Strategic Roadmapping is a function of Strategic Business Insights’ approach to the development and implementation of any given strategy. SBI has enhanced the steps to build upon in the diverse processes of road mapping, cutting across finance, technology, commerce, and IT industries. Many companies have adopted a similar principle.
The strategic roadmaps, however, are peculiar to different organizations. In the technology phase, the strategies are likely to contain more information than the usual technology development period. Some feature their products and services and display their relationship to underlying technologies. Nonetheless, you can define and identify the direction of your business by considering external factors and signposts. As a world-class consulting company, we are poised to drive you and your business to success. We will help infuse strategic road-mapping into every aspect of your business.
What Strategic Roadmaps Provide
Strategic roadmaps are an effective means of communicating and coordinating business and technology strategies, activities and plans. Specifically, they provide a platform to gather and monitor strategic intelligence. This is to ensure that you can sufficiently measure your employees’ and evaluate the efficiency of your management team.
Why do you need a roadmap?
As a startup or already-existing company, it is your responsibility to develop a strategic roadmap for your organization. This strategic plan highlights a goal or potential outcome of your input. It also encompasses the various steps or milestones that you can embed into the plan to achieve the set goals.
Roadmap serves as a communication tool and also doubles as a high-level document that you can deploy to articulate your strategic thinking of the reason behind the set goals and the plans to achieve them.
A typical use of the roadmap is to serve many strategic initiatives. This is what businesses all over the world must adopt- especially their IT strategy, marketing modalities, among others. You must, however, note that the strategic roadmap is never a document that captures every detail of your plan. So, what is a strategic roadmap NOT?
A roadmap is not a backlog
A backlog is a to-do list of the tasks you must carry out to accomplish a strategic initiative. That is, according to priority. Roadmap planning entails developing a high-level strategy, borne out of several backlog tasks or ideas. Therefore, a strategic roadmap can work together with a backlog because the creator of the roadmap will see to the translation of the high-level strategic components into assignable tasks. With that, you will be able to monitor the process(es) throughout the life-cycle of the project.
A Strategic Roadmap is NOT a project management tracker
More often than not, many managers confuse roadmaps with software applications which they can use to aggregate the details to complete the initiative. Examples of such initiatives include scheduled meetings, individual assignments, the personnel responsible for each assignment, and the deadlines to complete each aspect of the project. That is, to ensure you track and update the details via any form of strategic undertaking. However, the tool used for this would be a project management tracker like JIRA or Trello.
A Strategic Roadmap is NOT a list of features
As a product manager, you must never make the mistake of assuming your planned list of features is the exact roadmap itself.
It, therefore, becomes necessary to highlight the key characteristics of a roadmap. They are:
- A strategic roadmap is a high-level plan that defines the strategic aim of your firm and captures the steps to achieve the set objective(s). It is not enough to come up with a simple list of features because this would not capture the strategic thinking behind building the product in a particular way. It will also not articulate it. A valid strategic roadmap requires telling your story cohesively – depicting how all the epics, themes and individual features will combine as one to achieve the goals of your company.
- A strategic roadmap is a special communication tool that aids the communication of your firm’s strategy.
- A list of features does not communicate much, other than the items on the list. Therefore, you need a strong roadmap- product or service, with a clear and concise rationale to include any feature. If you cannot persuasively tell the reason for including a feature, it is best not to include it at all.
Strategy Roadmap vs Plan
Now, we must clarify the differences between a strategy roadmap and a plan. A lot of people still confuse the two and use them interchangeably.
A strategy roadmap is a description of the “what” and the “why”, while a typical execution plan describes the “how“. A strategy roadmap does not visualize the activities as in a Gantt chart where there are the start and end dates. Instead, it describes the things you must change, and why you must change those things to achieve your strategic vision and especially, to successfully undertake credible performance measurement.
Contrariwise, an execution plan is a simple description of how the organization will deliver the outcomes highlighted in the strategy roadmap. You can represent it in a Gantt chart, with a start and end date, milestone, resource allocation, and specific time-frame or duration.
Strategic Road-mapping With The Swiss Quality
To successfully translate your strategy into an executable plan, you need a strategic roadmap. This is even more required after you must have worked so hard to develop a strategy that is strong enough to articulate your vision, purpose, values and organizational goals. The Swiss Quality, being a renowned consulting and business firm, understands that it is likely you hit a roadblock during the implementation stage of the plan and in the execution of the strategy. Therefore, we carefully, professionally and diligently walk you over the bridge to determine the visualization of the key outcomes which you intend delivering at particular times.
You can substantiate the outcomes when you show a required understanding of the gaps, priorities, and capabilities of your organization, which you must address.
How to create a strategy roadmap
To create an effective strategy roadmap, we recommend that you follow these steps accordingly:
Have a method
Reiterating the previously mentioned point, a good strategy roadmap must be one that articulates the things that need to be changed and why the change is necessary. It must also state the sequence in which to execute the change.
Of course, it can sometimes be a complex task. SO, you must apply a very sound method. To translate your strategy to a strategy roadmap, The Swiss Quality applies a structured and logical approach which ensures that there is a clear connection or at least, substantiation of the outcomes of the strategy roadmap returned to the strategic vision.
Embrace capability-based planning
A way to plan and substantiate a good strategy roadmap is to incorporate capability-based planning. This method holistically considers your organization to ensure you have understood the areas of change.
Besides, this would aid your understanding of existing capabilities, the ones required in the ‘near’ future to meet the strategic vision; the changes required and how you prioritize the changes. Further, the changes got from this, later on, form the outcomes on your strategic roadmap.
A well-designed roadmap is a one-in-a-page document which must include: The question of what it takes for your business to arrive at its desired state is best answered by our strategic advisory services team. We deploy our knowledge and experience of a strategic roadmap to define and put you on the success path through our exquisite consulting and business improvement service.
When your business struggles with making certain major decisions, it becomes clear how significant the role of imperfect information has been since inception and how badly it has eaten into your decision-making capability. It becomes so terrible that when you select a course, it might be difficult to execute your plans because you miss the buy-in of stakeholders or lack sufficient and viable business case. These are some things responsible for trapping you in the current state and hampering your chances of achieving your desired future state.
Thus, you can follow our professional strategic roadmap method at The Swiss Quality to:
- Relieve you of the stress, anxiety, and fear of deciding wrongly, especially with a tight budget
- Develop the required materials and data that can help win internal support for any project you are undertaking
- Overcome the problem of jumping to solutions and project work without a clear understanding of the impact, benefits, technology, and modalities of the project
- Propel you forward confidently by leveraging our proven method
- Save some time, money and even resources by putting in the right effort ahead to avoid rework of your project.
Because roadmaps are graphical and naturally collaborative, they support the strategic alignment as much as the dialogue that ensues between the different functions in your firm and among organizations. The power or potency, therefore, lies in its flexibility, which can clarify and align the specific needs at every level, plus the functional and organization-related collaboration.
