Have you ever been asked to provide a timeline of what your team will be able to do in the next year or two? If you are like me you tried to plan in detail what you were doing with each problem or work item than you included in the forecast, only to realize that was a huge amount of effort. I wonder what is the difference between a plan and a roadmap?
Executives need to create predictability for our businesses, sometimes in highly volatile situations, and that requires us making forecasts and managing risks and unknowns. Both roadmapping and planning are an attempt to look into the future, predict what is possible, decide what we will do and provide some control over the unknowns facing us.
Roadmapping is focused on determining what is possible in the mid- to long-term horizon, let’s say a 6 months to 3 years window depending on the business specific needs and environment. During roadmapping we try to visualize what business outcomes we can produce in the agreed horizon. It is a forecasting activity, which does not require us understanding in a deep level of detail what actions we will have to take or how we will overcome each of the million difficulties that we will have to face during the execution. That does not mean disregard for risks, difficulties or the amount of work, but a limit on how much of that we need to consider. Only the major sources of work, risks, and opportunities should be explored. Investing heavily into more detailed analysis and planning beyond a certain point does not increase accuracy of plans, but on the contrary it tends to produce worse forecasts (you may read about this effect here).
Planning is aimed at creating a set of specific possible scenarios we may face and detailed courses of action we will take in response to those scenarios. The planning process is then focused on identifying what may happen and what we should do when it happens. Detailed risk and opportunity analysis is a critical part of planning, as well as probabilistic thinking to ensure we invest enough thinking in scenarios that are very likely and that have a large potential impact in the outcomes we are pursuing. Planning is tactical, it is detailed, it is short- to mid-term focused and it is action oriented. Now it starts to look like a different beast to roadmapping.
In summary: the main goal of roadmapping is forecasting the likely future and what we will be able do considering the major milestones, junctions and obstacles ahead of us in both head- and tail-wind conditions. The outcome of roadmapping is a prediction of the future so that our stakeholders know what to expect. The objective of planning instead is to enable action that can produce the pursued outcomes, clarifying how we will react to reality as it unfolds. The outcome of planning is not a plan, but a team ready for action.
The Adaptive Executive 