Visualize Your Strategic Roadmap

Create visibility to shape the strategy.

Analyst perspective

Deliver the roadmap with the data you have.

We're speeding up and making IT more responsive to ever-changing business needs.

A lot of our clients sacrificed specificity and forecasting for agility, choosing to move ahead with initiatives before they were sufficiently planned. We lowered the bar on what it takes to start a project, making it more difficult to keep the resourcing needed to complete a project and creating the fertile conditions for growing technical debt.

But now, leadership needs to make sense of the competing priorities without reliable projections of cost, benefit, risk, and timing. They need to prioritize within a portfolio where they can barely distinguish between the projects.

We produced the templates in this publication to speed up the presentation of your strategic roadmap and deliver a decision-informing experience with the lowest possible friction.

Use these materials to restart the decision-making conversation.

Barry Cousins
Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

• New project demand hasn't slowed after the disruption of COVID-19 and AI.
• You reorganized and reoriented around the product management or enterprise architecture paradigms.
• Project definition, sizing, and forecasting has devolved to the point where there is urgent demand for barely defined projects.
• Executive leadership wants to intervene, but they are not equipped with actionable information.

Common Obstacles

• The supply-demand imbalance (between project demand and resource supply) is obvious and debilitating but unmeasurable because estimates and forecasts are no longer required.
• You lack the software systems and methodologies needed to simplify and accelerate your roadmap production.
• Board-level pressure and economic uncertainty are intensifying leadership's resolve to reassert control of project prioritization and resource utilization.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Establish minimum standards for the definition of a funding request without concern for how it's packaged (project, program, product, work effort, initiative, etc.).
• Re-establish the responsibility-authority paradigm for your portfolio across the organizational hierarchy.
• Maintain a frequently refreshed strategic roadmap that offers a transparent view of the competition for funding and resourcing.

Info-Tech Insight

Decision-making has been impeded by a lack of actionable, quantified forecasts of costs and benefits. Develop your roadmap around the data that is available, and avoid extending your standards beyond the organization's current capability.

These templates can help to overcome decades of decision-making atrophy

If you don't have the cost/benefit/risk data needed to prioritize, use these templates for a storytelling approach to resolving unquantified funding requests.

Corporations have increasingly distanced the individual from business consequences:

• The contemporaneous shift to "empowerment" and "matrix management" in the 1990s rendered workers unmanageable and the number of unsuccessful work assignments exploded.
• Widespread adoption of a "consensus model" rendered executives unaccountable for results and the number of approved but unsuccessful projects exploded.
• The shift to an Agile or product management paradigm moved decision-making down the organizational chart and away from executive accountability, leaving leadership uninformed and powerless.
• Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives drove spending and activities unrelated to the corporate mission as a form of brand-centric virtue signaling.
• The focus on near-term earnings distanced executives from the consequences of an ineffective long-term strategy.
• The cessation of resource management practices disabled IT's ability to understand their own capacity for project work and made it impossible to quantify availability.
Work-from-home removed the consequences of ineffective work environments and poor productivity.

Executive leadership is now expected to claw back their decision-making capability and authority, but it's been eroding for decades.

Use this research to reestablish the dialogue between strategic authority and project delivery.

Use these resources to redevelop your ability to manage (i.e. to control spending and resources).

Should you use this model?

It's a citizen developer solution, and it's not for everyone.

Data skills

• These templates are for people who manage their project portfolio data in Excel or SharePoint lists. There is no software application preventing you from entering illogical or incompatible data.
• On the other hand, it's quite a bit faster to manage data this way if you can bear the burden of data quality.

Power BI skills

• These templates offer a rich reporting solution when compared to Excel charting. They are based on a relational data model that is constructed from your Excel or SharePoint list data.
• You don't have to be a Power BI developer to use these templates, but we recommend having a developer available if you choose to extend or modify the solution.

Platform management

• The reports are accessed via Power BI Service, a cloud-based reporting platform. Rather than emailing your spreadsheet data around the executive tier, you will be managing file versions, data refreshes, and uptime in development, test, staging, and production environments. It's far more powerful than Excel, but you will be managing a service rather than periodically distributing emails.

As-is, and the customizations are yours

• We've been collaborating with our membership on these solutions for over a decade through our Advisory Services, helping each other succeed. These templates are openly published for your use, as-is. However, it's not a software product. There's no warranty or technical support.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.

1 Establish minimum request standards

1-3 hours

The following slides describe the two key components of our strategic roadmap:

• The list of projects with a high-level start and end date.
• The different classification options:
  • Initiatives within Department
  • CIO Playbook Theme
  • Initiatives within Value Stream
  • Management & Governance Theme/Process

It's fine to use multiple views, though it's best to select a primary lens for your roadmap by combining the project list with your preferred classification option.

Establish minimum request standards

Strategic roadmaps need to enforce minimum expectations to make the roadmap options comparable. They should include project name, start and end dates, and classification.

Strategic roadmap options

Roadmap visualizations can range from high-level abstractions to more detailed progress updates.

Basic Strategic Roadmap

Classification by Department and Initiative (Program), Timelines by Quarter

CIO Playbook Roadmap

Classification by CIO Playbook Theme and Initiative (Program), Timelines by Quarter, Progress

M&G Roadmap

Classification by Management & Governance categories and Initiative (Program), Timelines by Quarter, Progress

EA Roadmap

Classification by Enterprise Architecture Value Stream and Initiative (Program), Timelines by Quarter, Progress

2 Publish and maintain your roadmap

5-10 hours

The following slides describe the solution architecture (how the files fit together) and the process for installing the templates at your location. A template is provided to document your file and workspace names for different environments.

These are the skills requirements:

• Excel (Intermediate)
  • Maintain a set of tables in Excel.
  • Preserve the table integrity as if the table is a genuine database table (proper spelling, no duplicate values, relationships between tables preserved).
  • Maintain the data as the projects and classifications evolve.
• Power BI Desktop
  • Provide https:// location of your Excel file in the Power BI parameters.
  • Refresh data and publish to Power BI Service.
• Power BI Service
  • Maintain credentials and implement refresh schedule.