What is a strategic roadmap

In a global 24/7 connected world it’s nearly impossible to picture a modern business without a strategy roadmap and a strong Project Management Team behind it. If your company is not currently using both, you should heavily consider to implement it. The most successfully companies on the market either periodically look for an external project management team depending on their needs or have their own within the companies structure. Project Managers are highly important as they centralize all the different departments/tools/workers required to successfully complete an objetive at the same time as they can be an important and very stable “bridge” between the interests of the firm and its vision of the future and the workers and their daily tasks. Having both a solid project management team and a well designed strategy roadmap has become over the last decades an important key for firms to grow and achieve their goals. Together Project Managers and  the strategy roadmap form a gear that, if used correctly, turns at a good pace. A strategy roadmap it’s in fact a very simple tool to use, understand or visualize as it mainly shows actions that take developers/workers from one point towards the company’s idea of where the firm wants to be, normally in long-term although it is still a tool that can usefully be fitted for short-term projects also. With only 3 simple questions any company or management team can start designing its own roadmap:

•     Where are we?
•     Where do we want to go/be?
•     How will we get there?

Very simple isn’t it? Even pretty obvious to many people, still it’s very surprising how often companies get eventually lost, regardless the impact this might have to the business, by jumping from planning to execution without any strategy at all. This doesn’t happen because they had a bad plan nor that the firms or the project couldn’t support its execution. Many times  it’s because businesses miss “the road” that links their plans or their ideas to its implementation which will then lead to the objetive and its results. This is the first of many reason why Project Managers rely a lot on strategic roadmaps and actually spend a significant amount of time designing it. This valuable time spent designing the strategy roadmap is not only because of the multiple benefits attached to a correct elaboration of the roadmap in a long-term but also due to the fact that if it is properly-designed not only will strongly mark the routes to follow, it will likely shorten these routes and the time needed to actually finalize each task making the movement from one point to another smoothly intuitive and fast. Another benefit of this tool is that it helps communication flow and also avoids losing track of the main targets which is crucial for a good project execution and implementation. It graphically presents and describes a lot of information on what’s happening and what is planned ahead, information that helps moving forward more effectively as it reduces a many queries and doubts instantly without having to speak to a third party trying to figure out what needs to be done to get to the next step. To Project Managers this tool is a blue print of all that is needed to conclude their mission which is normally to achieve the company’s vision. It is a strong and complete overview of both short-term and long-term objectives that clearly outlines what steps are to be followed to keep moving in the right direction towards the larger goal. Giving strategy roadmaps such importance makes perfect sense to Project Managers as it not only provides this easy reading information that can constantly be updated without much effort so they know where everything is at every moment, but it also provides worker/developers the autonomy they need so they can focus on their tasks. Often the information presented on the roadmap is available to every employee. Sometimes only for consultation purposes other times employees can actually update their position on the roadmap. With this simple action, Project Managers are giving each individual or department the needed information to continue developing the tasks towards the common goals encouraging the communication, collaboration and transparency required to grow and develop the short-term projects and daily tasks on an healthy work environment. This individual autonomy soon becomes the workers personal growth and fast becomes the department growth which soon becomes the company growth. With all this in mind it’s fair to say that a Project Management team and a strategy roadmap are an importante meeting point to every member of staff in any modern company and a strong and solid start point towards the future of any business that wants to not only survive but prosper and evolve in good timing.