Design a roadmap and engage stakeholders to build your strategy : Imagine driving into nowhere and realizing you're lost with no landmarks in front of you. You have no idea where you are or what to do next. The same situation could happen to your business and to your team when you start...

Design a roadmap and engage stakeholders to build your strategy

"Plans are worthless. Planning is essential." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 

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Developing a digital strategy is essential for business competitiveness, but too often there are difficulties for managers who handle this to convey it to key stakeholders. This scenario occurs for various reasons. 

Firstly, it is a tricky subject for those who carry out other tasks and are not familiarized with technological issues. Then, because of the absence of tools that make the message clear, both in content and in the roadmap to be followed. Having clear, understandable, and flexible guidelines is key to achieving an organization's goals through digital initiatives. 

A roadmap is critical to outline what a company's goal is, identifying some of the activities that can help organizations achieve it.

This essential asset also called project roadmap, is a strategic business planning tool used to trace the future vision for a system, service, or new product.

It will show at a glance what changes and developments are needed to get there and visualize the outputs that are expected to be delivered in a specific time frame.

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Why is a roadmap so important?

As said, developing a digital roadmap allows the company to convert a strategic vision into a realistic plan of action that considers risk, probable variables to take into account, and helps to evaluate the ROI of the project.

A key to a constructive roadmap that guides the digital business is to collaborate with all stakeholders. Even if conveyed by an owner, guidelines need to be shared with stakeholders so as to involve as many resources as possible. That’s the key to creating an integrated strategy focused on achieving an agreed and shared business goal, rather than providing a series of isolated initiatives!

A first step might be to identify where the gaps are in the business proposal, processes, and capabilities, determining the areas your company wants to address.

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How do you create a project roadmap?

Planning is an ongoing process and you must take the time to define and update it. 

The roadmap continually evolves as does the future vision of the project. It is through this evolution that you should minimize those moments.

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Why didn't I know?!‍

That could do so much damage to the end result. There are a few steps that can be followed to define a project roadmap, let's see what they are.

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Identify stakeholders

At the very beginning of defining a new project, identifying key end-users and stakeholders is really critical. By understanding who to target, you can investigate what is important to the project activity.

Keeping these people informed, involved, and highly engaged remains essential, especially as the various steps proceed. Only in this way what was initially abstract might become a tangible and forward-looking action, making it real.

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Establish priorities

Some priorities will be so important to the organization that the timelines for these will be already set. For everything else, it is imaginable to be creative.

One idea is to bring stakeholders together and in this session encourage people to be open and transparent, keeping everyone focused on what is best for the organization as a whole and not on individual departments or teams.

The intent is to get overall coordination on what to prioritize based on descending order. By involving stakeholders in the definition of the project roadmap, you can allow them to actively incorporate themselves into the future vision.

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Visualize the roadmap

In identifying the potential of the business, leaders must consider where the company position itself to stay competitive. And so is for roadmaps that can be represented in different sizes and formats, wrapping the priorities (with related potential issues), and goals that are intended to be achieved in the short, mid, or long-term.

As mentioned earlier, these plans are always subject to change, but the aim is to make them easy enough to adjust and modify over time.

The important thing is to always be able to have a good visualization of the whole: to accomplish this, PM's creativity is often necessary. 

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CONCLUSION

With an effective project roadmap and stakeholders in your mind, you can give your company the idea of where you're going, how you're going to get there, and who will take the journey with you. The roadmap is the starting point of planning, and creating an effective one is a great way to set a project up for success. But it's not just a matter of theory because, in today's work environments, the increasing complexity of activities must be managed. To achieve this, any PM needs the support of versatile and powerful tools to manage the overall workflow of the team.

Now that you have the information you need to start an effective project roadmap it’s important to understand the right software to implement it: give a try to Anywhere for job management might be the easy solution and the best tool to increase your team productivity.