Top 5 Roadmap Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Just because you have a roadmap doesn’t mean you’re invulnerable to unexpected detours, pitfalls, and roadblocks along your business transformation journey. It’s a common oversight we’ve seen too often, which ends up leading to more financial and operational troubles than anticipated. To help ease the anxiety and reduce the risk of roadmap headaches, we’ve listed five of the most common roadmap pitfalls below along with insight on how to avoid them. These are not intended to resolve your current roadmap woes; but, they should help recalibrate your way of thinking when it comes to navigating the road ahead.

Pitfall #1

Your roadmap is unbalanced. It is either solely focused on expanding the ServiceNow footprint and not on extracting value from existing licensed products, or it completely fails to target ServiceNow enterprise expansion opportunities.

Recommendation: Strike the Right Balance

So you’ve got a roadmap. Where is it taking you? Is it leading you to new, exciting areas of the ServiceNow ecosystem, extending the power of the platform into new areas of your business? Or, does it lay out a plan for increasing your operational maturity, with target KPIs and CMMI-type maturity milestones over cycles of continuous improvement, to shore up your existing investment?

There’s room for both in your ServiceNow roadmap, but failing to strike the right balance – of creating efficiencies through expansion and extracting maximal value from your existing products and licencing – can raise a significant barrier to securing executive buy-in. Having a clear vision of your destination, the resulting business value, and the steps to get there, are essential to success.

Pitfall #2

Your roadmap does not align or leverage overarching strategic goals and imperatives. Failure to align to existing business priorities can impact momentum, funding, and executive advocacy.

Recommendation: Avoid Isolation

All too many roadmaps are gathering dust on the shelf and will never see the light of day. Competing priorities, funding challenges, and the lack of a “burning platform” can often lead to your roadmap becoming isolated and lost amongst the “noise”. The resulting lack of commitment and momentum often leads to inertia and practical resourcing challenges.

Connect your initiative to current strategic goals and imperatives and engage senior leadership early and often to illustrate how your roadmap’s goals support the imperatives near and dear to their hearts. At a practical level, this can be as simple as engaging leadership for their perspectives during the pre-roadmap assessment stages. Demonstrate early that your roadmap is designed to deliver business value in areas that leadership feels passionate about. And while you are at, it openly asks individual leaders to become advocates of the change to start building a strong coalition as part of early change planning.

Pitfall #3

Your roadmap is heavily focused on technology and does not adequately plan for all of the other elements that are critical to success, such as process governance, adoption, and executive support.

Recommendation: Create a Balanced Roadmap

Many roadmaps focus exclusively on technical considerations and often represent a series of ServiceNow work packages for your implementation partner to execute. While this can be one successful element of your roadmap execution, it fails to acknowledge the scale, complexity, and dependencies that exist in realising successful business outcomes.

Ensure that your roadmap acknowledges and identifies other work packages critical to your success. Establishing process governance, defining change objectives, reviewing the current operating model, assessing workforce adoption, establishing platform governance, and evaluating the current customer experience are all examples of elements that may need a substantial degree of focus as part of a successful roadmap.

Pitfall #4

Your roadmap is too high-level and is not supported by detailed, actionable steps, or an implementation plan that sets out the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘when’.

Recommendation: Define the Drill-down from the One-Pager

Everyone wants a one-page version of the roadmap, right? It’s easy to consume and provides a great executive visualisation.

Once consumed, however, your audience will soon seek to better understand what activities underpin each key work package. You should ensure that this has been defined before your first readout. Be ready to articulate the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘when’. If you can tie each stage back to tangible value, then you should. Your roadmap will have significantly more credibility as a result, as leaders will nearly always be seeking more information.

"Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now." - Alan Lakein

Your time investment will be well spent since it will lay the groundwork for the creation of a detailed project implementation plan as part of the next step.

Pitfall #5

Your roadmap process fails to engage and learn from key stakeholders during the early stages to ensure buy-in. A lack of co-design – perceived or real – can inhibit engagement, alignment, and support. In some cases, this can trigger passive or even active resistance.

Recommendation: Win Hearts and Minds Early Through Co-design

The assessment and discovery activities that support the creation of a roadmap are a great opportunity to foster a highly collaborative approach to build trust, co-design, and gain early adoption.

“Sometimes, it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” – Drake

Effective stakeholder engagement through kick-offs, surveys, simulations, demos, workshops, and 1:1s ensures that your people feel involved, considered, and valued. Opportunities to learn and to challenge at these early stages are key to longer-term buy-in and adoption.

Parting Words

I hope you gleaned some pearls of wisdom after reading this blog and have a better appreciation for how essential a well-designed roadmap is in facilitating business optimisation. Establishing business objectives is the easy part – understanding how to synchronise your people, processes, and technologies to attain them is the overwhelming challenge. Let our team of specialised advisors help guide you on the most sensible path, free of pitfalls, roadblocks, and detours.