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Visually communicating your Strategic and
Technology Roadmap is an important part of telling your strategy story.
Visualizing your plans can help communicate a complex and evolving
plan to your audience, pointing them to the key factors and
decisions that will make your plan a success.
Two key visualizations create a sound foundation for a
strategic or technology roadmap:
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Technology Roadmap. The time-based Roadmap shows the evolution of technologies or capabilities that
will achieve your objectives over time.
There are almost as many formats for roadmaps as there are roadmappers,
but nearly all roadmaps include a time-based graph that
describes how technology, product, markets, etc. are expected to
evolve over time.
Sometimes the roadmap includes
progress milestones in performance or features.
Some roadmaps include linkages to show how the elements
of the roadmap are driven by strategy, customer needs, or technology
innovations.
Figure 1 Product-Technology Roadmap
Here's how to read the technology roadmap:
We are currently using existing technology 1 (which we developed
ourselves) to implement Element A, and we have a plan to replace it
with technology 2 (that we will obtain from a supplier) in 2010. For
Element B, we are using technology 3 and we will use a cost reduced
version of technology 3 obtained from a supplier in 2008. Element C
uses technology a and technology b (which we developed with a
partner). The roadmap includes a “Vision” for Element C, that is at
some unspecified time in the future, we see the ultimate technology
for Element C will be technology e. Technology e is currently
unplanned (“we don’t have a current plan to implement”), but we hope
to obtain technology e from research.
The roadmap in Figure 2 adds information about
development plans for some critical technologies. For technology 2
to be ready in 2010, we must begin development in 2008 and
demonstrate feasibility in mid-2009. We must begin to work with a
supplier in 2009 to have technology 6 ready for inclusion in the
product in 2010.
Figure 2 Technology Roadmap with Development
Intervals
Some roadmap formats display the evolution of multiple layers of
Market, Product and Technology. Figure 3 shows a multi-layer
roadmap where the idea is to show relationships among the markets,
products, and technologies involved in the plan.
Figure 3 Layered Roadmap
It is sometimes helpful to show links and
dependencies among the elements. In Figure 4, the connections from
technologies to products shows how products depend on technologies.
For example, Model 1 requires Tech a and Model 2 depends on Tech b.
Figure 4 Layered Roadmap with Links
Innovation scorecards accompany a roadmap and document its visual elements.
For key technologies or capabilities innovation scorecards
consisely describe--in one or a few pages--future objectives and how to get there:
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The need or issue addressed.
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Performance improvement or expected benefits.
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Competitive solutions.
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Risks, roadblocks, barriers.
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Work by others that may be leveraged.
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Timing: When technology/capability could be ready for use.
Innovation scorecards provide a framework for tracking progess in developing and acquiring technologies.
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