Yes, you need co-ordination. No, you don’t need a roadmap. If you’re doing innovative new things, a roadmap is almost the worst possible way to try and co-operate on them.
Let’s say you really do need your geo feature now. There are two happy answers from the DB PM: “we’re working on it now, estimate is x” or “it’s top of our list, we estimate starting on it after x”. Neither of these need a roadmap.
The unhappy answer is something like “we’re not working on it, it’s fifth on our priority list”. You also don’t need a roadmap for this. In fact, this is a more honest and useful answer than the roadmap one — which would be something like “it’s behind four other things so slated for Q3”.
The roadmap is a crutch to avoid the hard conversations about priority that are the core of good co-operation. Why? Because the roadmap suggests that while geo isn’t priority 1 now, somehow by the time Q3 rolls around it will be, and so you can start planning against that. That is going to leave you unhappy in Q3, almost for certain.
Because the truth of the matter is implied in the priority list answer: “this is fifth to us. So we will work on it when we finish what we’re on now and if we get through the four things in front of it and if nothing else comes up as a higher priority in the meantime.”
If you need geo, either way you now need to make a case for higher priority, to escalate, or figure out some other way to do what you want because clearly what you need isn’t an overall business priority. The roadmap also makes all those conversations harder because they become about dates and the PM can say “of course it matters to us we just can’t start it until Q3, do you really want to resequence all these other things? What about the impact on all the other dependencies? Seems bad”.
Obviously this just leads to worse and worse conversations, until management steps in and says the real problem is a lack of transparency. What is really needed, they’ll say, are better roadmaps, ones that expose dependencies properly, ones that let the consequences be seen, ones with a much higher granularity. And a PMO to help us run it all.
Before long, you’re no longer co-operating, you’re fighting over Gantt charts. This is the state of affairs the article is intending by “big change programs with detailed roadmaps”.
And it can all be avoided by not pretending that work stretches out in front of us on a calendar. We don’t work on geo because Q3 has arrived and “we promised on the roadmap so I suppose we’d better”. We work on geo because of all the items on the shifting sands of priority, geo is the top one now and that priority is broadly agreed across the business.
All you need are three ordered lists: “stuff in flight”, stuff that’s up next” and “stuff we’re looking at but haven’t committed to at all”. All the benefits of roadmap transparency and priority still surface, with none of the bad consequences of trying to express those things via a calendar.