“Developing Capability Roadmaps” is based on a Web Forum presented by Strategy and Planning Executive Mark Guidi. The roadmapping process identifies critical customer needs and the capabilities, technologies, and skills that will meet those needs. It also helps a planning team set a strategic approach in a future oriented competitive context. This identifies gaps in meeting customers’ needs and helps define plans to fill the gaps. In this report, you will read about how roadmaps connect and balance the drivers of customer needs (“customer pull”) and technology innovation (“technology push”). It looks at different approaches, traps to avoid, lessons learned, and roadmap integration. Also included in the report is a case study taking you through the roadmap process.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the section talking about lessons learned during the roadmapping process:

“A roadmap is not a roadmap in the sense that it is singular. The key to having a good roadmap is having one source of data. No matter how you look at it, you need to have a single source of truth for the data on which the map is being constructed. It should cover policy, process, and systems as well as have multiple views for multiple audiences (Fig. 5). For example, at Cisco they had an architecture view that showed the key dependencies. Boxes were literally checked off as they progress along the roadmap. You could actually see the progress that was being made as they moved across time on the roadmap. If the CIO wanted to know where things stood on the architectural roadmap, Mark’s team could show him this perspective and get his view on it.

On a related note, have different ways of looking at the metrics. Cisco tracked them by each of the major initiatives. Then, in total, they looked at revenue and productivity. Those were the two value drivers in terms of where they were realizing the benefits. It was either top-line revenue or productivity enhancements.  So they looked at each initiative and attempted to track where they were in terms of revenue and what was expected. Then, on the backend, a process was implemented to track that over the two years to ensure they actually hit the targets…”

IMF members can download the full report on Developing Capability Roadmaps here.