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The Technology Roadmap: the one-page roadmap view, on a yellow background

The Technology Roadmap

A year of technology work on one page: every initiative tied to a business goal, laid out month by month, and checked against your budget and your team's time.

Most technology roadmaps are a wish list: everything anyone asked for, in no particular order, with no idea whether there's the money or the people to do it.

A good one answers three questions on a single page: what are we doing this year, why (which business goal does each piece serve), and can we actually afford and staff it?

This workbook helps you build that page, and keeps it honest.

What's in it

  • Goals: up to six business goals for the year, with what success looks like. It shows how much work and money is going towards each one, and flags any goal with nothing behind it.
  • Initiatives: everything you plan to do, with its goal, type, owner, start and end month, project cost, the running cost it leaves behind, effort and dependencies. It flags anything without a goal, owner or dates, and anything that starts before what it depends on is finished.
  • The Roadmap: a one-page view with a bar for each initiative across the year, colored by status, ready to print or share with the leadership team.
  • Summary: cost and team time by quarter against your budget and the people you actually have. It shows what the year adds to your running costs, and where the money goes: keeping the lights on, fixing what's broken, protecting the business or growing it.

It comes filled in with a made-up company's year, which turns out to need more of the team's time than it has in Q1, and more money than the budget in Q3. That's exactly the conversation a roadmap should start. Clear the sample and the formulas stay.

Who it's for

CEOs, CIOs and IT leaders planning next year's technology work, and leadership teams who want to see the whole picture before they approve it.

It builds on Do You Need a CIO, or Just CIO-Level Thinking? and The "Later" Tax. It pairs well with The Later Tax Register and The Quarterly Tech Board Report.

Budgeting for it? The IT Budget puts the roadmap's project costs alongside everything else you spend on technology, month by month.

It's a single Excel file. It also opens in Google Sheets and Apple Numbers.

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