Following our who, what, why, when and how theme; and building on the Delivery Framework post. One of the key tools for communicating a delivery timeline to stakeholders is a Road Map. Here we look at the simple steps you can take to create a Road Map.
The when
You can begin to bring the whole project to life by creating a Road Map. The first iteration should highlight any unknowns and potential blockers that may impact the delivery timeline. These can be removed at the project progresses and the amount of uncertainty decreases. There are many processes for providing estimates, as a rule they follow this pattern:
- Each team should estimate how long each of their steps in the process will take to complete and give a confidence score
- Identify any team that has a dependency on it, they should also provide an estimate and confidence score for the dependency
- These time frames can then be added together taking into account entry and exit criteria for each step to produce a road map for delivering key milestones
- Importantly there should be one master Road Map, each team can have sub plan but they should all inform one Road Map.