Before we delve into understanding the importance of roadmaps in Business Analysis, let’s understand what a roadmap is.
What is a Roadmap?
A roadmap is a strategic plan or a GPS for the business that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it. As an example, twitter probably has a a roadmap of what they what to accomplish for the year or your department may have a roadmap outlining what are some of the objectives they want to accomplish for 5 years.
It also serves as a communication tool, a high-level document that helps articulate strategic thinking—the why—behind both the goal and the plan for getting there.
What a Roadmap is not ….
It’s not a backlog.
Roadmap planning is often the process of creating a high-level strategy out of a collection of backlog tasks and ideas.
This is another very specific type of document. A backlog is essentially a to-do list of the tasks required to complete a strategic initiative, ideally arranged according to priority.
A roadmap, therefore, can and should work together with a backlog in the sense that the person responsible for the roadmap will translate its high-level strategic components into tasks that can be assigned and tracked throughout the project.
This leads to a related item that roadmaps are often confused with…
It’s not a project management tracker.
Many managers confuse roadmaps with the documents or software applications used to compile all of the details to complete the initiative — the individual assignments, the personnel responsible for each task, meetings scheduled to discuss specific issues or milestones, deadlines for completing each element of the project, etc.
It’s not a list of features.
Finally, many product managers mistakenly assume their planned list of features or epics constitutes the roadmap itself. But this is not the case.
Understanding the difference between a Project and a Roadmap
A roadmap is a visualization of your strategic initiatives and the major areas of work you will pursue. A project plan is a supporting document that lays out the specifics of what you need to do to achieve those initiatives. Use a roadmap to define the high-level goals and give an overview of how you will accomplish them. Then create a corresponding project plan to capture the step-by-step actions you will take to reach each goal along the way.
Why should you as a Business Analyst care about Roadmaps?
Roadmaps provide a window into the strategic goals and objectives of the organization or enterprise. It empowers a Business Analyst to trace requirements to business objectives and bridge the gap between what your working on as a project team and what the goals and objectives are of the business.
Without understanding what value you are providing to the Business, it becomes a difficult task to understand what are you measuring against.
In the BABOK guide there is a chapter on strategic analysis and it lists 4 types of tasks in that chapter. The first task is that of Understanding the Current State, which provides the business analyst an understanding of where the organization is currently at; Understanding the Future State, which provides the analyst an understanding of where is the organization headed to meet the business needs; Asses Risks which enables the analyst to understand the unknowns and work towards a plan of action in the event the business encounters these issues and Define Change Strategy where an analyst performs gap analysis between current and future state.
A roadmap essentially layout the objectives which then provides the need that the business is looking to meet.
Agile is all about value and without understanding the big picture via a roadmap it becomes difficult to contextualize what is being worked on or delivered.
