Create Your Roadmap to Success

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Do you, or your organization have a set of well-defined goals to aid in the maturity of work management, the motivation of your team, operational growth, and overall success? By having a strategic plan and a roadmap to success, you can define desired outcomes and identify a series of best next actions, ensuring that each step, milestone, and overall objective is achieved. 

This week’s blog will define the four key components of a successful roadmap and provide you with a series of questions to consider, recommendations to take action on, and a sample roadmap worksheet to fill out. 

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

Strategic thinking must take place before a roadmap is created to ensure there is alignment between stakeholders and team members. As you unpack the overall purpose of your organization to fully understand why it exists and define its key objectives, ask yourself the following questions to help with brainstorming: 

• What are your company’s current strategic and operational objectives?
• How do you, your team, and your department impact your company’s goals?
• What are your company’s risk factors?
• What is your company’s Mission Statement?
• What is your company talking about? 

If you aren’t sure where to start, review the following in your company’s Annual Report and check other sources of information like your company website, LinkedIn and Google News: 

• Year in Review
• Messages from the Chairman/CEO, and CFO
• Mission
• Market Focus
• Future Growth Position
• Press Page

CURRENT STATE

The current state evaluation forms the foundation of your future state recommendation and roadmap. By auditing and documenting where your organization is today, you can feel confident that all of the moving pieces have been identified. This review process should take into consideration users, systems, processes, and technologies. To get started on this evaluation, survey your team to calculate their NPS, and look to address each of the following questions: 

• Do you currently manage work outside of Workfront (e.g. strategy & intake, budgeting & planning, work execution, review & approval, work delivery)? 
• Do you and your managers have work status visibility? 
• How do you know when you’ve done good work?
• Who do you collaborate with and how do you collaborate?
• Do you have current or potential integrations?
• What metrics are you measuring and what are the results?

In order to analyze performance within Workfront, you must first have a set of well-defined metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). Download a sample KPI Dashboard that can be kick-started into your Workfront instance - more information and kick-start instructions can be found here - and make sure to watch the on-demand webinar, Ask the Expert - Measuring Performance with KPIs to learn more. 

As you continue auditing your systems, technologies, and processes, start to think about possible built-in Workfront integrations that can get work done faster and easier or explore using Workfront Fusion, the integration platform that can seamlessly connect systems to drive productivity.  

OPTIMAL STATE

Keep it balanced — this state should be a combined vision of both leadership and individual contributors. You should already have feedback from your team based on the NPS survey that you distributed, so take the time to connect with stakeholders to understand the high-level, must-have requirements for the organization as a whole. 

To help you come up with a vision for the future, review and analyze the data from the current state evaluation, and then ask your team the following questions: 

• What Workfront features are you currently not using effectively or not using at all?
• Where are your bottlenecks, pain points, and areas of manual work? 
• Are you able to make informed decisions? 
• Are you able to prioritize and plan work? 
• Are you able to identify work trends to allow predictability?
• Are your stakeholders involved in Workfront and do they champion adoption?

To ensure everyone has a voice and a consistent model of work is implemented moving forward, take action, and set up a Workfront governance committee. This cross-departmental team provides leadership, best practices, cross-functional system settings, training, and helps to build a framework for excellence. 

You can also watch the on-demand webinar, Modern Work Governance, or read about how Workfront executed a successful governance model in the article, How Workfront Cleaned Up Its Own “Unbridled” Instance of Workfront. 

To see how other customers have leveraged Workfront to improve and achieve their goals, read through case studies, most notably the story of how a 2020 Lion Award winner, Home Depot, drove Adoption leveraging the Workfront for Slack integration. 

OUTCOMES AND MILESTONES 

Finally, putting it all together — now that you have defined both the current and future state of your organization, take what you’ve learned and come up with a list of actionable outcomes or initiatives that will drive the business forward. Ask yourself the following questions, always keeping in mind the why: 

• What is the why for doing this and what's in it for the people? 
• What is the communication plan for promoting your vision and detailing the actions needed? 
• What are some quick-win opportunities? 
• What are the expected outcomes for stakeholders? 
• What is the most effective way to deliver progress and outcomes? 
• What will be the impact on people, processes, and technology? 
• What is the risk of doing nothing? 
• Are there deadlines for the company, department, team, or personal initiatives? 

The easiest way to create a roadmap is to list out and prioritize the initiatives you want to move forward with and then, based on urgency, available resources and other key factors, start adding details and milestones to a timeline under specific phases. 

Download a sample worksheet from the book, Done Right, to help you break down your goals into key initiatives and then use the sample roadmap below to start planning. 

To learn more about Workfront’s optimization services, reach out to your Account Executive. 

CONCLUSION

Now you have the components to build your roadmap! So what’s next? 

1. Evaluate your desired outcomes and required actions. 
2. Prioritize and organize these actions into the near term (now-30 days); mid-term (30-90 days); and long term (90 days +). 
3. Assign actions to your people - this way they can see and be part of the changes as they happen. 
4. Create and execute a change management plan to drive adoption. 

And remember, communicate early, often and in every direction about the progress you are making and the wins that have come from the work being done.