In a previous post, we discussed the importance of a digital strategy roadmap. As we’ve worked with clients over the years, we have found that many of them benefit from applying the roadmap methodology to their business as a whole.
As digital tools and processes continue to become increasingly critical for success in all sectors, the need for a well thought out strategy becomes unavoidable.
A top-notch strategy roadmap helps organizations to avoid wasted resources in all departments and maximize team member output. In fact, The money you spend developing a topnotch strategy roadmap comes back to you fivefold in avoiding wasted resources and maximizing the support of your team members to achieve their efforts.
The process for developing your digital strategy has value outside of the final deliverables. The actual process of defining your business strategy will help move the organization forward I meaningful ways.
Different firms will have different approaches to developing a roadmap. The following bullet points describe the basic tasks we perform in order to develop a destination and corresponding business strategy roadmap.
Document Review is where we start. This helps us get up to speed on areas such as the enterprise architecture you’ve already built, past planning strategies, and the current state of your governance.
Discovery Interviews is typically conducted at your location or over Zoom. Our consultants interview members of your team from across the organization. In addition, we conduct brainstorming meetings with stakeholders. These interviews and meetings will help us to identify and collect all of the information we need to build the blueprints and strategy roadmap.
Destination Development is the next step. We will take what we learned from the interviews, document reviews, and create a draft set of destination measurements. These will help us agree on the results we expect at the end of the timeframe of the strategy roadmap.
Once this is agreed on, we can complete the next step.
Strategy Roadmap Development is the process of creating the various lanes of a business strategy and filling in the timing of the important action items. You’ll know you have reached your goal when anyone inside or outside your organization can quickly understand the major activities needed in order to have a winning strategy going forward.
In addition to your roadmap, there are a number of optional overlays or workshops we suggest to enhance the core business strategy process. In each case, the option provides a deeper dive into a specific area, or an additional angle on the strategy. A few examples include:
Budget Overlay – We take a completed digital roadmap and do the financial analytics to estimate costs, resources needed, and the potential ROI from completing the roadmap successfully.
Competitive/Peer Overlay – We research organizations you feel are competitors or peers and show how you will compare to them from a digital standpoint. We have a model for comparing that we use to collaborate with you on who you want to compare to and in what areas.
High Beam Workshop – This one-day workshop focuses on defining your market five years out into the future. We use a number of techniques with your team to create clarity as to what your future market will look like and the investments you will need to make along the way to be productive in the future. You can learn more about our High Beam Process here.
FPOV has an excellent track record of helping clients define the destination they seek and then working backwards to develop the strategic roadmap that can be followed by team members and vendors.