How to Create a Project Roadmap: Tips & Examples
A project roadmap is essential for managing cross-functional projects, offering clear milestones and strategic objectives that help align all teams and stakeholders. Without it, projects fall behind. Yet simply having a project management roadmap is not enough in itself to guarantee success.
This article seeks to define a project roadmap and how it differs from a project plan. It goes on to discuss the benefits of using a project roadmap, before offering some tried and tested practical tips for putting together project roadmaps of your own, with some examples of what that might look like.
If you are looking for more information on project management in general, see this article first:
What is a project management roadmap?
A project roadmap is a high-level – usually graphical – overview of a project’s goals and deliverables presented on a timeline. Alongside deliverables, it will typically also display objectives, milestones, and resources.
A project roadmap is a simple, easy-to-follow source of truth for key stakeholders. For project managers and their teams, it allows them to visualize the project from a strategic standpoint and make critical decisions without having to sift through the details. For senior and external stakeholders, it helps them to keep track of progress.
Project management roadmaps will usually offer a clear breakdown of:
- The project’s progress at any given point
- How allocated resources are being utilized
- Whether the project is on track to hit its strategic goals and SMART project objectives
Project roadmap vs project plan: What’s the difference?
Where a project roadmap gives a high-level strategic view of a project, the plan will go into more detail at the level of specific tasks.
A project plan provides task-level details of a project, presented on a timeline. This helps project managers to assign responsibilities to team members and track aspects of a project at a granular level. It is designed as an internal project team resource that helps them stay up to date with project progress.
A project roadmap presents only the high-level, strategic view. It avoids going into day-to-day tasks or delving into a detailed view of what team members are working on. The roadmap is designed to help the team present an at-a-glance view of the project’s status to other teams, such as the executive committee, investors, the marketing and sales departments, or others outside of implementation.
Benefits of using a project roadmap
Project roadmaps come with several key benefits:
- They articulate the strategic reasoning for pursuing a project in ways that everyone can understand.
- Project managers can use them to communicate a project’s strategic objectives to stakeholders in a way that’s easy to understand.
- PMs can use them as an ongoing reference guide to keep on track of a project’s progress.
- Having a quick visual reference as an at-a-glance reminder of high-level goals makes it easier for teams to re-prioritize tasks as their project changes.
- They are good for setting expectations.
- They are good for earning buy-in from senior stakeholders and budget holders.
- They are good for keeping executives and investors in the loop with project progress and developments.
In summary, a roadmap is great for communication, tracking progress at-a-glance, and keeping stakeholders informed without them having to go through the entire project management process.
Project roadmap template
Project roadmaps are big-picture, high-level overviews for stakeholders that don’t need nitty-gritty details. Project roadmaps convey the goals, significant milestones, and dependencies of a project to implementation teams, managers, and senior stakeholders.
Here’s an example of what a project roadmap looks like in Teamhood:
This roadmap shows the initiatives involved in a project over a specific timescale. You can see that time is displayed in units of months, you can also add milestones to mark quarterly deadlines, as well as other important dates such as product launches and testing.
You can also see that the initiatives on the roadmap are color-coded to easily identify their type.
Step-by-Step Guide: How to Create a Winning Project Roadmap
1. Set Your Project Goals
First things first, you need to figure out what you want to achieve with your project. What are your strategic goals and objectives? Work backward from there to come up with some measurable targets, or key performance indicators (KPIs). Consider what you want to achieve, who your audience is, and how long it might take.
2. Pick the Right Data Points and KPIs
These are the metrics you’ll use to track your progress. What milestones and deliverables are relevant to your goals, and can you track them accurately?
3. Create a Project Timeline
This is a pretty straightforward step. Take your milestones and lay them out in a timeline. Think about how they relate to each other and how long each one will take. Once you have that sorted, you can come up with an overall project timeline.
When you use project management software like Teamhood, it’s easy to get a visual representation of your milestones:
4. Test Your Roadmap with a Mock-Up
Building a minimum viable version, or mock-up, of your roadmap is a good idea. It’s a chance to test your assumptions and make sure you’re on the right track.
Take your project objectives and data points, and plot them against your timeline. This is where project management software can really come in handy. Tools like Teamhood make it easy to map out your information and get a clear picture.
5. Review Your Mock-Up
Show your mock-up to your team and get feedback from people you trust to give an honest opinion. Does your mock-up give a realistic overview of the project? Is it easy to understand? Is there too much detail?
Ask for feedback and take it all in.
6. Create Your Full Roadmap
Once you’ve got all the feedback, review it and decide what changes to make. Update your roadmap with the new information and add in any details that are missing.
7. Update Your Roadmap as You Go
As your project progresses, make sure to update your roadmap to reflect any changes that come up.
8. Choose the Right Project Management Tool
When it comes to creating a practical roadmap, you need the right software. Look for a tool that lets you collect and visualize data quickly, and that has all the features you need. You might also want it to handle other project management tasks for you. Check out some of our articles that compare different project management tools.
Once you choose the right software, creating and using project roadmaps will become much easier. Want to continue learning? Check out this post for best practices on developing roadmaps in Kanban.
How to start creating project roadmaps for your team
Teamhood’s suite of project management software tools is perfect for all aspects of the project management lifecycle, including project road mapping. It comes complete with a range of Agile tools, Gantt chart capabilities, templates, and more.
Best of all, you can try it today for free, without providing your credit card details.
Get started using project roadmaps in Teamhood:
