Once you go through this piece, you’ll learn what a project roadmap is and what crucial components must be included in your roadmap. We’ll discuss some common misconceptions related to project roadmaps. Also, you’ll find our suggestions for what tools to use in project planning and development to solve this whole project management puzzle.

Project Roadmap – What It Is, and What It Isn’t

Project roadmaps provide an easy-to-understand, high-level overview of the important stages and pieces of a project. Think about them as a resource that can be shared with employees and stakeholders to provide a snapshot of the project’s goals, key deliverables, important milestones, possible risks, and dependencies.

Benefits of the Project Roadmap

When a project manager compiles the project roadmap, they get a key communication tool. With it, prior to and during the project kickoff, they can set appropriate expectations, highlight important components, and share high-level plans of the work to come.

Assuming that you’ve gathered the right project contributors and stakeholders at the table, a proper project roadmap allows setting the stage for the success of your project. To ensure this, see that you use the simple, graphical nature of this tool to the fullest. Ideally, it should be a clear, easy-to-digest infographic that will communicate the project’s most critical details to any interested parties.

Benefits of the Project Roadmap

What Project Roadmap is Not

A Project Plan

Here is one common misconception. While a project plan can be connected to a product roadmap, the former is the backbone of a project once it’s underway. Certain critical components that form a functional project plan (e.g. resource management, critical path, start, and finish dates) are too detailed to include in a project roadmap.

A Project Charter

This is a tool to keep your team and stakeholders on the same page, guiding them toward the same goal, operating from the same playbook. Sure, the project roadmap may share some elements with your charter, but it is actually more effective for communicating with a wider audience. This is the angle that you should approach it from.

A Resource Management Tool

Obviously, you want to see how resources are allocated across your projects, and you should have a tool to make sure your people aren’t overextended and are working on the right areas. But this requires a level of detail that’s too in-depth for a project roadmap.

A Product Roadmap

The names’ resemblance is probably what confuses some people. A product roadmap holds information about a development-focused undertaking with a product as an end goal. It is typically more detailed than a project roadmap needs to be.

An Epic

In Agile practice, a large chunk of work that may include multiple tasks and shares a single common objective is called an epic. A project roadmap, by contrast, can outline multiple goals and include supporting information.

Who Needs Project Roadmap, and When?

Even though project managers are usually the ones to create project roadmaps, team members, product owners and managers, external and internal stakeholders, and customers also use it.

Who Needs Project Roadmap, and When?

Project roadmaps can be found in all sorts of industries, e.g. enterprise, healthcare, or education. They are applicable in many types of projects, including:

Sales
Marketing plan or project
Strategy development
IT strategy
New business development
Project portfolio management
Technology project

What Elements to Include in Your Project Roadmap

Project managers have to pull themselves out of the weeds and concentrate on the high-level details to build an effective project roadmap. It needs to be highly visual and concise – you want to fit everything on one page. Aim to create a quick snapshot of your project for viewers to digest at a glance.

The following are the key elements of the project roadmap and their execution in the Goals app.

High-Level Project Overview

Be concise and brief when documenting your objectives, priorities, and goals for each initiative. Always aim for a few sentences at most.

In Goals by KeepSolid, this is provided by the Gantt-style view. It shows the project in its entirety, causing the author to boil down every task, milestone, and goal to their essence.

Schedule Overview

Shows what the general timeline of the project looks like. No need to worry about many details here — again, that’s what the project plan is for — but still map out when the work on each initiative starts, and any hard deadlines that must be met.

Goals by KeepSolid allows adjusting the completion status of each task in real-time, helping you to stay aware of the current progress. With it, you can see how realistic your deadlines are, and if everything’s going according to plan.

Key Milestones

Milestones in Goals Roadmap Planner

Highlight a few important dates. Your project roadmap should clearly identify the most crucial dates from the start. Don’t forget that the visual element is vital for setting the right expectations with both your colleagues and others in your organization, e.g. stakeholders, who won’t be working on your project day in and day out.

Not inventing the wheel, Goals by KeepSolid has milestones that you can set for tasks and projects. This defines key stages and, most importantly, creates actionable steps on your path to the project’s success.

Collaboration Management

Your project roadmap should facilitate and guide team collaboration. For instance, Goals' team control and collaboration features let PMs monitor the team’s progress, enhance teamwork, share ideas, etc.

Resource Allocation

Despite the brief nature of project roadmaps, you still want to provide an estimate of the human resources and cost needed to see the end of your project. When requesting personnel, ensure they have enough time to complete what you need; or if they don’t, consider reorganizing teams and adequately dividing the workload.

Goals by KeepSolid offers plenty of ways to plan and allocate resources. Whatever those are – human resources, budget, materials, documents, etc. – you can assign them to the respective projects and tasks. This way, anyone looking at your roadmap gets a clear understanding of which resources go where, and how your priorities are set.

Support Feedback Loop

The feedback loop is a system where some or all of the feedback is used as input for future operations. The most common form of it in project management is “build-measure-learn”. Creating some form of a feedback loop is important if you wish to see your project evolve over time.

Goals by KeepSolid helps establish a feedback loop on many levels, from ideas backlogging to their implementation via agile team management.

Roadmap Planner in Goals as a Project Management Tool