Build your roadmap

A practical guide to learn the method, best practices, and build your roadmap to launch your project and develop it step by step in your daily work.

1. The Roadmap: What Is It?

A sheet is a practical document that helps you organize your work and get a long-term view of the objectives you set and the various tasks they involve so you can get from point A to point B of the project. It provides direction to follow.

Throughout the project, the roadmap can and should be used as a reference. It can be updated regularly based on whether objectives are achieved, unforeseen obstacles encountered, and possible shifts in project direction.

The roadmap should be used in conjunction with a range of other monitoring and organizational tools, such as reverse scheduling (work calendar) or key performance indicators (KPIs). These are tools that provide structure and support day-to-day management and work management.

2. Why develop a roadmap?

The roadmap makes it possible to both break down, prioritize and plan your objectives while also anticipating from the outset the concrete needs that each will require on a human, material, and economic level.

Understanding the timeline and prioritizing your goals

The roadmap serves to stagger the objectives you set and plan the various elements they require you to mobilize and achieve. This tool helps address challenges of rationalization, decomposition, hierarchization and prioritization of objectives while evaluating them against a timeline. The roadmap thus combines the principle of a priority list and a schedule. It is a realistic calendar of objectives.

The idea is not to create objectives for the sake of creating objectives, but rather to think about the different milestones to reach before achieving your final goal. Additionally, the roadmap makes it possible to break down and plan these different milestones and to better articulate the needs encountered in order to develop your project under the right conditions.

To facilitate the structuring of the roadmap, we propose establishing six objectives from the project's outset, staggered over a period spanning from the project's beginning to six months. This allows for progress with very gradual milestones, one objective per month.

The roadmap can also be conceived over a longer timeframe and allow you to set your goals over a period of one year. We don't necessarily recommend planning your goals further ahead than one year maximum, as the risk is losing focus and aiming too high, too low, or off target. The roadmap would then risk indicating a false course and would become outdated.

Identify the practical implications of each objective

A roadmap asks the project lead to think realistically and pragmatically about the various parameters that need to be considered in order to achieve each set objective and thus reach the final objective.

You must take into account:

• The amount of time it will likely take to achieve a goal. This is a difficult but essential exercise. In particular, it allows us to estimate costs in a pragmatic way;
• The people involved in carrying out the project. This includes the “point person” who will be in charge, as well as others—whether from within or outside the team—who will be called upon one or more times to perform the various tasks involved in the project;
• All possible challenges involved in achieving each objective. These may include hiring staff, securing a partnership with X or Y, moving into new office space, developing a mobile app, purchasing equipment, etc.;
• The financial costs incurred specifically to achieve the objective. These may include hiring a service provider and paying their compensation, or purchasing specific equipment, for example. You must also include imputed costs (i.e., implicit expenses). These may include, for example, the wages you will forgo for the hours spent on tasks related to the objective;
• Overhead costs related to fixed and structural expenses. These include all expenses incurred regardless of their purpose (such as Wi-Fi service fees, rent, salaries paid, the number of workdays, and the associated labor costs, etc.).

All of these elements must be carefully considered in advance for each objective and included in the roadmap. The goal is to be thorough and realistic in order to avoid setbacks and to know where we’re going and what each objective will entail. In this sense, the roadmap makes it possible to anticipate and allocate human, material, and financial resources. It also serves as a feasibility assessment tool that enables you to set milestones and choose the right monitoring tools (Key Performance Indicators—KPIs) based on your timeline and objectives.

3. Create a Roadmap

Create your roadmap in seven steps:

1. Define your ultimate goal—where you want to be in six months;

2. Think about the various milestones you’ll need to reach along the way to get there;

3. Rank your goals and set a timeline for them so you can prioritize and phase them out;

4. For each of these goals, one by one, consider the following:

• How long does it take you to do it?;
• Who will be responsible for ensuring that the objective is achieved;
• Who will be involved in achieving the objective;
• What constraints and requirements will you encounter in achieving this objective?;
• What are the specific costs associated with achieving the objective?;
• What are the fixed and overhead costs that are added to that?

5. Assess the feasibility and realism of your project once you have a big-picture view;

6. Create a detailed reverse schedule for each objective that includes all the associated tasks;

7. Finalize your roadmap by creating an overall reverse schedule.

4. Our Educational Resource