Strategic and Technology Roadmapping

Strategic roadmapping is being used by leading corporations around the world to better integrate strategy, product and R&D planning. As a result, these firms have been able to respond quicker to market opportunities, cut non-aligned R&D investments, and focus resources on a strategic plan to win in their chosen markets.
Roadmapping is particularly useful in industries undergoing rapid technological change, disruptive competition and open innovation partnering, and has been proven to apply to service organizations as well as product companies facing these industry forces.

A strategic roadmap visually displays the activities you are currently doing, the business objectives you want to reach in the future, and the network of activities you need to perform over time to reach those objectives.

A standard multi-roadmap framework enables different parts of the business to create and manage their own roadmaps as well as combine them into a single consistent view

This framework is essential to create roadmaps by both business unit and functional layer, such as: technology, product, customer, capability, channel, external events, and strategic goals.

Best Practices

IFT' solution integrates pre-packaged best practices from Drs Allen and Bone, of Cambridge based
nu Angle, the leading technology strategy and roadmapping advisors and implementers. Existing approaches focus on pushing technology to market, while IFT and nu Angle's solution uniquely combines technology strategy and roadmapping with both technology-push and market-pull (consumer needs) analysis.
"Over the last 5 years, we have helped CTOs and innovation teams make the right investment decisions by applying our state-of-the-art Technology Strategy and Roadmapping methodology", said Peter Allen, nu Angle Managing Director. "To support our customers, we have invested heavily in codifying our approach in a bespoke Microsoft Excel application, but we have now a more scalable solution that better support our collaborative multi-user implementations for our clients”.

IFT’s Solution

Powered by Planisware™, IFT's solution allows you to dynamically create technology strategies, integrate them with product development roadmaps, perform ‘what-if’ analyses and translate plans immediately into detailed resource and financial forecasts.

The whole solution enables collaborative working across many locations, business units and external experts, greatly reducing the time, cost and complexity of creating and updating technology strategy and operational plans. More specifically :

Strategic objectives roadmaps, global and/or by business unit. Objectives can be financial or not and may be linked to defined target dates.

Flexibility to create multiple level roadmaps to describe market segmentation, customer needs, product lines, internal and external technologies, channels, capabilities, etc.

Describing each component with user defined attributes, attached documents, financial targets and costs.

Building composite roadmaps by drag and drop to combine elements from different roadmaps and reflect dependencies between customer needs, technologies, products, platforms, etc.

Identification of all dependencies for a given roadmap element with a single click.

Creation of checklist or scoring on any roadmap element to better assess feasibility or ability to answer to targeted needs.

User controlled synchronization and roll-up through the composite roadmaps to compare targets and actual.

Simulations and impact analysis of adding, delaying, replacing or deleting a platform, a technology, a component, a product development project, etc.

Flexible and powerful data and function securities to update and share roadmaps throughout the organization

Configurable alerts on individual user portal or using e-mails

Pre-defined style guides to enable consistent display of different roadmap elements with colors, symbols and texts according to specific element attributes

Configurable, graphical executive dashboards with PowerPoint export and pdf generation

Fully integrated with idea management, strategic funding buckets, portfolio management, stage-gate governance and product lifecycle management.

IFT's Solution Key Benefits

Companies report very tangible benefits of using roadmapping, including:

Quickly identify customer segments that could be addressed with your existing technology or products

Combine complementary technologies into common modules and platforms that can be re-used across multiple product families.

Avoid development/continuation of technologies and products that are insufficiently related to market needs, opportunities or channel capabilities

Re-use existing technologies that were developed for a customer segment or product line to develop new or enhanced products for another set of customers

Remove or combine duplicate technologies or products from different business units that address the same customer segments

Identify missing channels for your products to address specific customer segments

Identify external R&D partners who could provide you with additional technology to better address a given customer need

Best Practice White Paper

Download our exclusive report on the 10 essentials of Strategic Roadmapping practices

Front page of Strategic Roadmapping Report

Example of 3 layers roadmap

Example Solution Capabilities

Identify all dependencies in a single click

Roadmaps can be exported directly to PowerPoint

Related NPD Processes