1. Roadmap Planning
2. Roadmap Planner Confluence Size
3. Roadmap Planner Confluence Days
4. Roadmap Planner Free
5. Roadmap Planner In Confluence

Save time with free roadmap templates for Excel and PowerPoint

Roadmap Planning

Roadmaps are excellent visual tools that help you articulate your business vision to your clients and executives. But as useful as they are, creating them is a long and challenging process. With our pre-built templates, you can spend less time creating your roadmap and more time managing your project.

In addition to just giving turn-by-turn driving directions, now you can build and manage full itineraries, find interesting places along the way and print, email and export your trips to any Rand McNally GPS device. We could use the Roadmap initially, even if the Planner is not supported yet, but it would have to allow creation of Rows without the linkage to the Project Online. All we want is a simple collaborative task management (Planner + Teams), timeline view (Roadmaps) + eventually some gant graph view.

Roadmap planning provides numerous vital benefits for a business, including: Aligning investments and research with the organization’s goals and strategy Reaching consensus regarding priorities and required actions Promoting communication across various key stakeholders, which facilitates ongoing action and dialogue.

On this page you'll find five of the most common roadmap templates you can use in your next stakeholder meeting, developed in two versions for easy use with your usual MS Office tools:

• a roadmap template for Excel, where you can use standard Excel features like shapes and colors to build your roadmap manually
• a roadmap template for PowerPoint, where you can use the Office Timeline Pro add-in to create your roadmap automatically or move the shapes by hand if you don't have Office Timeline Pro yet

Top 5 free roadmap templates

Explore our series of roadmap templates for Excel and PowerPoint especially designed to save you time and get you started quickly:

• 1. Product roadmap template
• 2. Project roadmap template
• 3. Technology roadmap template
• 4. IT roadmap template
• 5. Strategy / Business roadmap template

Choose from these most popular roadmap examples, download and customize them with a few clicks to make them suit your project.

1. Product roadmap template

A product roadmap is a high-level overview of your product strategy and how that fits into your business vision. It can show both the strategic side and the practical side of your product offering, the reasoning and the planning behind your implementation decisions.

Your product roadmap template can include important aspects like product features, iterations, and the releases that are planned in the future, and you can represent them on the roadmap as key milestones, tasks or on different swimlanes.

To help you fast track your next product strategy meeting, here are two pre-populated templates that you can easily customize in Excel and PowerPoint (using the Office Timeline Pro add-in).

2. Project roadmap template

When managing any kind of project, you'll probably need to create a project roadmap, which is a strategic outline of the project goals and the key deliverables. When you build it, it's best if you present project tasks, milestones, and goals or initiatives grouped on various swimlanes.

The project roadmap is an extremely useful tool for stakeholder buy-in and communication, since it helps create a common understanding on the strategic reasons for sponsoring a project. When all stakeholders are on the same page, you can overcome obstacles easier and deliver your project on time and within budget.

Use these templates below to turn your project roadmap presentation into an effective meeting. Choose between Excel and PowerPoint (with the Office Timeline Pro add-in) to create a project roadmap that would impress your stakeholders.

3. Technology roadmap template

A roadmap can be a useful tool when it comes to a product or project, but it can just as easily help you make strategic decisions regarding your technology investments. And since roadmaps are strategic planning instruments, it's useful to create a technology roadmap to document your infrastructure initiatives too. You can organize the swimlanes to include infrastructure solutions, tools, or processes that are in place today and what's envisioned for the future.

Working with templates can make things a lot easier for you and save you hours or work. Check out these examples of technology roadmap templates we've created for Excel and PowerPoint (and the Office Timeline Pro add-in) to get started faster.

4. IT roadmap template

Another frequent type of roadmap you may be creating is an IT roadmap, which is basically an overview of the way your organization uses IT systems to achieve its business goals. For example, an IT roadmap can show the strategic plan created to migrate your organization's data or adopt a new tool.

You can include various IT initiatives like apps, internal processes, or new technologies and you can use color-coded swimlanes to represent each initiative or goal. You can use the IT roadmap to show current capabilities or the developments that are planned.

Here's an example of an IT roadmap template that you can download and change the deliverables to make it work for you. There's an Excel version and a PowerPoint one (with the help of the Office Timeline Pro add-in) so you can choose whichever suits you best.

5. Strategy roadmap (or Business roadmap) template

A visual representation of the key moments that mark your strategic business initiatives is extremely useful, especially if you need to include different themes and span across a longer time frame. Communication with stakeholders becomes easier if you show them a strategy roadmap, a more general plan that explains the overall vision for growing your business.

The strategy roadmap (or business roadmap, as it's sometimes called) can present your initiatives or themes on different swimlanes and include current state, long-term goals, and future steps needed to implement the business strategy.

Discover the strategy roadmap templates we have built using Excel and PowerPoint (and the Office Timeline Pro add-in). These will help you create a simple but clear strategy roadmap for your next stakeholder meeting and show off your presentation skills.

If you need any help with choosing a roadmap software, check out our dedicated section on roadmap tools.

Updated on Feb. 07, 2020: We’ve stopped support of Roadmap Planner but the Roadmap feature is now available in our new goal-oriented platform – Goals by KeepSolid. This business solution provides the same opportunities to plan and execute your strategies and even more. Check out Goals by KeepSolid and stay tuned for its updates!

If you are a regular reader of our blog, by now you should already know our answer to the question “to plan or not to plan?”. For newcomers – but of course to plan! The next important question, however, is HOW to make a plan? More specifically, how to write a business plan if you don’t have that much experience and/or would rather avoid employing professional analysts? This is exactly what we’re going to discuss today!

In this piece, we will cover a certain method of business strategy planning – using a roadmap. It revolves around defining your goals and outlining more or less concrete key points, or milestones, that should get you there. This method is considered to be first implemented by Motorola in the 80s, who defined roadmap as “an extended look at the future”. Let’s delve deeper into this topic (and don’t miss our roadmap crafting checklist at the end of this article!)

• • 1. What is a roadmap and why do you need one?

Of course, since the 80s, many other definitions and views were expressed. But they have some things in common – they all agree that a roadmap should provide a high-strategic view of the plan using means of graphical representation. Roadmap planning provides numerous vital benefits for a business, including:

• Aligning investments and research with the organization’s goals and strategy
• Reaching consensus regarding priorities and required actions
• Promoting communication across various key stakeholders, which facilitates ongoing action and dialogue
• Keeping participants on the same page and preserving the dominance of the big picture over present-day problems

Now let’s discuss the strategicroadmap structure. Any roadmap should answer three fundamental questions:

1. What do we want to achieve?
2. Where are we now?
3. How do we reach our goals?

These questions naturally define the structure of the roadmap. Below, you will see how to answer them properly and how to build your strategy around them.

2. How to define goals for a roadmap?

This first step is arguably the most vital. After all, if you don’t set your targets right, it won’t matter how well you perform other steps – you will be heading in the wrong direction altogether. That’s why it’s crucial to grasp a couple important concepts when you start planning your own strategy.

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Build your perfect roadmap using Roadmap Planner by KeepSolid!

1) Vision

Vision is all about imagining your organization reaching its goals. Understand how this will affect it, what implications this might have, how the business environment will react, etc. Why is this so essential? Because you don’t want your aims to be set in vacuum, not bound to real problems and background. Envisioning your company having achieved its targets may help you come up with important related questions, like “what if we actually get there?” and “is this really what we need?”.

Take heed – developing a Vision hides a certain pitfall. Seeing how it is usually a mental product of a business owner or a CEO, Vision can be subject to cognitive biases. This is a topic for another day, but for now – double make sure your goals pass the reality-check.

2) Structural thinking

Many of us have heard about Pareto-efficiency – a principle that 20% of our efforts generates 80% of the results, and vice versa. Well, you could say that structural thinking is what you use to determine those most efficient 20% of efforts. This is how it works (don’t forget to set KPIs for each level!):

• choose your grand goal (for instance, earn X amount of $)
• derive subgoals that are integral to the success of the grand one (let’s say, sell Y amount of goods and reduce product cost by Z)
• derive sub-subgoals, and so on (the number of levels can vary depending on the size of the system; for SMBs 3-4 levels should be enough)
• use subgoals to define milestones for your roadmap (more on that later)

The pitfall of structural thinking is in how difficult it is for us humans to conduct proper induction. In general, you can’t be 100% sure that whatever subgoals you’ve derived are actually the crucial ones. That’s why it’s always recommended to double check them by performing a reverse operation to see if your trains of thought come back to the initial point.

3) Black Swan theory

State of modern markets can be easily described by the VUCA concept. That is, they are Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Any old-school long-term planning becomes nigh-impossible in such environment. It takes a business Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility to have a chance to succeed on these markets.

In this regard, no wonder why the Black Swan theory by Nassim Nicholas Taleb becomes more and more popular nowadays. In this theory, a black swan is an event that has a major effect on business results, yet occurs unpredictably. What’s important is that you don’t have to try and forecast such events, but rather to build up the robustness of the business – being able to withstand the negatives while still exploiting the positives. Be sure to plan for big swans when deciding on your goals.

3. How to define your current position for a roadmap?

Once you know where you want your business to get, you should analyze its current state with the end goals in mind. Take a look at your resources, market niches, competitive environment, understand which of them can influence your path towards the targets, and how. Think what factors in the past brought you to the present situation.

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This stage, while obviously important, is highly subjective and depends on the organization and its goals. So, alas, there isn’t much we can add here – you’ll have to figure out your current state yourself.

4. How to outline the path towards your goals in a roadmap?

Now that we know where we are and where we wish to get, it’s high time we decided how. At this stage, we’ll once again use structural thinking, but now – to determine which steps and tasks will result in reaching milestones. Which, in turn, will facilitate the accomplishment of the aims.

The first important concept to understand at this stage is GAP Analysis. Using this method, you can identify critical… well, gaps between your current and desired states. This is a broad topic that we recommend you to delve in deeper, but this is how it works in general:

• Define your business’ key components that affect the dimensions in which your goals and subgoals lie. For instance, your customer goodwill may be influenced by product quality, helpfulness of client support, and post-sale marketing activities – those are the components.
• Determine how these components must be changed to promote objective fulfillment.
• Analyze organizational capabilities to affect the components. Perhaps, you outsource your customer support, so there’s little you can do to increase its quality, but you employ your own marketers and have full control over their activities.
• Choose the technical solution. Basically, this is answering the hows of your strategy. Will you update your developers’ devices so they can work more efficiently, or would you rather hire a manager who can optimize their work?

Now that we’ve conducted GAP Analysis, how exactly do we craft the roadmap? A universally applicable standard for building any kind of Roadmap, whether you develop it in a professional planning service, like Roadmap Planner, or draw it on a sheet of paper, is a Balanced Scorecard (BSC).

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It is an instrument that, whatever the form you choose, allows to set activities and goals AND (this one is important!) helps to keep track of the task execution. On the principle of BSC, any strategy should:

1) Be incremental. Never build a long-term plan so rigid that it doesn’t allow ad hoc changes in case of unpredicted events (black swans, remember?).

2) Include:

• • • List of components or dimensions
    • List of what must be changed about them
    • Specific actions to change that
    • Expected outcome or benefits of these changes

3) Visualize dependencies between tasks.

4) Get updated systematically to always represent current situation and the business’ chosen direction

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5) Be available for key stakeholders at any times for them to be able to align their actions according to the global goal, not only their ongoing tasks.

5. Roadmap Crafting Checklist