- Understand the difference between a Project Roadmap and WBS or a Project Plan.
It is a format expressing your project plans in a clear, easy-to-grasp way, probably using quite lay terms. First of all it is a tool to approach the executive boards, stakeholders and community.
- Decide on the optimal way to express the project plans at a glance (design a schema layout or a format for textual document that expounds your project’s roadmap).
Start with a need analysis: briefly elaborate a problem or a set of problems that you target to resolve with your project, and then seek to depict their resolution.
- Build a diagram that highlights important project milestones.
Make sure it gives to a lay reader a clear picture of what products (deliverables) are expected during the project execution, and what feasible time should pass while these deliverables will be ready for utilization. Use intelligible artwork to depict deliverables and project tasks.
- Associate the project deliverables with the benefits they are charged with.
Explain the use of deliverables that you are going to produce during the project, or how they contribute towards resolution of the initially stated problems.
- Associate the project deliverables with the planned utilization of project resources.
A reader who is new to this project should obtain, by studying your roadmap, a profound vision of the budget allocation, involvement of technologies, use of manpower, equipment, etc.
- Make sure your representation of resources focuses only on a few of the most costly items.
Project roadmap is not a document to itemize costs, but it helps a reader to understand whereto the most of the resources will be invested.
- Ascertain that your roadmap can make the potential project stakeholders (whether sponsors or financiers) to understand the worth of the project (it can make them really interested).
Emphasize the most important and relevant problems that are to be resolved by your project, as well as explain the benefits to be delivered with its realization in the most intelligible terms.
- Give a review of the most likely risks associated with the project and explain how you are going to mitigate them.
Provide a reader with the feeling that you have given an all-round research to these risks, hence you have a clear understanding ...