With the target clearly defined and ecosystem well understood, it’s now time to get into the details. The next step is the roadmapping process which understands the precise needs or changes that must be done in order for the organisation’s vision and strategy to be adequately addressed. Roadmapping is one of the most important parts of the process because this is where valuable resources get allocated, therefore every decision must be rooted in the strategy.
Business Capability Roadmap
The Business Capability roadmap is not about developing solutions but defining what and when capabilities need to be developed and implemented.
Strategic themes are used to group the various changes and they can be at either the level of the strategic map or be cross-cutting.
When thinking about the roadmap the following needs to be worked through;
- Identify the critical pain points and ensure we have an elegant solution at the right time – this is the critical path journey to your vision
- Score everything in terms of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability and this needs to be done through ranking
- Desirability is the value to your customer of solving a problem
- Feasibility is how easy can your organisation solve this problem
- Viability is how valuable this is for your organisation, often measured in revenue or profit.
- Perform a relative Return-on-Investment assessment (Value vs. Effort)
Fundamental to this approach is the concept of ROI—return on investment. You can’t do everything at once, so you should do the most leveraged things first, the things that have the most bang for the least buck.
It’s easy to be tempted to use absolute pounds and pence in the ROI and many companies judge the value of proposed work based on a revenue projection. But what if your product is pre-revenue and you need to focus on getting your core vision in place? What if some customers are unprofitable at this point? What if the vision is to grab market share or to enter a new and untested market?
Revenue usually does come into it somewhere, but how do you account for multiple drivers of value? This is why value is not just revenue it must be;
Value = Customer’s Needs + Strategy * Confidence Factor
The power of the ROI assessment derives from its deliberate imprecision. It’s easy to get caught up in an argument about whether the revenue opportunity is £300k or £500k, but it’s usually quick to agree on whether it is high, medium, or low. The math works well with a 0-5 scale.
Effort is whatever is necessary to meet your customer’s needs and achieve your organisation’s strategy by adding the proposed feature, enhancement, or whatever is proposed.
One approach we use to get estimates without a lot of angst is to make them simple and abstract using t-shirt sizing. This common practice uses the familiar small-medium-large-extra-large scale to roughly size level of effort without getting bogged down in sprints, days, or person-months — and if you assign numbers to the various sizes it works well with the value scoring.
A risk factor can be used to discount the expected ROI of any proposed investment. A simple way to do this is to multiply the result of your value/effort equation by a confidence percentage. This is essentially the inverse of risk. You should be less confident about risky things.
Transition Roadmap
The Transition Roadmap is highly connected to the Business Capability Roadmap and both are rooted in the strategy.
A key part of this roadmap definition is to understand the gaps and outline the solution building blocks (SBBs), specifically identifying;
- How the roadmap supports the strategy, goals and objectives
- How the roadmap supports the Business Capability Roadmap by building out the necessary transition architectures
- What new or existing Solution Building Blocks will be used
- Key issues, risks and constraints
- Areas that require research and innovation, gaps in skills and knowledge
Working through the Business Capability roadmap, the matrix below consolidates all the gaps identified in the previous stages between where we are today and the vision. Time is spent thinking through potential solutions and dependencies. Principles defined in the End-State Assessment will be used to guide decision making and potential solutions.
The roadmap is defined in increments called Transition Architectures. This allows the architect to group the changes into manageable chunks. These chunks provide incremental delivery, breaking down the problem and ideally also providing the business incremental value, which is always more palatable.
Systems Roadmap
The Systems Roadmap is linked to the other roadmaps but also lives to some degree in isolation. Improvement to the technology landscape through simplification, rationalisation, reuse, innovation and improved management is always ongoing.
The analysis performed here is about the lifecycle of systems, which can pass through a number of transitionary states; Replatform, Refactor, Rearchitect, Repurchase, Rehost, Retain or Retire. This is an opportunity to investigate cloud service models such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS and is therefore a significant subject and should be given the time to be considered separately and also together with the rest of the proposed transitions.
Alignment with the Transition Roadmap provides the opportunity for more compelling changes, for example if we need to rearchitect our Sales and Service app, why not also move to a cloud-based model.
Bringing it altogether, in terms of the key business, application and infrastructure roadmap artefacts.
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