If you’re at the point where you feel ready to engage an outside vendor or build the digital workplace yourself, it’s time to develop your planning roadmap. This process helps you make smart decisions about who should build it and how to go about building it to meet your expected outcome.
Too often, organizations start major technology initiatives with faulty assumptions. They assume they already understand the company’s priorities and business needs, as well as what users do and don’t want.
But without a disciplined process, these assumptions are essentially guesses. When the project represents a significant investment of time and money, guesswork just isn’t good enough to ensure success and strong user adoption.
Overview Of The Roadmap Process
For an IT manager, developing a digital workplace roadmap may not seem fundamentally different from planning other departmental IT projects. With a digital workplace roadmap, the primary difference is the scope of the rollout.
You’re talking about a comprehensive project that affects everybody and everything in the organization. The roadmap process takes a deep dive into how your organization works and develops a strategy for fundamental changes that improve performance.
Because the digital workplace affects everyone and changes the way they work, there’s a major advantage in planning ahead and including a change management component as part of your roadmap process.
Having the right cross-functional team is also essential. It is important to create a coalition of stakeholders that includes executives, business users and key departments.
While every department may not need to have a presence on the team, those who are should be able to represent all of your user groups. The IT department has a role, because it is responsible for making the project happen. And you should have at least one person who has a good understanding of the company’s overall vision and the ability to articulate and represent its business objectives.
Bringing The Roadmap Together
The individual stages in your roadmap process may be highly technical or specialized, but your end result should be aimed at a broader audience within your organization. Think of it as your pitch, your company’s rationale for moving forward — your digital workplace manifesto.
Since you’re targeting a broader audience, a good final format for your roadmap would be a PowerPoint presentation or similar document. Another idea would be to make a site on your existing intranet, in which you back up the high-level thinking in your roadmap with source documents, output from your workshop and other research.
At this point, since you haven’t entered the procurement phase, there aren’t any dollar amounts attached to your plan. It’s simply a planning roadmap for changes that make sense for your organization.
Presenting this planning roadmap is another step in building consensus and urgency for the changes you’re proposing. From this point, the owner or driver of the initiative would share this roadmap document with the larger organization, employing change management techniques to build a coalition that helps move your digital workplace forward.
In the end, developing your digital workplace roadmap ensures that you follow a disciplined process. It helps you start the planning process early, ask the right questions and check your assumptions, as well as clarify your goals for the project and build consensus.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by downloading our free e-book, Your Roadmap To The Digital Workplace: A Step-By-Step Guide For Professional Services Firms.
