Defining the Scope of a Roadmapping Initiative: A Checklist-Based Template for Organizational Stakeholders

Roadmapping has a proven history of supporting organizations in a variety of ways. It has been applied across a spectrum of industrial initiatives, ranging from: simply generating a technology roadmap for a project; to being deployed as a tool to integrate into and enhance existing business processes; to acting as a platform for underpinning and synchronizing corporate-wide management toolkits; through to developing international consensus-based multi-organizational roadmaps. However, the adoption and implementation of roadmapping still remains problematic. A major upfront hurdle for many organizations is to elicit the requirements for a given roadmapping initiative and produce an agreed expression of what is `needed-vs-expected' and what can be `delivered' (in the allotted timeframe and resources available). Requirements elicitation is typically driven by a set of stakeholder perspectives and opinions. In order to align and agree, there should be a reconciling of self-interests versus collective interests, and this should be reflective of the organizational context and realities of the specific situation. In order to help define the scope of a roadmapping initiative, a checklist-based template has been designed which brings together the conceptual dimensions and practical elements that are necessary to deepen and enrichen the understanding of expectations and requirements.