Technology Roadmap

Who it is for

The Technology Roadmap fits when more than one thing needs doing and the order matters as much as the work.

• Several systems need rationalising, and finance, operations and marketing each hold a different version of the truth.
• An earlier transformation stalled and the remaining plan is no longer credible.
• A decision between building, buying and configuring has stalled for want of an independent view.
• You have a budget for the year and need to decide where the first dollar goes.

If you already know what to build and need it priced, the Product Development Plan is the shorter route. Larger programs spanning several stakeholder groups are a digital strategy engagement, scoped and estimated separately.

Roadmap or health check?

The roadmap maps several systems and the manual work between them, scores the options and never reads code. A Platform Health Check reads one platform in depth: its code, infrastructure, security and documentation. If the estate and the order of work is the worry, start here. If one platform is the worry, start with the health check. Where the roadmap names a health check on one platform as its first initiative, the roadmap fee is credited against it.

What you get

You receive a written roadmap within about three weeks of the first workshop, and we spend an hour going through it with you.

• A current-state map: which systems hold which records, what moves between them, and where a person is doing the integrating today.
• Up to six candidate initiatives scored on commercial impact, implementation effort and organisational readiness.
• A build, buy or configure recommendation on each, with the reasoning next to it and an indicative band from our published pricing where the answer is build.
• A recommended twelve-month order. Every stage carries an objective, a measure and a decision gate, and you choose at each gate whether the next stage goes ahead.

Configuring software you already licence is the cheapest outcome and is recommended wherever it will hold. The roadmap is written to be executed by your own team or another supplier, and it says so where an initiative does not need us.

How it runs

1. A 30-minute call. We confirm which part of the business the roadmap covers and who needs to be in the workshops. We invoice the fee only after this call.
2. Workshop one: the current state. Two hours on the systems in use, the data that moves between them and the manual work holding the gaps together.
3. Workshop two: the options. Two hours on what could change, evaluated against the requirements written down in the first session, and vendor demonstrations do not set the criteria.
4. Authoring. The map, the scoring and the recommended order, written in the second week.
5. The walkthrough, in the third week. An hour on the recommended order and the gates.

One stage at a time

A twelve-month plan committed up front rests on a single decision. The same plan with a gate at each stage becomes a series of smaller decisions, each informed by the one before it. Readiness is scored alongside the commercial case because a high-value initiative a business is not ready to absorb fails at adoption even when the engineering is sound.

The fee is credited in full against the first initiative, a Platform Health Check included, or against a Product Development Plan on the initiative you choose, if either proceeds within 90 days. That is the only commercial link between the roadmap and the work that follows it.