MSP Best Practice Using Strategic IT Roadmaps to Get More Contracts

You can even enable or disable views on a per-user basis for the ultimate control of your roadmap. Sometimes you just need to zoom right in and look at the detail — and that’s exactly what the airfocus Item View helps you do. Essentially a prioritized list of all outstanding tasks on your technology roadmap, you can use this view to sort and filter by various criteria like Value, Effort, and Risk. By prioritizing each task against your project’s overall strategic goals, you can easily see what’s driving value (and what isn’t). If you’re responsible for development teams or any technology development project, this article will teach you what technology roadmaps are, why you’d want to use one, and how to create one of your own. Evaluate your current capabilities and technology against your strategic goals, including reviewing and documenting your business vision, goals, and requirements along with technology and process observations.

it roadmaps

IT roadmaps are built and managed by operation managers and IT leaders. In reality you need a series of destinations, because your IT journey will never end . Your overall destination is an IT infrastructure that supports your business goals. Setting small, realistic goals while thinking big is how many successful companies manage their IT projects. MSPs specialize in managing technology infrastructure and have extensive knowledge and experience designing IT roadmaps. They understand the latest trends, emerging technologies, and best practices, allowing them to provide valuable insights and guidance tailored to your business needs.

IT Roadmap Templates

To gain greater insight into the progress and evaluate the success of your roadmap, choose a set of performance metrics or Key Performance Indicators that is actionable, reliable, and controllable. For example, metrics allow you to focus on data to make decisions or evaluate facts—rather than relying on emotion or conjecture. Furthermore, performance metrics can help mitigate risks and avoid costly delays by alerting https://www.globalcloudteam.com/what-is-an-it-roadmap-setting-goals-for-your-product/ initiative owners to the need for corrective actionsbeforeissues arise. Lastly, metrics can help you articulate how your roadmap is meeting its success criteria in your regular reports to the executive team. Veritis engages in several analysis sessions, where it learns the ins and outs of your existing infrastructure framework and with key stakeholders to understand the organization’s vision and growth plans.

it roadmaps

Stakeholder engagement ensures the active participation, collaboration, and support of the various stakeholders impacted by IT initiatives throughout the implementation of the IT roadmap. Companies utilize various technologies to support their employees. The collection of these systems and technologies is often complex and resource-intensive. Therefore, the overall infrastructure must be planned and implemented organizationally. For teams that want to get really granular with the administration of their IT system, the timeline view (Figure 2.) is recommended. The timeline view makes it easy to visualize the timing and resourcing for the technology resources in the pipeline.

Data Analytics

Actual IT roadmaps should be customized to meet the specific needs and objectives of each organization. A clear IT roadmap helps to prevent it by giving you full control over your growing stack of SaaS tools. You’ll never forget about recurring subscriptions you don’t need anymore or purchase new software when your existing systems are capable of performing the tasks you need. The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform empowers IT teams to create in-app guidance and self-service user support on all internal desktop, web, and mobile applications.

  • That’s why project leaders need to be responsible for the communication and governance of their initiatives.
  • The optimists, however, clearly outnumber the pessimists at German-speaking companies when it comes to responding to new challenges.
  • The standardization of hybrid and remote learning has reshaped how universities deliver learning to students, and that has reshaped the role technology plays in their education.
  • Then, you can reduce or put an end to any tasks or systems that aren’t working and save your organization the money being used on those resources.
  • You’ll never forget about recurring subscriptions you don’t need anymore or purchase new software when your existing systems are capable of performing the tasks you need.
  • Therefore, the overall infrastructure must be planned and implemented organizationally.

When different teams have different priorities, it can be tough for them to see eye-to-eye. But a technology roadmap can give you the final word — and it’s tough to argue with hard data. Whether it’s managing your customers and prospects with a CRM system, or deploying a new cloud-based email system to all employees — every one of these activities can be listed and prioritized on a your technology roadmap. Project Roadmaps create plans for specific tasks like shifting company data to a new cloud system or upgrading software platforms. Product Plan helps you build technology roadmaps and prioritize your initiatives. Use one of their many templates to help you get started, including tailored technology roadmaps for enterprise or IT architecture.

Be more strategic with strategic roadmaps

A growth-oriented IT roadmap is more than just putting down your systems onto paper. However, the real benefits come from taking a step back and creating and detailing technology initiatives and goals specific to your organization and how they align with the future of IT as a whole. Then, using this IT roadmap to continuously track and measure the progress and success of these goals.

it roadmaps

Protect yourself and your organization by aligning your technology roadmap goals with effective compliance measures. By prioritizing compliance in your plan, you are investing in your IT infrastructure, your clients, and your reputation. Having this type of plan in place is a key component to creating an edge and getting a leg-up on the competition. It allows growing businesses to fully take advantage of the infrastructure and systems already in place while still planning how to improve and innovate in the future.

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It requires a deep understanding of the organization’s strategic objectives and the capabilities and limitations of existing technology. Balancing short-term needs with long-term vision can be complex, requiring input from key stakeholders and a collaborative approach to decision-making. Today’s competitive business landscape drives rapid product innovation, and in turn makes it critical for organizations to have the right technology solutions in place so they are ready for future market needs. Company leaders or stakeholders often wonder how short and long term business goals can be matched to a specific technology— all while keeping costs and risks low.

it roadmaps

At a corporate level, every business strategy represents a set of actions pushing towards a specific goal. In today’s marketplace, IT organizations need to operate with the same degree of focus. That’s why a strategic IT roadmap is paramount to the success of every organization. It may seem simple, but every new tool a business uses requires staff training, an update plan, data migration from previous systems… If this sounds like a headache, you’re not wrong; but with a software roadmap, you can relieve that stress and become the master of your company’s software solutions. In fact, the technology roadmap is often a useful way to track and align the overall strategic goals of a company.

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MSPs will help you make strategic decisions informed by the specifics of industry trends and elucidate new initiatives and compliance pressures that you may be unaware of. Ultimately, it’s what will take your technology to the next level. “Many times this step will help determine the priority and serve as a checkpoint if priorities shift,” says Kopp. Marketing & Creative Management Manage campaigns, resources, and creative projects at scale. Content management Organize, manage, and review content production. The most popular online Visio alternative, Lucidchart is utilized in over 180 countries by millions of users, from sales managers mapping out target organizations to IT directors visualizing their network infrastructure.

Organizing and planning a roadmap will help you strategically plan and identify the items needed for your business, the items that you do not need, and the items you need to prioritize. Your MSP or whoever oversees your IT roadmap will configure and run recurring assessments based on ever-evolving compliance standards for regulations https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ like GLBA, CMMC, SOX, GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and more. As a result, you can have confidence in your technology solutions when complying with various industry laws and standards. Because maintaining compliance demands that you routinely evaluate your network infrastructure security solutions, acting as an incidental high-level roadmap.

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An IT infrastructure roadmap allows you to plan big changes in your tech stack and prevents infrastructural failures as you’re undergoing digital transformation. Any company needs to perform digital transformation at some point – you can’t keep your software stack fixed. If you’re about to go through IT infrastructure enhancement, you’ll need a roadmap similar to the one we’re providing below. Without achievable milestones, it’s difficult to keep your team motivated and hardly possible to track the progress. An IT project roadmap is a strategic, big-picture overview of the key steps of a project.