Value Added Roadmap

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Albert Einstein: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

Problem – Many Project Roadmaps Don’t Focus on Value

During the discovery phase of a project, you need to manage expectations by clearly illustrating project goals and schedule. You can achieve this with a standard Project Roadmap that illustrates a sequence of high level deliverables superimposed on a timeline. However, you must also make it easy for the audience to quickly discern the high level “schedule of value” that the project will deliver.

Ideal State – Value Added Roadmap

The ideal state during project discovery, is a clear understanding of why your organization is undertaking the project, supplemented by a sequence of high level value added deliverables. This value added project roadmap must be feasible and actionable given the technical and business constraints.

Root Cause that Drives the Need for a Value Added Roadmap

The root purpose of a value added roadmap is to translate a strategic vision into a high level business strategy that is feasible and actionable.

Context – Value Added Roadmap

The context for a value added roadmap is you have a clear vision for your project. In addition, you have a set of capabilities and constraints illustrated in your future state architecture. A value added roadmap is an illustration of your feasible and actionable strategy designed to achieve your vision through the incremental delivery of value.

Before you start developing a roadmap you should first clarify exactly what you are trying to achieve. Your objective will then determine whether you need a business roadmap, a product roadmap, a technology roadmap or a project roadmap.

A business roadmap is used to illustrate the business strategy that will accelerate your business from its current state to its desired future state. That desired future state is comprised of a set of business goals. A product roadmap is used to illustrate the planned evolution of a product to achieve specific business goals. It is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of each product over time. The goal of a technology roadmap is to illustrate the features and capabilities required to support key business and product functionality. The goal of a project roadmap is to list the tasks needed to execute a project that delivers product, technology, process and business goals.

These roadmaps should comprise a sequence of deliverables that drive value. These deliverables may add value for the end customer, for an internal customer, for distributors, for partners, for your organization, or even for a specific group within your organization, such as the IT department.

Solution – Value Added Roadmap

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Warren Buffett: “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

A roadmap is valuable during the discovery phase of your project because it helps align technical and non-technical stakeholders. It promotes a shared understanding of capacity, dependencies and constraints. It also forces decisions about priorities. In addition, it helps elicit feedback from project stakeholders which will help identify any missing value drivers. More importantly, it forces the team to think through the key components of your strategy in a methodical manner. However, you must ensure your proposed strategy is feasible and actionable.

When creating a roadmap, you should tell a visual story. The story should clearly state where you are, where you want to go and how you plan to get there. When telling the story, you should determine the project’s objective and really understand your primary audience. The roadmap should illustrate the strategy to deliver only those benefits and value that your target audience believes are essential. Both non value added features and value gaps will lead to waste. The sequence of benefits, illustrated in the roadmap, should highlight measurable value on a realistic timeline. The deliverables on your roadmap should be specific to avoid ambiguity, measurable to quantify the level of success, accepted by your sponsors, reasonable to ensure the goals are achievable and time boxed to ensure a laser focus on the highest value deliverables as early as possible. To improve understanding, you may need to organize your deliverables into logical workstreams. This will help communicate dependencies, priorities and constraints. Many different templates exist for roadmaps. The product launch plan and IT Roadmap displayed are two examples. However, ensure all deliverables on your value added roadmap highlight value and are feasible and actionable.

Your Feedback

Enter your comments below so we can update this post and provide better solutions for the community. Also, if you have created any project management tools or templates that you would like to contribute for communal use then please send each one, with a brief description, to PMTools@LeanProjectPlaybook.com.

Business Opportunity

There is an opportunity to systematize the lean startup process for projects. Let us know if you would like to collaborate as a part of our community to transform these opportunities into an easy-to-use solution that will help assure project value and improve project failure rates. Alternatively, if your company is willing to contribute some of your time to help specify a solution to meet their specific needs then they will receive free licensing for an agreed period of time. Each project requires a project manager, an architect, a business analyst, a developer and a QA lead.

Simple Life Lesson

All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination. Earl Nightingale

Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you’re not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are. Peter Guber

Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don’t rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That’s your job. Mark Cuban

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