Roadmapping

Roadmapping is the first and most significant step in your project. It is how we develop your plan to move your company forward.

We help you understand:

• Where you're going
• How long it might take to get there
• How much you can expect it to cost
• What type of risks are we likely to encounter along the way?

The Roadmapping process consists of two steps. First is a guided interactive session where we dig into the details of your company and your processes. Second is the creation of a clear roadmap that will address how you can safely solve your business problem quickly and economically.

Here’s what to expect with a Roadmapping session:

1. YOU, SUCCESS AND FAILURE

You: We start by going into more detail on you, your company, customers, and business model.

What defines success? We will learn more about the specific business problems behind your project. Identifying what a successful future looks like we’ll establish how this project will be financially beneficial to your business and create a positive return-on-investment

What defines failure? Under what scenario would you consider this a failed project? What type of risks are you willing to take? Are there any risks that must be avoided?

2. ASSESS RISKS AND PRIORITIES

Once we’ve learned about your business and your project we’ll identify and analyze any risks that may get in the way of successfully moving forward — maybe the budget’s too low, there is a tight schedule to meet, or we need to integrate with other systems.

Our goal is to capture anything that might get in the way of success and then create a plan to avoid that risk or to mitigate it if it cannot be avoided.

3. DEFINE ROLES

What type of people will be interacting with this project?

For whom is this project intended? Internal team members or external customers?

We’ll identify individual names and subject matter experts where possible so that we can bring everybody into the room if necessary as we drill down into more detail.

4. DEFINE ACTIONS

For each role, we’ll capture where they interact with the project and what effect those interactions have on your business.

Our goal here is to develop a bulleted list of actions for each role. Actions can contain current tasks or tasks we want to accomplish in the future.

5. DEFINE STORIES

These are individual and specific details that relate to a role and action. Each of these stories should accomplish a tangible business goal like the following: Protect Revenue, Increase Revenue, Manage Costs, Increase Brand Value, Increase Efficiency or Provide More Value to Customers.

(As part of the development process we’ll create very detailed stories to guide the developers. These are not those stories)

6. PROPOSE CANDIDATE SOLUTIONS

At this point we’ll have a pretty good understanding of the project, your business problem, goals and users.

We’ll use our experience delivering solutions to provide some options on ways to accomplish your project along with an estimated level of effort.

7. DISCUSS INFRASTRUCTURE AND HOSTING

Having explored some solutions we’ll investigate how they would be hosted, what costs might be incurred in setup and long-term maintenance, and we’ll help you identify and understand the technologies that will be used to accomplish this project.

8. REASSESS RISKS

Now that we’ve fleshed out this project and have come up with a few paths that will help you solve the problem you face, we’ll revisit the risks we identified at the beginning of our session and see if they’re still a concern.

We will also take another look for any risks we uncovered during the process and risks that are specific to a solution.

9. CLOSING

Finally, we’ll take the roadmap we produced and compare it to the business goals you established at the outset of our session. Have we come up with anything that holds us back from reaching your goals?

Are there any closing thoughts or suggestions on how we can solve your problem faster or better?

Are there any proposed solutions that we can remove from consideration or identify as a clear choice for moving forward?

10. NEXT STEPS

Once the session is completed, we will create an exhaustive summary of the roadmap and proposed solutions, including projected budgets and timelines.