A project roadmap is one of the most powerful tools for getting stakeholders and executives on board fast. They help the stakeholders understand the project’s goals, targets, allocated resources, and expected deliverables, plotted out on a timeline. They are vital for fine-tuning your project strategy and keeping the overview of the project prominent.
Are you ready to learn how to create your project roadmap to aid your success?
Project roadmap definition
Before you start creating a project roadmap, you must understand what a project roadmap is and why you should use one.
A project roadmap is a one-page graphical overview that presents high-level goals and deliverables on a timeline. It is a helpful way to manage your stakeholder’s expectations while communicating project objectives and schedules with your team.
A project roadmap is ideal when you (the project manager) want to quickly convey critical information like project goals to your project stakeholders. It is an excellent tool for rapidly briefing executives and other stakeholders who want a general idea of the project and how it will work but don’t need to know the day-to-day ins and outs. It’s also great for the early days of a project when you haven’t worked out all the details yet.
Key elements of a project roadmap
A project roadmap provides a strategic overview of the main elements of a project; therefore, it should include objectives, milestones, deliverables, resources, and a project timeline.
A few key elements of a project roadmap include:
- Objectives
- Milestones
- Deliverables
- Resources
- Project timeline
- Dependencies
- Key contacts
Five steps to an efficient project roadmap
We have provided you with a guide on the steps to build a project roadmap utilising monday.com.
1. Write a business case
When writing a roadmap, a company will want to know the most important information upfront. The first step is to describe the project, justify your undertaking, and outline the benefits, costs, and risks. You can use monday.com‘s project proposal template to help you write your business case. The purpose of this step is to get buy-in and approval first.
2. Write a project charter
After you get approval, the next step is to write a project charter to outline the key points of the project, such as major milestones and deliverables, key stakeholders, assumptions, schedule overview, and resource allocation. Once you have written this, you’re ready to create your visual roadmap.
3. Start with the project roadmap template
With the help of monday.com‘s project roadmap template, building your roadmap is now simple and quick. The project roadmap template starts with the bare bones ensuring you only include what you need. The template ensures your project roadmaps always look the same.
4. Input your project information
When it comes to populating your project roadmap, the data we recommend including is:
- The goals/objectives
- The benefits or potential ROI of reaching these objectives/goals
- A high-level timeline showing the entire scope of the project with prospective delivery dates
- Workstreams for each of the teams working on the project
- High-level activities to be completed
- Defined project milestones
5. Keep your roadmap updated
Projects change all the time, and this is where monday.com comes in handy as you can make altercations to reflect changes in timelines, resources, milestones, and dependencies. monday.com makes this process a lot less time-consuming and tedious.
monday.com project management features
As well as monday.com being great for creating your project roadmap, it also helps you to connect all the moving parts of your projects to drive impact and reach your goals faster.
Here are a few project management features included in monday.com:
- Project approvals: Teams can use forms to collect the information needed for efficient, streamlined project proposals and work requests, which all get added to a board, where you can use automation and statuses to speed up approvals.
- Project planning: Team members can assign owners and contributors, set clear deadlines, and follow the status of individual projects.
- Portfolio management: Teams can see the big picture by pulling data from all projects across different programs into one Dashboard View. Teams can instantly connect budgets, timelines, actual costs, risks, and progress to identify bottlenecks and trends.
- Document creation: monday.com workdocs allows you to create your own documents in-platform, where you can add text, images, boards, and dashboards directly from your workspace.
For your project roadmap to succeed, you need it to be flexible, visual, and easy to share. Using monday.com is an excellent way to ensure this.
Contact us today to learn more about the moday.com project roadmap template.
