Strategy – How to build a Road Map
I know this is sounds crazy, and maybe it’s just me. How many of use in the profession can truly say we have been taught to develop, refine, and deliver a professional road map based on a sound method with consistent repeatable results? Have been at this crazy business for years, and still astonished at the wide variety of quality in the results I have experienced over the years – and it’s not getting any better. Not sure I can identify why this is so, maybe it’s the consolidation and changes in the traditional consulting business (big eight to what? two, maybe) or the depreciation of the craft itself among our peers. And then again, maybe sound planning went out of style and I didn’t get the memo. No matter what the root cause(s) is want to take a little time and share some (not all) of what has worked for me with great success over the years and may make your next roadmap better. I’m no genius, just believe I have been blessed to come into the industry at a time when the large management consulting firms actually invested in intellectual property and shared this with the “new hires” and up-and-coming staff professionals. Don’t see much investment in structured thinking, communication skills, or just plain good analytics anymore, it is truly troubling. Where are the young people learning the craft anymore? Enough of the griping I beginning to sound like my parents again…
Bear in mind this not just confined to the “bigs”. What I’m going to share is works well in the boutiques as well. I have demonstrated the success of this method over the years with my experiences as a small boutique leader and several channel partners. It simply works. You will not find this in textbooks, class rooms, or in your local book store (I have looked, maybe not hard enough). You will find this in the best and brightest organizations that have adopted an optimized way to think about guiding their organizations to perform as expected (this is called experience). Now on to the summary of what I want to share, the balance will be revealed in later posts.
The Overall Pattern
At the risk of over-simplifying things, here is the overall pattern ALL roadmaps follow:
Click to enlarge
1) Clear and unambiguous understanding of the current state
- Business Objectives (not strategy or goals, quantifiable objectives)
- Functional needs
- High impact business processes or cycles
- Organization (operating model)
- Cost and complexity drivers
- Business and technical assets (some call these artifacts)
2) Future or desired end state definition
First, (know this is obvious) what are trying to accomplish? Is there an existing goal-driven strategy clearly articulated into quantifiable objectives? Sounds silly doesn’t it, and if this exists and a no one knows about it or cannot clearly communicate what the end game is we have a problem. This could be a well guarded secret. Or, what is more common the line of sight from executive leadership down to the mail room is broken, where no one knows what the true goals are or cares (it’s just a job after all) becomes a annual charade of MBO objectives with no real understanding. Some better examples I would expect include:
- Performance targets (Cash flow, Profitability, Velocity (cycle or PCE), Growth, Customer intimacy)
- Operating Model
- Guiding principals
3) Gap Analysis
Okay, now this is where the true fun starts. Once here we can begin to evaluate the Delta between who we really are, and what we truly want to become. Armed with a clear understanding of where we are and where we want to be, the actionable activities begin to fall out and become evident. Gap closure strategies can then begin to be discussed, shared, and resolved into any number of possibilities usually involving the following initiatives:
- Organizational
- Functional
- Architectural (technology)
- Process
- Reward or economic incentives
4) Prioritization
Okay – now we have the list of actionable items now it is time to prioritize what is front of us. This is usually driven (in a technology road map) by evaluating the relative business value AND the technical complexity, plotting the results in a quadrant graph of some kind. It is critical here that the stakeholders are engaged in the collection of the data points and they are keenly aware of what they are scoring. At the end of the day, what we are doing here is IDENTIFYING what is feasible and what has the highest business value. I know, I Know this sounds obvious, and you would be astonished by how often THIS DOES NOT occur in the wild.
Okay, now we have the initiatives, the prioritization, how about sequence? In other words are there things we have to get accomplished first, before others? Are there dependencies we have identified that need to be satisfied before moving forward? This sounds foolish as well, and we sometimes we need to learn how to crawl, walk, run, ride a bike, and then drive a motor vehicle. And what about the capacity for any organization to absorb change? Hmmm… Not to be overlooked, this where a clear understanding of the organizational dynamics is critical (see number 1, this is why we need to truly understand where we are).
Now we are ready. Armed with the DELTA (current vs. desired end state), the prioritization effort (what should be done), and the optimum sequence (in what order) we can begin to assemble a sensible, defensible road map describing what should be done in what order. How this is communicated is critical now. We have the facts, we have the path outlined, and we have a defensible position to share with our peers. We have the details readily available to support our position. Now the really difficult exercise rears its ugly head. Somehow, we need to distill and simply our message to what I call the “Duckies and Goats” view of the world. In other words we need to distill all of this work into a simplified yet compelling vision of how we transform an organization, or enabling technology to accomplish what is needed. Do not underestimate this task, after all the hard work put into an exercise like this, the last thing we need to do is to confuse our stakeholders with mind-numbing detail. Yes, we need this for ourselves to exhaust any possibility we have missed something. And to ensure we haven’t overlooked the obvious – not sure who said this but “when something is obvious, it may be obviously wrong”.
So, this is the basic pattern which is how a robust road map should be developed for any organization across any discipline (business or technology) to ensure a robust, effective planning exercise. Wanted to share this with you to help you with your efforts, this is usually not an exercise to be taken lightly. We are after all discussing some real world impacts to many, all the while understanding the laws of unintended consequences (more on that later), to come up with a set of actionable steps to take along the way that just make sense. I may be just another “rodeo clown”, but this has worked for me time after time. think this may just work for you. More on this later….
