If you’re looking to make changes to your internal IT processes, improve business operations, implement new software, or establish brand-new procedures, an IT roadmap is essential.
Whether you own a brand-new start-up, SMB, or large organization, a technology roadmap will help you navigate the digital transformation process and keep your team focused on long-term goals.
But if you’ve never used a technology roadmap before, you might wonder why you’d allocate time and resources to create one now. In this guide, we’ll show you seven important benefits of implementing a documented technology roadmap and how to create one that achieves measurable results.
Improves Strategic Technology Planning
Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels in your business? Never quite reaching the milestones you’d hope to year-on-year? This is the most important benefit of having a documented technology roadmap. It helps align your IT projects with your business goals for the next one to three years.
Having a strategic view of your business improves coordination and ensures each business decision you make moves you toward your big-picture goals. This way, you’ll see consistent progress and reach key milestones on time.
A shocking 65% of businesses don’t make it to the 10-year line, so anything you can do to map out your business’s future will help put you in the successful minority.
Justifies Project Budgets
Documenting priorities and timelines in a roadmap makes it easier to secure funding for planned initiatives from leadership. If you’re looking to invest heavily in a new IT initiative, you might find it tough to get backing from owners, senior leaders, investors, and even board members.
Our research shows that around 78% of businesses that suffer a failed software implementation simply give up and revert back to old, ineffective processes. With better tracking, it’s much easier to measure progress and pivot as needed.
Having a documented technology roadmap that shows exactly how and when the new investments will show an ROI makes it much easier to get support from key stakeholders.
Facilitates Resource Planning
Implementing an effective ERP system improves business processes by an impressive 95%, but only with proper project management and stakeholder engagement. Resource planning should aim to save costs, improve performance metrics, and boost efficiency in business transactions, but all of this requires strategic, thoughtful resource planning.
A well-planned roadmap will show you which resources you need over time so your IT team can size, hire, or outsource areas or projects that need extra hands.
If you’ve already gone through growth or major projects without proper resource planning, you’ve likely already experienced the bottlenecks and growing pains that come with it.
A strategic roadmap allows you to plan for periods of growth so you can get the proper resources in place in advance.
Encourages Stakeholder Buy-In
It’s not just your IT department that will be affected by changes in your business. You need key stakeholders in every department on board and on the same page to see real results.
Sharing your documented roadmap helps all sorts of user groups understand the strategy and get engaged in the planning process early. Not only will this help with the transition to new systems or processes, but it will get your team excited about potential growth and changes.
Aids Vendor Management
Researching and selecting new vendors can be a time-consuming process. You want partners that can meet your business’s current needs while offering scalability to meet the needs of future growth.
You’ll face significant delays and unnecessary costs if you have to find new vendors in a few years’ time when you’ve outgrown current suppliers.
A roadmap can make the process of choosing the right vendors much more streamlined. By referring to your technology roadmap, you can choose vendors that best suit your long-term goals. In turn, this will help with estimating contracts and setting realistic project timelines.
You will also be better able to negotiate lower prices and concessions when vendors see and believe the bigger picture and multi-period revenue potential. One-time clients always get charged more than clients which look like a longer working relationship.
Measures Project Success Rates
Without effective success metrics, you’ll never know if new projects or processes are successful. By comparing your real-world implementations to your roadmap and projected ROI, you can track goals and budgets and evaluate the overall IT performance.
If a project doesn’t get the ROI you were expecting, it’s also much easier to figure out what didn’t go to plan and how to make tweaks to see improvements in the future.
And, remember, lots of people will be judging the success or proclaiming failure of your project. From day one, consider how to secure their feedback in ways that improve the project, rather than have people suddenly voicing concerns about the project and critiquing how the project was run when you’re nearing the finish line.
Get Advice from Experienced Consultants
Successful software implementation and integration projects often rely on the expertise of software consultants. An experienced software implementor can help you prioritize projects, design data flows, and ensure that you are getting the most out of your software investments.
A well-documented technology roadmap helps you communicate your goals and expectations with software consultants, allowing you to compare their project estimates and find the best partner for your project.
Need Help Creating Your IT Roadmap?
From improving strategic planning to securing funding, having a documented technology roadmap comes with some crucial benefits. If you haven’t already allocated time to develop a technology roadmap, now is the time to do so. Explore the StackPlan directory today to find the consultant for your business.
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