Alignment
Roadmaps are a First Step
As is clear from the prior information, a roadmap is about collaboration and communication.
First, the roadmap is a tool to help different teams in the business keep aligned towards the same goals. It lets teams with different focus (technology, marketing, finance, etc) discuss how the technology team will work to support the whole. When there are questions or concerns, the roadmap can help anchor discussion around plans and actions.
Second, the roadmap keeps the technology team focused. Without a roadmap, tech teams can work on what seems important but is not useful to larger strategic objectives.
For example, a team might decide to refactor a slow component. However, if that component doesn’t improve any key metrics for the customer or answer a business goal, the team has missed an opportunity to do something more effective. Work might not be wasted, but a better aligned or more profitable task is missed.
Thus, roadmap discussions, communications, and improvements all need to be a regular part of team and company processes. If those break down, are too infrequent, or if a roadmap is “one sided” then the strategic alignment that brings value to roadmaps are harmed or missing.
Resource Allocation and Budgeting
Ultimately, in any organization, a roadmap translates to money. Money is required to pay salaries, buy hardware, maintain subscriptions, and more. The roadmap assists with this financial work and forecasting by describing the timing and size of efforts in coming quarters.
Estimating Costs
Everything has a price tag. Salaries, subscriptions, licenses, hardware, even desks and chairs all have a cost. Managing costs is obviously important as lower costs mean higher profits (for businesses) or more money available to further the mission (for non-profits).
Roadmaps can assist with this by helping to forecast upcoming expenses or investments. Contract requirements, staffing additions, physical space expansion, and other needs can all be generally allocated so that budgets include relevant details.
For projects that span financial periods, roadmaps help with budgets by navigating around the trap of budgeting 100% of a project on “Day 0”. Only the smallest projects can spend their budget upon launch. For larger projects that require a roadmap, the timeline of major activities can help spread out budgeting across quarters or years. This allows the business to better allocate funds, prevent money from going unused, and manage risk over a longer-term.
Forecasting and Prioritization
With cost estimates, the organization can use the data to start forecasting cash flows and resource needs. These, along with other requests for investment, can be organized into a financial forecast. Given that there are always more opportunities to invest than available funds, management can rank requests by priority, request business cases, and build a budget as these activities increase clarity.
Staffing
The roadmap lets the organization assess required skills and experience for success, and compare that to the current staffing models. Thus, a well-designed and complete roadmap will help with:
- Training: Determining where training and development for existing staff would benefit and WHEN that investment would be most beneficial (typically: train so it is completed as it is required so there is no time gap where training benefits can fade because it is not used)
- Hiring: At times, the roadmap can show that the existing team cannot support the work delivered by the roadmap. Additional roles will be required to support new systems, expanded architectures, and more.
- Outsourcing: Work on the roadmap might need temporary support to deliver, but then workloads will fall back to historic averages. As such, bringing in outside talent via consulting or contract labor is often the best option to deliver the highest ROI on efforts.
Business Case Requirements
As projects on a roadmap are larger, take more time, or have more complex benefits, a business case is often a great way to think through a larger effort and bring some questions and focus to planning. This is not a book about business case construction. But in general, a good business case includes:
- A statement of the opportunity and proposed approach to capture the opportunity.
- Implementation timelines, milestones, and related estimates.
- A cost-benefit analysis of the approach that outlines key investments and returns.
- Risks of the proposed approach and mitigation plans for each risk
One note: the implementation timeline is the roadmap, at least to a degree. The timeline might have a higher level of detail or milestones that wouldn’t show on a larger roadmap, but the business case implementation timeline and milestones should never contradict what is in the roadmap. (In fact, the roadmap should be informed and built by using what is in the business case!)