But only if your team is equipped to use it to its fullest potential. While it focuses on product roadmaps, it’s also useful for https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ creating strategic IT roadmaps. The tool helps to prioritize tasks, capture feedback, and collaborate directly within a roadmap.
By the end of this article, you’ll learn the definition of an IT roadmap, how it’s constructed, its benefits, and its potential disadvantages. Of course, in the end, only you can decide for yourself if this IT strategy style is right for you. As an IT provider, WEBIT Services feels that IT roadmaps are a foundational piece for a successful client-provider relationship. However, we recognize that not everyone feels this same way or has had a positive experience with IT roadmaps. Of course, once you download, you can save electronic copies to your computer or a cloud drive. Your best bet is to log in to the portal and download the products from the included links.
Monitor, Measure and Refine IT Strategy on an annual basis
Your IT provider will gather information on your organization’s current hardware and software. Using a combination of specialized software and “boots on the ground,” they will find how many assets are in use and how old they are, alongside running a risk assessment. Another benefit of having every aspect of your technical environment documented on paper is that you can see what’s working and what’s not. Then, you can reduce or put an end to any tasks or systems that aren’t working and save your organization the money being used on those resources. This money can then be redirected to another area in your organization that would benefit more.
An IT Roadmap is a tool for setting, ensuring, and communicating the direction of an initiative. It ensures that the project team remains on the course they deliver the value promised. Therefore, an IT Roadmap complements an IT Strategy and IT Strategic Plan. Consider using Saint Louis’s roadmap next time you are presenting your strategic plan to an executive committee or board of directors. Example features supporting technology initiatives shown on a workflow board in Aha!
It’s not a project management tracker.
While five years is a long horizon in the evolution of specific technologies and their obsolescence, the IT strategy itself should have a sufficient time horizon for stability and continuity. For example, rearchitecting and re-platforming the backend transactions processing engine may be a multi-year endeavor. Or a plan to upskills IT workforce is typically not a one-year exercise. The second facet of an effective IT strategy and roadmap is how the IT department operates and minds its business. The content of a roadmap will depend on its audience – a roadmap for the development team may cover only one product, while a roadmap for executives can cover multiple products. Depending on the size and structure of an organization, a single roadmap may span multiple teams working on the same product.
- Ideally, the technology teams must have representation and voice in the development of business/corporate strategy.
- A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it.
- At the end of the day, the benefit of any technology roadmap should be that it helps your team to better understand the landscape of the technology they use every day—and how that landscape will evolve over time.
- Because creating a technology roadmap requires significant planning, it also helps professionals consider the effects of their plan.
- The second facet of an effective IT strategy and roadmap is how the IT department operates and minds its business.
- It ties together your strategy (the « why »), the work you will need to do to achieve your goals (the « what »), and a timeline for completion (the « when »).
However, on the flip side, you don’t want to spend more time updating the roadmap than is necessary to achieve alignment between stakeholders and within your team. Remember, the roadmap is a planning tool to think through how to build great products that will make an impact on your customers and on your business. If you’re spending time updating your roadmap that you could be spending on execution, re-think the cadence and how you take in inputs, feedback, and data from across the business to prioritize your initiatives. An IT roadmap is a great way to understand how your daily operations and projects align with overall business goals and objectives. It provides regular work updates, ensuring process transparency and keeping all project teams on the same page. This results in more accurate investments, more effective prioritization and management decisions, adequate risk assessment, and cost-efficiency.
Real Estate Business Capabilities Model
Every department can benefit from collaborating more closely with IT and letting them know what their department needs to succeed. In table 2 all the different sub-activities of the development phase can be seen. If you do not have an IT provider and want to discuss how an IT roadmap could benefit your business, you can schedule a consultation with WEBIT Services. Your IT roadmap will help you identify and remove unnecessary technology and applications. IT-spending surprises will be few and far between because you’ll know when you need to set money aside for IT projects and when to expect them.
The companies that fare best through these changes are the ones who forecast their industry’s evolution and make thorough plans accordingly. Planning for these changes can be a challenge—but with the right data, research, and most importantly, a clear roadmap, a company can not only survive downturns but thrive through them. As a business matures, its requirements to continue delivering a competitive product or service will grow and evolve as well. Assuming you are creating a 5-year or a 3-year IT strategy, then a yearly refresh or a rolling 3-year plan will be a great way to course correct. As economy changes, technology revolution accelerates, enterprise IT Strategy cannot remain static. Today, vendors, including the many startups, are developing innovative concepts and technologies in various facets of B2B space.
Why roadmaps are important
Let’s assume you want to customize this technology roadmap template to make it a little more ‘you’. The first thing to do is to begin adding any outstanding tasks or trackable events using the ‘Add item’ button at the top. At the heart of any roadmap lies a certain goal or objective tied to the overall success of the company. As the needs of the business change to reflect its direction, so too will the IT roadmap.
Often, product roadmaps are displayed publicly to set the right expectations with customers or partners. This plan helps teams better grasp the requirements needed to reach the end goal and provides a clear path for the desired use case for the organization. A product roadmap focuses on communicating the intent it roadmap definition behind a product strategy. The product roadmap is the strategic communication tool in a product manager’s arsenal. Product managers work with internal teams and stakeholders to build a crystal-clear roadmap that clearly communicates deliverables and the expectations for where the product is going and why.
How to create a roadmap
Projects can range from upgrading a new software platform to moving to a cloud-based system to managing technical debt. In some technology roadmaps, professionals list these preventative steps against the risk factors instead of including the problem itself. This provides a more helpful and actionable explanation of the possible issue. For example, if a risk factor of a company using a new app is the unfamiliarity employees have with it, the IT team can plan to create an instructional presentation and user guide.
Thankfully, building a technology roadmap from scratch doesn’t have to be a grueling task—it can be quite simple and streamlined if you know what to focus on. You can pivot your technology roadmaps to tell a very detailed story of how IT administration will roll out over a specific period. For example, look at the image above to see a view that showcases which employee is spearheading each initiative and when it will be completed. Technology roadmapping can be used to plan when/how new apps and tools will be implemented—as well as who will be involved in the process.
Work Management
It doesn’t matter how sleek your plan is if people can’t meet unrealistic deadlines. Without achievable milestones, it’s difficult to keep your team motivated and hardly possible to track the progress. A clear IT roadmap helps to prevent it by giving you full control over your growing stack of SaaS tools. You’ll never forget about recurring subscriptions you don’t need anymore or purchase new software when your existing systems are capable of performing the tasks you need. Some agile folks think that a roadmap with dates will slow them down from continuously iterating and delivering. A roadmap aligns everyone on the team around the goals and plans, providing a clear direction and a way to quickly view priorities.
