Roadmap
“We can reinvent ourselves on our terms or allow Amazon to reinvent us on their terms.”
Predictive Analytics is a big deal here in the stride of the 21st century, but Predictive Innovation is valuable too. Predictive innovation takes form as a Roadmap. A Roadmap is evidence that your organization prioritizes its innovation work, is not complacent with Business-As-Usual Operations, and minimizes fire-fighting.
Change Leaders need to create and maintain a tangible, legible, elegant representation of their organization’s big picture activities in the form of a calendar. Do not be tempted to jam a lot of information to the roadmap. Avoid clutter. Executives want to know how big, fat, and fast their innovation pipeline is. The vehicle is a roadmap. The roadmap should contain 3-12 activities. Two activities feels bare and not compelling. More than a dozen activities dilutes attention and starts to create cosmetic and legibility problems. The roadmap contains all major in-flight activities and a modest number of major projects that have not yet started.
A roadmap helps your organization:
● Start and execute the most valuable investments
● Keep project / investment names customer-centric
● Optimize the timing to start a new project
● Optimize the quantity of projects in-flight at any given time
● Expose why 20 in-flight projects bring progress to a crawl
● Be transparent about pivoting when priorities change
● Avoid being at the mercy of impulsive decisions – a new fad originating from “water cooler conversation”
● Avoid siloed, orphaned projects
● Avoid languishing of projects such that the Value Proposition becomes obsolete
Some organizations add ongoing activities to their roadmap. Don’t do this. For ongoing activities, the calendar is irrelevant. Doing this dilutes the focus of true projects that have a beginning and an end. The transparency for ongoing activities belongs in a separate inventory. On a project roadmap, ongoing activities are not worth the noise. In an extreme case, a roadmap shows all ongoing activities, and the calendar dimension completely loses its value.
At its best, a Roadmap is evidence you have exciting changes approaching that are intelligently prioritized!