Project delivery, the “doing” bit, is often the sticky end of a project, where practical limitations and constraints can impact the shape of the project and its minimum viable product (MVP) delivered.
Whether you are working in an agile or a waterfall way, you will benefit from a clear roadmap identifying the jobs to be done and the dependencies on their delivery for your project.
Sounds obvious, but in our experience, we have seen roadmaps drive both action and paralysis.
We have seen roadmaps where the project owners desire to put infinite details into a roadmap, akin to creating specifications for each task, create a really complex plan that in essence creates a blockage to delivery, something to hide behind. Then at the other end of the scale, we’ve seen roadmaps that are summarised to such a degree that it doesn’t really give pragmatic direction to the delivery team.
Our roadmap tips will help you succeed and reach your goals.
1) Categorise the areas for focus into themes - you may have some themes related to customer insight, some related to data accessibility, some related to how you want to use the data for marketing purposes.
2) Summarise what the ambition is for each theme - a statement of intent if you like. For instance, in marketing, we frequently hear about ambitions for the ability to deliver personalised messages seamlessly to customers at scale.
3) Write down all the tasks that need to be completed for the ambitions for each theme to be reached. We call these the jobs to be done. Putting them onto post-its (real-life or on something like a jam board online collaboration tool) helps when you get to tip 4.
4) Review the post-it tasks identified in step 3 and group them into a pragmatic order for delivery. We like to group into buckets of time based on pace - Crawl (being the immediate tasks), Walk, Run (being the longer term tasks). It enables you to think about a logical order for delivery without getting caught up in specific timelines. It also helps you identify which tasks have greater, evolving jobs to be done which may spread across all three categories of time. A good example of this is when looking at a new marketing automation platform. The crawl tasks are usually related to understanding the current data landscape and the use case requirements, not selecting the solutions provider or implementing the platform which comes later into walk and run time periods.
5) We then recommend focussing on Crawl to identify the dependencies and barriers to delivering the jobs to be done. Projecting far out into walk and run can become abstract that in itself can become a blocker to progression. These can be people, skilled resources, budget, other projects in the pipeline.
6) Document the output of these stages to create a summarization of your ambition, themes, the jobs to achieve each themes vision, and a Crawl Walk Run timeline of jobs to be done. This gives you a clear, pragmatic roadmap to move forwards with.
We Are MoJo works with many businesses whose data strategy is in its infancy, but their ambition for how they want to be using data to drive their business is sophisticated. However, the pragmatic bit in the middle, creating and delivering against the roadmap to make the ambition a reality, tends to raise a lot of stumbling blocks. Get in touch with us today if we can help your business develop its roadmap for a successful journey to becoming data-driven.