Why your teams aren’t using your roadmap (and what you can do about it)

This blog is part of a mini-series exploring the findings of our newly commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tempo, called “Maximize Your Portfolio Management Processes”. You can check out the first blog here or sign up for our webinar, where we'll be exploring the findings in detail.

Business leaders are not aligned with practitioners about what their portfolio management solutions can do. Few have their processes integrated across the business.

That is according to a newly commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tempo. It found that C-suite level respondents were more likely than directors to say their teams use the strategic capabilities of their PPM tool. Where is the greatest disconnect? Roadmapping. 59% of C-level executives stated their teams utilize the capability, while only 28% of directors and managers said the same.

So executives have a different view of their organization’s portfolio roadmap than the people who do most of the work. What does that actually mean? A lack of visibility for managers and their teams creates silos and misalignment that lead to wasted time and resources.

Solving the roadmap gap

Organizations of all sizes need to understand how integration between their teams and tools is necessary. Not only to make a good return on investment in a product, but for better working relationships throughout the company.

However, the study shows that less than 30% of respondents’ organizations have a portfolio management process that is integrated across the business. These processes might be integrated in specific teams, but not across the business.

So how do we solve this gap when it comes to the biggest problem: Roadmapping tools?

It can be difficult to establish effective roadmaps across teams and products. Firstly, you need to create a culture with a dedication to communication and data-driven practices. The easiest way to do that is to make it as simple and natural as possible to work and communicate together. 

The key lies in integrations. Solutions that automatically take data from the places your teams are working and feed them into roadmaps. It will then create views of work automatically that help everyone. Whether that is executives looking for the big picture or a single developer searching for their next project.

Strategic Portfolio Management comes in when that process blends into part of the working process. Integration means simply by working on their tools, people create data that is fed into dashboards without adding more jobs to someone’s day.

Extending roadmaps across your teams has clear benefits. It enables executives and team leads to understand work and maintain connections across the business. Individuals can see what they are working towards, what dependencies they are waiting on, and other projects in flight.

It’s easy to make excuses not to: Agile teams don’t need longer-term plans; some parts of the business wouldn’t benefit from roadmapping. But if the benefits can be gained with a low investment of time and energy, those excuses dry up.

Effective roadmaps aren’t the ones with the most features or the most expansive views. (Although they can be very handy). Their efficacy comes from being accessible and taking as little time as possible for your team to use.

Strategic Portfolio Management can fall victim to the power, not simplicity, is good trap. Most solutions offer a dizzying list of views, features, add-ons, and reports. You may find yourself paying vast sums for tools that your C-level is aware of, but teams resist using it. 

Why would they resist? Because it gets in the way of their work. The more complicated a tool is, the less likely it is that people will use it. Simplifying day-to-day tasks can be the only way to make sure roadmaps are adopted and integrated across the business.

The steel thread from strategy to execution

This leads to why Tempo developed Strategic Roadmaps and Structure PPM to sync together with minimal input.

It takes just a few clicks to set up, and will automatically populate your roadmaps with your information from Jira. No double-data entry or manual lift is required from project teams. If it's in Jira (where your teams work), then it is in your roadmap. 

This way, you can break through to your siloed teams without having to quite literally break your way through to them. Their work is being turned into data for executives automatically.

It’s hard to overstate the value of breaking through those siloes. As the new Forrester study shows, siloed strategic planning practices have a negative impact on your tech investments. 

The 528 respondents recognized this, noting that the lack of visibility into each other’s work creates misalignment of investment needs. What does this mean in practicality? It means Team A thinks investment is needed in one area but Team B thinks money is better used elsewhere.

The result? Over one-third of respondents said their organization is not seeing the ROI from its portfolio management investments. 

However – this perceived lack of ROI is not down to performance, but instead due to internal processes that are hurting visibility and collaboration across teams.

Tempo’s tools bridge the gap and help create an unshakeable steel thread between your big-picture strategy and the execution happening day-to-day.

Here’s how:

The toolkit

Strategic Roadmaps empowers your teams. It enables them to capture customer feedback, prioritize what to work on next, and build impressive roadmaps to communicate your strategy.

Formerly known as Roadmunk, Strategic Roadmaps creates multiple roadmap views from the same dataset in just a few clicks. It can sync with the tools your team uses to get data and even roll up multiple roadmaps for a portfolio-level view of your entire organization. 

This links in with Structure PPM. Structure tracks progress across your projects and teams with adaptable, user-defined issue hierarchies. It then presents them in a spreadsheet-like view and serves as the day-to-day tool for everyone to work in.

It can generate insights and visualizations from your sprint planning, release management, and dozens of other day-to-day tasks.

Structure integrates with Strategic Roadmaps, creating a seamless working environment and building the foundation for full Strategic Portfolio Management. You get the solutions to work and track your data, visualize it, present that data in multiple different formats. 

Everything your teams (and executives) need in an accessible and flexible way that people will actually use. 

The path to portfolio management perfection

By bringing in roadmaps to your product portfolio, you begin to bridge the gap between teams and the C-suite. When you do it with the goal of accessibility, and communication in mind, you get closer to full strategic portfolio management.

To discover more about Strategic Roadmaps, Structure, and how the rest of Tempo’s toolkit can help your business on the road to strategic portfolio management, visit our SPM solutions page.