How do you draw up a project roadmap? 7 steps to a clear roadmap
Imagine driving without a GPS or a map. It's like a project without a roadmap: disorientating and risky. A project roadmap is your strategic compass, essential for staying on course with your objectives while anticipating challenges.
Understanding what a roadmap is, why it's crucial, who benefits from it and how to create an effective one can transform the way you manage and deliver your projects. Whether you're a project manager, developer, sponsor or customer, this tool is key.
By following the next steps and incorporating best practice, you'll be able to design a clear and effective roadmap that will guide your work towards success! 💪
What is a project roadmap?
A project roadmap is a strategic visual document that describes:
- the objectives,
- deliverables
- key stages
- and milestones.
It acts like a roadmap, helping your staff to understand the development path, monitor progress and anticipate potential challenges. In essence, the project roadmap provides an overview that helps you stay on track with your objectives while ensuring coordination between the different teams.
Why use a roadmap?
The project roadmap is essential because it facilitates communication by enabling all stakeholders, including customers, internal teams and sponsors, to understand the project objectives and the steps needed to achieve them.
It also improves planning by helping to: 👇
- define priorities
- allocate resources ;
- set realistic deadlines;
- monitor progress;
- encourage transparency by making project milestones and objectives visible.
This not only keeps the teams aligned, but also boosts stakeholder confidence by seeing the project progress in a structured way. 🤝
Who uses a project roadmap?
Project roadmaps are valuable tools used by a variety of players in and around an organisation to ensure the success of projects. Here are the main users of this strategic document:
Project managers
Project managers use roadmaps to plan, organise and supervise the execution of projects. They enable them to: 👇
- visualise the major stages of the project
- monitor progress ;
- ensure that all aspects of the project are aligned with the strategic objectives.
Thanks to the roadmap, they can identify potential risks, adjust plans accordingly and communicate effectively with teams and stakeholders. As a result, the management of complex projects becomes more fluid and structured, reducing the risk of budget or time slippages.
Development teams
For development teams, the project roadmap serves as a guide to understanding priorities and deadlines. It helps to coordinate development efforts by clearly defining deliverables and deadlines, enabling you to better manage resources and minimise conflicts or redundancies in the work.
It also provides a long-term perspective on the project, helping your teams to prepare for the next stages and adapt to changes. Teams can anticipate future needs in terms of skills and materials, while ensuring efficient time management.
Sponsors and investors
Sponsors and investors use roadmaps to assess the viability and progress of the projects in which they have invested. A well-designed roadmap gives them a clear vision of: 👇
- key milestones
- expected results ;
- and potential benefits.
It helps them make informed decisions about additional funding, risk management and the strategic adjustments needed to maximise return on investment.
The key elements of the roadmap provide essential transparency to justify expenditure and long-term commitments.
Customers and end users
Customers and end-users also benefit from project roadmaps by gaining a transparent view of how the project is progressing. They can track progress, understand delivery timescales and know when to expect the final features or products.
This transparency strengthens the confidence and satisfaction of your customers, while enabling them to provide relevant feedback throughout the development process.
A well-communicated roadmap can improve customer engagement and active participation in the development process, which is crucial to the success of the final product.
What is the difference between a project roadmap and a project plan?
Although often used interchangeably, the project roadmap and project plan have distinct purposes. 🎯
The roadmap
The project roadmap provides a strategic overview by presenting the long-term objectives, major stages and milestones, with the flexibility to be updated frequently to reflect strategic changes.
It is designed to be understood by a wide range of stakeholders, including those not directly involved in the project.
The project plan
In contrast, the project plan details specific tasks, the resources required, precise deadlines and individual responsibilities, making it a more stable operational document. It is primarily intended for the project team and project managers who need technical and operational details.
Example to illustrate the difference
🗽To illustrate this difference, imagine the roadmap as a map of a journey from Paris to New York, showing the main stages such as boarding in Paris, the transatlantic flight and landing in New York.
The project plan, on the other hand, would be the detailed itinerary, including departure and arrival times, hotel reservations, daily activities and local means of transport.
Both documents are essential, but they serve different needs and audiences.
What is an effective roadmap?
An effective roadmap is much more than a simple list of tasks or a calendar. It should be a living, strategic document that guides the project towards success. Here are some of the key characteristics of an effective project roadmap:
Flexibility and adaptability
Projects often evolve along the way as a result of various internal and external factors. An effective roadmap must therefore be flexible and adaptable. It must be easy to update to reflect :
- changes in priorities
- available resources; and
- market conditions.
Incorporating mechanisms to adjust plans without disrupting project progress is crucial. An adaptable roadmap enables you to react quickly to unforeseen events and maintain the momentum of the project.
Visualising dependencies
An effective roadmap should clearly show the dependencies between the different tasks and stages of the project. Understanding these relationships helps to anticipate potential delays and take preventative action.
💡Using visual tools such as diagrams can help to represent these dependencies in an intuitive way.
This allows the team to better plan and manage interdependencies between tasks, ensuring smooth and coordinated execution.
Inclusion of measurable milestones
Milestones are critical control points in the project. An effective roadmap includes measurable milestones to track progress and check that the project remains on track. These milestones must be accompanied by clear success criteria to objectively assess the project's progress.
Communication and transparency
A good roadmap must be accessible and understandable to all stakeholders. This requires regular and transparent communication about its content.
Updates must be shared proactively, and there must be mechanisms in place to gather and integrate feedback from the various stakeholders. Effective communication strengthens team collaboration and commitment, ensuring that everyone is kept informed of progress and adjustments.
How do you draw up a project roadmap?
Step 1: Define the project objectives
The first step is to clarify the project objectives. These must be SMART:
- specific
- measurable
- achievable
- relevant ;
- Time-based.
To define clear objectives, it is often useful to consult key stakeholders and ensure that their expectations are aligned.
💡 Organise brainstorming workshops where all stakeholders can express their visions and concerns.
Step 2: Identify stakeholders and their needs
Stakeholders play a crucial role in the success of the project. It is essential to identify them and understand their needs and expectations. This includes: 👇
- customers or end users ;
- members of the project team
- project sponsors;
- suppliers and partners.
Understanding their needs helps to better align the project's objectives with the expectations of those who will be impacted by its results.
To identify stakeholders, you can create a matrix that lists all the individuals or groups involved in the project, their influence and interest in the project, and the appropriate communication strategies for each. Proactive management of your collaborators will help prevent conflicts and ensure ongoing support throughout the project.
Step 3: Determine the main deliverables
Deliverables are the tangible products, services or results that the project must provide. Each deliverable must be clearly defined and associated with success criteria.
The list of main deliverables, the quality criteria for each deliverable and the associated deadlines must be precisely documented to avoid any future ambiguity.
Step 4: Break the project down into stages and milestones
Once the deliverables have been defined, it is crucial to divide the project into logical stages. Each stage should have specific milestones that mark important points in the project's progress. Milestones allow you to: 👇
- monitor progress ;
- identify potential delays
- keep the team motivated.
Step 5: Allocate resources and define responsibilities
For each stage and deliverable, it is necessary to determine the resources required and allocate responsibilities. This includes :
- human ;
- material ;
- and financial,
as well as the tools and technologies required.
A good way of managing this stage is to create a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix, which clarifies who is responsible for each task.
Step 6: Establish a timetable and deadlines
A well-defined schedule is essential to ensure that the project progresses as planned. Use project management tools to create a realistic timeline, including start and finish dates for each stage, intermediate milestones and dependencies between tasks.
💡A diagram is a particularly useful tool to help you visualise the schedule and task dependencies.
Step 7: Monitor and adjust the roadmap
A project roadmap should be a living document, regularly updated to reflect progress and changes. Constantly monitor progress, organise project review meetings to assess progress, discuss obstacles and adjust the roadmap if necessary.
🔎 Encourage continuous feedback from team members and your other collaborators to identify issues early and be prepared to adjust goals, deadlines and resources according to the realities of the project.
Comparison of the best project roadmap software
On the market for project monitoring tools, there are many software solutions capable of producing any type of Scrum-style road map:
- startup road map ;
- enterprise road map ;
- marketing road map ;
- software road map ;
- product road map ;
- etc.
We have selected 5 of the most effective, which stand out for their agility in project management.
Wrike
Wrike is a collaborative project manager that lets you organise your teams and plan tasks and activities so that they can be carried out more quickly and transparently. It's a powerful project planning tool that lets you efficiently manage projects involving several people from different professions.
Planisware Orchestra
Planisware Orchestra is a modern, unified project management tool that enables you to manage large-scale projects with a large number of parameters. It is highly innovative in terms of resource management and offers a very user-friendly interface.
Clarizen
Clarizen is a mature, reliable and comprehensive solution, with over 10 years' expertise and use all over the world. It is the pioneer of project management in SaaS mode, and is equally suited to start-ups, SMEs and major accounts thanks to its advanced functionalities and ultra-collaborative environment.
z0 Gravity
z0 Gravity is one of the few project monitoring tools that can simultaneously manage several project portfolios in a geolocalised way. It's an entirely online solution, with customer support and data hosting in France.
And now it's your turn to move into agile project mode!
Now that you've got everything you need to start with a good example of a project roadmap and work with the right project management software, all that's left to do is implement real agile methods. Goodbye Gantt chart or Kanban, hello V cycle! 🙌
It's up to you and your steering committee to make the move to Scrum-style agile management: maintain your roadmap iteratively and with continuous improvement objectives at the end of each sprint. Prioritisation, scoping, reporting, backlogs and change management are your watchwords.
Article translated from French