9 business roadmap examples for scaling your organization

Entrepreneurs often have to pivot their business once it becomes clear that their original customer is not the right customer or when it turns out that their product or service fits better in an alternate market. Because of these realities, business plans are written at the start end up nothing more than a fable”. Consider which audiences will view your technology roadmap, so you can build it using language all involved will understand. If you plan to share the roadmap with more than one department, web-based roadmap software is once again the prime choice. It allows you to quickly and easily build several versions of the same roadmap and switch effortlessly among the different views during your presentations. As work gets underway, using web-based roadmap software allows your roadmap to be updated in real time.

They will help you in eliminating inefficient processes from your business. Prioritize initiatives — Use those themes to define initiatives, making sure each supports a specific goal. As you can see, there are several different types of roadmaps that can be used depending on your situation.

Quarterly infrastructure enhancement roadmap

Although custom software development can be more expensive in the short term, that software becomes a valuable, proprietary company asset that runs the core operations of the business. Plotting the large-scale goals a business wants to tackle in the next few quarters or years, a capability roadmap revolves around potential rather than your present projects. It plans the super-ambitious, game-changing goals beyond features and releases.

WEBIT finds the IT roadmap vital to building client relationships and bringing IT-related success. When properly executed, IT Roadmaps can be helpful guides for businesses. However, if an IT provider or client takes shortcuts in its creation, an IT roadmap can lead to more hurdles than aids. Once your IT provider understands your immediate and future goals better, they can use this information to improve the IT roadmap. WEBIT Services has partnered with its clients for over 25 years to build successful IT roadmaps. It’s an essential part of building both IT strategy for our clients and building relationships and trust with the clients themselves.

How to Create A Roadmap That Helps You Say No

One such dedicated roadmap maker is the PowerPoint add-in called Office Timeline. This intuitive tool helps you automatically generate clear, stylish roadmaps as PowerPoint slides that you can quickly update as often as necessary and share or present in meetings. For comprehensive demonstrations on how to make a roadmap using various office tools, check out our collection of step-by-step tutorials. To better understand the role of a roadmap, let us review what this strategic tool is and is not. Make impressive multi-level timelines and roadmaps with the Pro+ add-in for PowerPoint. WEBIT Services’ vCIOs have helped hundreds of clients construct their IT Roadmaps and bring their IT plans to life.

• Project roadmaps are slightly less detail-oriented than project timelines.
• You may also keep it lightweight and create a short slide deck instead.
• You want to show how the entire company will work against overall business objectives.
• A timeline-view of a business roadmap provides a concise overview of major projects and deadlines for each team.
• There are many ways you can use these roadmap examples to make better decisions around your strategic initiatives.
• Including these figures into an enterprise IT roadmap allows all the participants to take an unbiased look at their capabilities and plan the initiative accordingly.

Every company will stumble upon this quandary at some point, and at a certain level, the short-term versus long-term gains of each option must be considered to develop a reasonable roadmap and business plan. For companies looking to use a product on a short-term basis, buying a software license is by far the most sound business choice as it can generally address at least 80% of the problems it was designed to target. For example, you might create a long-term roadmap that covers all aspects of business planning over the next three to five or even 10 years. This could include high-level forecasts for revenue, marketing and sales, staffing, and operations — as well as new products or services you plan to develop.

A business roadmap is a long-term strategic document that shows where your company is going and the steps required to get there. Most work is collaborative nowadays and you’re always in close contact with a client or team. Therefore, you’ll need a roadmap tool that works the way your clients and colleagues do, and the resulting roadmaps are easy to view, edit, download, or what is an IT roadmap share by anyone, with their usual office tools. An IT roadmap is a strategic document outlining an IT project timeline to help your company improve productivity, IT security, and IT budgeting. It’s constructed during a company’s onboarding process with a new IT provider. Your IT roadmap is a “living document”—it will change as your organizational needs and goals change.

What’s an enterprise architecture roadmap?

For example, a company anticipated growing by 20 employees in a year but increased by 35 employees instead. That changes their IT roadmap projection and goals, and it changes recommendations for new systems and technology to support that growth. You may have heard your IT provider mention your organization’s “IT Roadmap,” a document outlining your current IT setup and both short-term and long-term goals. If your provider has not mentioned roadmap, you may soon discover IT-related frustrations, including a drop in productivity and IT budgeting issues. Indeed, roadmapping tools are not a must-have for all teams and products.

For businesses that aren’t ready to allocate specific timeframes to every single initiative on their roadmap, that’s where a swimlane-view works really well. By showing each department’s individual projects and strategies, you can have swimlanes dedicated to each team and then organize items by any timeframe. For a company that needs a flexible document that effectively presents key business goals, dates, and plans of action relevant to all stakeholders. If you don’t have access to a good IT team, then you should consider working with an MSP.

Translate product goals and initiatives into features and requirements. Impact – highlighting how each area of investment ties to a high-level goal, roadmaps easily illustrate the impact of a team’s progress. Clarity – by answering the question “what are you working towards and why? ”, a roadmap clarifies strategic goals and how the involved work is linked to the overall strategy. A thorough guide to effectively building and using a roadmap through definitions, examples, tools and tutorials. It is created as a “one-size-fits-all” without a proper understanding of the client’s business, present reality, and plans for the near future.

It will also show real potential for growth, demonstrating to buyers the potential future value of your business. Progress – indicate the status of different work items and the overall progress towards goals by using shaded bars, colors, checkmarks or % percent complete indicators. Agenda – once you determine to whom you will present your roadmap, set an appropriate agenda of what core aspects you will capture and discuss. This gives your audience the right expectation for what they will see along the way. A variety of professional, stand-alone templates that you can instantly customize into your own beautiful roadmap.

Technological change management roadmap

Swimlane roadmaps are theme-oriented and don’t include a timeline. They’re a good option when you want to build your roadmaps around sprints, roles, or other themes. As such, your IT team or operations managers should define measurable, time-bound goals that you’ll need to reach to get closer to your bigger objective.

We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our investment conferences and advertising on our websites and newsletters. It’s more important than ever to check in with your HR team members regularly. They have been on the frontline of massive changes in the workplace that go well beyond people management. They are dealing with mental health and well-being issues, business continuity, return to office plans, furloughs, and working and learning remotely.

Technology Roadmap

It provides a view of the milestones that need to be reached to support a business change. 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.

Chetu, a leading U.S.-based custom software development and services company. There are obviously many factors for businesses to consider when scaling their IT roadmaps, but the looming question of build vs. buy has to be on the table. SaaS and pre-built solutions are incredibly effective and economical for short-term solutions. However, businesses that are looking for improved ROI and long-term scalability for their IT solutions should seriously evaluate custom software as a sound long-term investment. Also, we advise setting milestones—short- and mid-term accomplishments linked to specific dates. They indicate certain process stages and help stakeholders evaluate their progress towards goal achievement.

The simplest to explain but the hardest to achieve, e.g., increasing profits or revenue by a certain percentage within a defined time. It helps get everyone involved on the same page and aligned on the direction of the company. It demonstrates to investors, lenders, and other interested parties that you’ve done the research necessary to build the business correctly. This roadmap is used to outline the large-scale capabilities a business would like to have. At the time of their last fundraising in March 2017, Airbnb raised more than $3 billion — valuing the company at over $31 billion.

YOUR IT ROADMAP IS JUST A CALL OR CLICK AWAY!

Prioritize and determine requirements – break down the activities that best support your strategy into smaller units of work. To help you save time, you can download these examples for free (we’ve built them using PowerPoint and the Office Timelineadd-in) so you can get started right away. It shares general plans with external audiences such as partners and advisory boards. The IT Roadmap will not strategically anticipate or meet needs if an IT provider doesn’t listen to the client’s goals and essentials. 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. Your IT roadmap is an honest discussion of where you see your company in the future and how your IT provider can help you get there.

Organize work into phases – group your ranked list of features or major efforts into major releases or stages and define their duration. Roadmap slide with swimlanes and project details for effective management of a platform development process. Simple roadmap showing the trial phases and key milestones in a drug approval process.

What should be in a business roadmap?

On the other hand, business development roadmaps encompass the bigger picture of your business. Rather than looking at various departments’ goals, this looks at the larger goal that all departments are working together to reach, and how they’ll reach that goal. For product/project managers to efficiently present and share their roadmap, they need to consider their audience – who they are, what they need to https://globalcloudteam.com/ know and why. This way, they can adjust the structure and level of detail of their visual so that the right information be conveyed to the right people in a visually appealing way. A roadmap template is a pre-built roadmap sample that can be easily updated with custom data to fit your needs. It provides an already-done framework to specific cases, helping you save time and effort in creating such a visual.

However, rather than being focused on the strategic goals of the organization, it more closely resembles your organizational structure. If you want to see what your network team, Applications, service delivery and other groups have planned at a glance, then the technology roadmap is what you are looking for. In most roadmaps of this style, the organizational goals are on the left side of the roadmap with a Gannt style timeline that describes the implementation timeline.