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Good Practice for Roadmapping
In the early stages, the roadmap produced is likely to have gaps and inconsistencies, but the quality of the roadmap should improve over time as the strategic plan matures.
Consultation with key stakeholders is vitally important, and the roadmap provides a mechanism to support this dialogue.
Discussion with customers and suppliers (particularly industry) is vital, to clearly understand requirements and constraints, and to understand potential acquisition routes, capability and technological options.
Through practical application, discussion and consultation with key stakeholders several observations on what constitutes a good roadmap have emerged:
- A roadmap should include a title and security classification, together with name and contact details for the owner and date that the roadmap was last updated.
- The architecture should be compatible with the principles set out in this guidance, in terms of three broad layers.
- A key should be included to explain the meaning of symbols and colours.
- A full lifecycle view of equipment and platforms should be shown.
- Colour or other appropriate means should be used to show clearly the funding status of research or development programmes.
- In general, a non-linear timescale is appropriate, with more space given to the short-term compared to the long-term.
- Clear links should be shown to delivered capability, which may require consideration of additional equipment, systems or platforms (for example if a delivery team is working on equipment that will be inserted into another platform).
- Clear links between research projects should be shown, and how these feed into equipment programmes.
- The roadmap should include key milestones and decision points (for example Initial Gate, Main Gate, In-Service and Out-of-Service dates).
- Elements should be coded with brief titles and Technology Readiness Levels (for technology research and development), together with an indication of the ‘window of availability’.
- Supporting text should be provided (usually in a supporting document) to complement the roadmap, describing the scope and aims of the roadmap, defining terms and presenting the ‘strategic narrative’, including options, tradeoffs and risks.
