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Technology Roadmapping Update
Enterprise roadmapping news for product and technology planners
Innovation and Emotions
February 18, 2008
I came across this interesting post on the role of emotions in product planning on the Consultaglobal blog today. the author writes about how product designers and planners should be factoring people’s emotional connections to the product into their planning.
The most relevant part of the post to this blog’s readers should be this bit:
Amazingly enough, many designers I worked with rarely look at product roadmapping, meaning that they would not spend enough time figuring out how products evolve through successive releases and how that relates to the product’s actual design:
* keeping or dropping features
* improving upon existing features
* enabling features driven by adjacent and unsuspected use cases
* adding new features
As a result, cramming a lot of features into first product releases and mission creep have become well known innovation pitfalls.
I couldn’t agree more, of course. Roadmapping is one small part of the overall planning cycle, but I believe its key for any organization with more than a couple of projects in the works at any one time. That’s especially trued for any company whose products involve a high-tech element. We don’t usually include the emotional context of a product in its plans but I can see where doing so might improve the overall results. I suppose this is just another piece in the puzzle that will soon be commonly understood to define successful product launches.
Roadmapping Tips from the PSN
August 12, 2007
The Product Strategy Network seems to be a group with the right idea. This page has tips you can use to guide your organization’s roadmapping practice, whether you’re just starting to think about it or have been in the trenches for years already. I agree with everything written here except:
…the product roadmapping process a company uses can be as important to its business as the roadmap itself
The process is actually the most important part. The roadmap generated by the process is useful but much less so though than the benefits your group receives from the collaboration and communication roadmapping can facilitate.
Secure staff buy-in to the roadmap through participation rather than relying on top-down enforcement to achieve compliance.
While I agree that no initiative can be totally driven from the top-down, in my experience you need more than buy-in from the people on whom the roadmap’s content will depend. A job requirement, including making the successful completion of a roadmap part of each participant’s annual review, is usually also a good idea. Absent that, it is inevitable that the other priorities that are required and evaluated at review time will take precedent. This is obviously not appropriate for every member of the group, but for key stakeholders and those chosen to maintain and manage the roadmaps and the process surrounding them.
If your company is young or creating a new, innovative product, roadmap updates can be as frequently as once a week.
Actually, in my opinion, it is the young innovative company that really doesn’t need a roadmap. They need to be fast, agile and willing to change and making everyone sit through frequent planning meetings would be really bad. I’m not saying long-term planning is bad for these types of operations, but I do believe too much planning could stifle the creativity and innovation they’re supposed to be pushing for.
Also, if the entire group of participants involved will be less than 20 or so people, I’d even question the need for an internally facing roadmap. We usually consider 20 + as the minimum number of people to be involved for a roadmapping process to make sense. Any fewer and they are probably going to be able to manage the planning and communication that roadmapping offers with simple tools and the water cooler network.
As I wrote above, everything else I read here is good advice. Read the other articles and check out their workshops for more on the PSN. In the spirit of good disclosure, I am not affiliated with them and have never directly tried their services. I don’t even know anyone there, yet. 🙂
Roadmapping for Tourism
July 12, 2007
I believe it’s safe to say that Roadmapping is well established as a strategic planning process when you find it being used in places like the Metro Iloilo and Guimaras areas in the Philippines. This article from a local newspaper’s site describes in good detail how the local tourism board got together to plan it’s goals and how it would achieve them.
Here’s a quote:
In a recent workshop held with project proponents, a roadmap was drawn expected to bring a shared understanding of the project concepts. Shared understanding that will translate to better management of the project and ultimately, attainment of the deliverables or expected project results.
Participants from various government agencies, local government units and partners in the private sector worked on getting firsthand knowledge on tourism strategic directions and infrastructure strategic directions as strategy maps were then validated.
The documents they prepared can be found on their web site.
From the sound of things, they included other process as well like balanced scorecard. I wish I could say my small town here in the states was this proactive in planning for the future. Way to go, Iloilo!
Roadmapping & Innovation
June 29, 2007
In a nice long post over at Accelerating Innovation, Egils Milbergs writes about the state of manufacturing in America and the promise for improvement he sees with the upcoming arrival of a new Presidential administration. Among quite a few nice points, he includes this about the potential of technology roadmapping:
Technology Roadmapping and Federal Research Priorities. Technology roadmaps represent a consensus regarding industry direction and research needs, innovation trajectories, alternative scenarios and the possibility of disruptive technologies and surprises. Industry associations and sector based collaborations are making greater use of technology roadmapping methodologies as an input to the federal R&D priority setting process as well as inputs to their own innovation planning. Roadmapping exercises can provide the basis for public and private investments in radically new production systems.
I couldn’t agree more and there can be little doubt that there’s a ton of room for improvement in way things have been done in Washington DC. In roadmapping practices, we talk all the time about the power of the process to break down silos (the barriers to communication that form in any large organization). Getting industries and the federal government to work together would be a great example of this in action.
As the author writes, one other aspect of roadmapping that needs to be emphasized is its ability to help an organization see the future with more clarity. I’ve sat in on many great workshops where a group of people who are not used to thinking out more beyond the next couple of years are asked to envision where their group should be 5 or 10 or more years from today. Once they get used to the concept, they really start to enjoy themselves. They realize they can play a critical part in defining the future of their company and that’s really powerful. Its this kind of event that is really needed today in government if we expect to stay competitive in the new world of the 21st century.
Do I believe that blog posts like this one or Egils’ will change anything? No; there are a lot of reasons for why the system works the way it does today. But there is hope as long as someone out there is pushing. Please read all of Egils’ post to see why “innovation” can be more than just this year’s enterprise buzzword.
Nanotech manufacturers need to roadmap
June 24, 2007
Small Times, a magazine for micro- and nano-scale manufacturers, has this recent story about how the industry needs to do more integration and standardization. There is a lot there that would only be interesting to a nanotech researcher, but this paragraph caught my eye:
Pointing to the chip making industry as “a good model to use,” MEMS industry consultant Roger Grace declared, “We need to learn from past experiences, we have to build on what we know.” The creation and implementation of industry standards, support of R&D efforts, roadmapping, and establishment of a dedicated equipment, metrology, and packaging supplier infrastructure were among the lessons that nanomanufacturers could learn from the semiconductor community, according to Grace.
As more and more industries see the success that the semi-con guys have had with their roadmaps (www.itrs.net) you will start to see the value of roadmapping appreciated in surprising new places. Right now it’s still very much about high technology planning, but the sky is the limit really, in my opinion.
What is Roadmapping, part I
June 20, 2007
Depending on how you found this site, you may or may not be wondering what roadmapping is. Let me break it down for you. You know how whenever you’re planning to take a long trip in the car to a place you’ve never been before, you pretty much have to have a map? Without that map, you would almost certainly get lost, or at least, take a lot longer than you should to get to your destination. Now imagine how important that map would be if you were trying to find a way to get 50 teams of 50 people each to all meet up at a destination that none of them had ever been to before and the future of your company depends on the success of that operation.
Well, that’s what enterprise-scale product planning is like today and that’s why roadmapping has become an important part of many companies’ planning processes. With a carefully constructed product and technology roadmap, you can be sure that, at least as of today, you know where you’re headed and how you intend to get there. Now you may be thinking here that there are a LOT of existing processes that help manage product and technology planning such as Portfolio Management, Stage Gate, Balanced Scorecard and so on. How is roadmapping different from these other well established disciplines?
The answer is that a roadmap looks at your plans, from which markets you want to be in, and which products you will sell into those markets, down to which technologies you will be building/buying in order to offer those products — expressed on a time line. In other words, most all other well-developed planning and management processes allow you to understand how your many many products and R&D efforts compare but they ignore the element of time. Also, they tend to be focused on “what we are doing”, as opposed to “what are we going to be doing”. In other words, they focus on today, not tomorrow.
So, portfolio management software vendors claims to the contrary, most of the time, their tools are used to compare projects that you’ve already decided to fund, right? Project Management is completely operational, of course. That’s why roadmapping fills a niche that’s really not otherwise covered today. A mature, well-developed roadmapping process, with (I hate to say it but) cross-functional participation and cooperation, allows you to start planning even further out into time than you could otherwise. It gives you as firm a basis as is possible on which to start defining your future, today.
In the next installment in this series, I will talk about the history of roadmapping and how it is used today by companies like Motorola, Corning, Boeing and others. Thanks for reading this far. Please please please provide any feedback you like on where you’d like to see this conversation go next.
Lastly, if you’re a person who loves details and wants them now, you might find reading the Technology Roadmapping page at Wikipedia to your liking.
🙂
Welcome to Roadmap Update
June 16, 2007
Hello world. (Sorry, just a little software geek humor there)
Welcome to the blog. My name is Peter and I am employed in the field of Technology Roadmapping. Please stay tuned here to learn more about what that is, what’s going on in the field and what’s coming up on the horizon.
Thanks for stopping by. Please feel free to comment and suggest ideas if you wish.
~Peter
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Technology Roadmapping Update 