We Roadmap and So Should You

{Scott Gilbert, Enthiosys President}

Here at Enthiosys World Headquarters, it's time to start working on our 2009 corporate goals and plans. Like most companies we have a good idea of who we are and what we want to become, in other words "a vision". Like most companies we have to pursue that vision one day, one week, month, quarter and year at a time. To do that we follow some of the core Agile practices that we help our clients adopt, with some slight adjustments to fit our context. For example we have weekly staff meetings, a.k.a. standups. We focus on monthly goals, a.k.a. sprints which contains projects, and a sprint backlog with tasks to allow the team to coordinate its efforts. But, like any good Agile team, none of the detailed execution work can begin until we have a well fleshed-out roadmap that aligns with our company vision.

Roadmap... you might be asking?  For those of you who are familiar with our approach to building Agile Product Roadmaps, the picture below should look somewhat familiar.

That’s right.  We use our Agile Roadmapping technique to guide our own corporate planning efforts, albeit with a few twists. As you can see, we don’t use the same sections that we describe in our latest product roadmapping webinar,  but many of them are similar. Starting from the top, I’ll describe each section and then I’ll describe our process.

• Marketing & PR: In this section, we document the set of outbound marketing activities that will take place in a given month. Some portion of the marketing mix is fixed and happens every month, like the distribution of our product bytes newsletter. Others are one-time events like speaking engagements.

• Sales: Here, we simply document the quarterly goals as well as the sales-pipeline-related metrics that we need to achieve them. This section is not very rich with content, but is a good reminder of the work that needs to be done each month.

• People: As a consulting services company, we - perhaps more than product companies - need to ensure that we have the right people on the team. It's challenging to consistently solve the puzzle of getting the right person, at the right time, in the right place to be able to fulfill a specific client’s needs. Therefore, in this section we work to make sure that we are building the workforce for our business.

• Services: This section is focused what new services to offer and what enhancements we might make to our existing services. As a consulting company, we are constantly learning new techniques and approaches based on our own client experiences - or through our peers working in similar situations.

• Platform: This area captures the tools, systems and processes we need to effectively and efficiently run our entire business: from marketing to sales to service delivery and finance. A broad platform perspective allow us to work on reducing operating costs and increasing profits by looking at the end-to-end activities flow of consultants, reporting, finance, contracts and other business activities.

• Schedule: Here we try to capture things like vacations, large-scale Innovation Games, significant travel, and extended on-site client visits.

So although the sections of content are different, the core principles and best practices we advocate for building your product roadmap still apply. For example, we start our two-day in-person working session by creating a set of company goals for the year. Then, we apply themes to each quarter to help organize and focus their efforts within that quarter. Next, we collaboratively fill in the various sections, typically starting with the marketing & PR events and rhythms. Finally, we tend to work month by month, going back to adjust projects/programs/releases to make sure that we have not overloaded ourselves or sequenced things in some weird way.

This is a collaborative, intensive, iterative process.  Face-to-face without special software tools.  (PostIt® notes are intuitive and easy to use.) If you're ready to do your own roadmapping, grab our roadmap templates, assemble your team, and get started today!

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