The PMO Whack-a-Mole

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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I do a lot of work with organizations around strategic planning and delivery. One of the areas in that work that has taken off significantly in the last few years is the concept of the strategic roadmap.

This is a visual representation of the strategic priorities and key investments that are planned for the next few years applied to a timeline with indications of key dependencies, the strategies that investments align with, and so on. The idea is that the roadmap is easy to communicate, easy to interpret, and helps keep everyone aligned with what the organization is trying to achieve and how to achieve it.

It works, in fact it works so well that many departments are now doing a similar thing for their own planned initiatives. Sometimes they adopt the approach themselves; sometimes it’s mandated by their organization that is looking for standard ways to communicate discretionary work.

As with any other aspect of strategy, the roadmap changes and evolves over time, but the nature of them makes it easy to make those changes. Additionally, with roadmap functionality now included in many strategic or portfolio project management solutions, the updating and distribution of roadmaps can be an automatic process tied to changes in approved plans and investments.

Besides the tool itself, the growth in roadmaps also demonstrates an increasing focus on the longer-term …

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