The whole world is going digital, and so is the corporate one. So, to keep up with the times, managers worldwide found a way to create new solutions to visualize different goals, tasks, and everything in between.

If you have a great goal in mind, you want to invest your time and energy in a project roadmap. What does it mean? Well, in short, it’s an extremely useful, strategic tool that allows seeing, with great detail, what kind of tasks and goals we have on our way to accomplishing them and where we are in the process of getting there.

In this article, we’ll be talking about what it means to create a project roadmap, what benefits it brings to good working people around the world, and what to put into the said project to make sure that we make the best out of it.

You may be wondering what kind of project management software you should use while creating such a map. Well, it depends - do you want to do it right, or just do it? If it’s the first one, you should consider Microsoft Excel. It’s the single best software for all your spreadsheet needs.

Here, at Royal Cd Keys, we’ve prepared it in a nice Microsoft Office package for an affordable price. It’s really almost free to use, so we hope that you’ll find it useful. With that out of the way, let’s dive right into the main topic of our presentation here - project roadmap.

Let’s first get ourselves acquainted with the concept of roadmaps. You can visualize it as a big and long painting telling a story of your projects with different characters doing different things on different occasions.

Usually, a project roadmap has a starting and ending date, assignments, and phases of the project. We will get into more detail about this aspect in the further section of the article. You can see the entire project timeline and what kind of milestones and objectives your team needs to do to accomplish this project charter.

How you’re going to go about it - it’s essentially up to you. You can add more or less detail, some colorful explanations, or just straight-up facts. It’s all up to you in the end, so choose wisely! There are many project roadmap templates out there, so we’ll show you how you can customize them to your liking.

As we’ve stated before, it’s really up to the creator to think of the elements to include in the project management roadmap. Some prefer it to be more detailed to know what every single person does in the company, some have more faith in their team leaders to guide their teams so that they do not need any additional control.

Project Roadmap - Sections

What usually gets into those kinds of spreadsheets is pretty much the same. You get your Project Objectives, Project scope, Project stakeholders, Project schedule, and some other project details like resource allocation, budget, milestones to achieve, deadlines, resource management, cross-functional team and responsibilities, and lots and lots more. 

Keep in mind it is up to you what you want to include in your project, so before getting started with it, think about your goals and create a project schedule to manage stakeholder expectations. As they say, every successful project starts with a first step, so make sure to take the right one.

Schedule

It’s very important to add the schedule to your project roadmap. It can literally make or break your plan, so keep that in mind when deciding to create a roadmap for your project. It does not have to be super-detailed but make sure to put in the most important dates in your project plan and just see them from far away as a concept.

Milestones

Speaking of something ahead, keep in mind that putting milestones into your project roadmap will most likely make you much more efficient. You will see how close you are to achieving your goal. It also gives you and your team psychological relief after completing some part of the task.

Project Overview

It’s really important to make your project roadmap as precise as it is humanly possible. You can make it detailed, but also - make it concise. Don’t write paragraphs over paragraphs. It’s really mostly a visual aid so people can know what’s what in your company.

Contacts

Be sure to add some contact information to your project roadmap, as it may be very important, especially if you work in a bigger group or with some kind of outside company. Having a subsection of contacts will make the whole process much easier, and you will not try to get the hang of someone through four other people.

Resources

If you create a well-crafted project map, you’ll be able to see what kind of tasks should be done and what kind of people should be involved in those. And, more importantly, how many of them should be involved. Managing teams can be hard, but if you know your job, you’ll be able to swiftly get all the necessary people to do all the required assignments.

Project Deliverables

If you have a lot of products to send out, it’s vital to track the route they need to take to get to the customer. You can check at all times where they are and what kind of steps you need to take to send them faster. You can also clearly see which ones are taken care of and which are still not sent out yet.

You may be wondering how to create a project roadmap in Excel. Well, it’s pretty simple. The most important thing to do is to download a project roadmap template that you can then work on. You can just download it from the official Microsoft website.

Project Roadmap Template - Step By Step

First, open your project Roadmap Template and add a title to it. It can really be anything you feel like putting there. To do so, you’ll have to double-click on the title at the top of the template.

• Adjusting Quarters and Dates

To do it, double-click on a cell and select the quarter that references the date you want to change. Edit the text to suit your project. And there you have it.

• Adding Task Names and Moving Subtasks

To add a Task Name to your task at hand, just double-click on the cell you want to edit and put the names in it. Additionally, if you want to add tasks, dates, and subtasks as well, you can just move it around freely, of course, in accordance with the dates. Just click on them and drag them wherever you want them. To lengthen or shorten them, just grab any corner of the taskbar and drag them however you need.

• Changing Colors of Subtask Bars

If you want to change or add color to better organize subtasks, you can easily do so. Visual aid is really important when creating a project roadmap, so make sure to put everything in the right order.

To color the Subtask, just simply click the paint bucket icon on the top of the navigation bar and choose your desired color. The Subtask bar you’ve chosen will automatically change its color to whatever you’ve clicked on.

• Status Key

There are a lot of possibilities when working on the template in Excel. One of them is creating legends and status keys that are suited for your project.

If you want to change the status key title, just double-click on it and put the desired name inside. To change the color of the status box, double-click on it, pick the paint bucket icon, and click the color you want.

The other burning question that most people would probably ask is - what kind of projects are best suited for a project roadmap? Well, there are plenty of them, so let’s just go over some professions that could benefit from creating a project roadmap.

Manufacturing

You’re probably familiar with a similar concept if you’ve ever worked at a manufacturing facility. As it turns out, many people use this kind of project roadmap to see how every step of their project gets done and what happens at every step of the process.

Entertainment Industry

Similarly, if you work in the entertainment industry, it’s also great to add a little bit of cohesiveness to your plans. With a project roadmap, you can easily track all the dates and what kind of shifts are happening on each one of them.

Office Environment

It’s also useful in the office environment and big corporations. It’s much easier to track what’s going on when there are multiple teams and you have to coordinate their work. Whether you’re creating your own project roadmap or you’re a part of a team that uses it, you’ll quickly see the benefits of it. Every project manager knows it to be true.

Kickoff Meeting

One of the most important things you can use a roadmap for is creating an incredibly important kickoff meeting. If you present your project roadmap comprehensibly and appeasingly, you will surely get your project started in no time. What are the benefits of using project roadmap tools in this way? Here are some examples.

Realistic Expectations

Thanks to everyone going through the project point by point and getting to the project goals easily, they can create realistic expectations on what they can bring to the project and how everything will be developing. It’s better than the feeling of uncertainty that is common in the corporate world, where many people don’t understand what they’re doing in the company.

Setting Clear Goals

Because the project roadmap explains everyone’s role in the project and what kind of things will be happening during our work, you can set yourself and your team clear goals on what to do. That way, you will be able to motivate each team member better and help them out with understandable tasks.

Getting to Know Each Other

Thanks to the visual aspect of the project roadmap, you will be able to meet many people from your work and understand the scope of their input into the project. With that, team members will be able to communicate with each other and ask questions about some aspects they’re not familiar with. And they will know who to talk to.

It’s not only the direct elements that will make your Project Roadmap successful and helpful in your everyday work. There are a lot of “soft” elements that influence your workplace, how you function in a team and the overall efficiency of your work.

That is why you can often find in the literature the “importance of project roadmaps” part. Here are just some of the benefits that a project roadmap will give your company.

Communication

Project managers all over the world agree on this point - the most important thing in the workplace is communication. Suppose you create a visually clear project roadmap that will show project progress from points A-Z in a really understandable way. In that case, all the parties involved will be well-informed and able to communicate directly about certain things in the project.

Accountability

…and with great knowledge about who does what, you can also help them all be accountable. If there is a name next to one of the key milestones that one of the project team members did not do, you’ll see it straight away. Project completion is everyone’s work to satisfy key stakeholders, so there is no space for someone not doing their job properly.

Cooperation

Every project needs people to be successful. And those people need to work together towards the same goal. Thanks to the project roadmap, everyone’s job is clearly defined, and they can work together with assigned team members to fulfill every single one of the project phases. 

Transparency

Speaking of visualization, let’s talk about visibility. Internal and external stakeholders can clearly see what everyone does in the project. And by accomplishing that, everyone sees who is responsible for what, where, and why. 

Everyone can see what the other team accomplished and who can be asked about what kind of element in the project.

Prioritization

Project plans change a lot, but the key components stay the same. Thanks to the roadmap, you can set specific goals and change them over time depending on what kind of things happen in the meantime. And, as we live in extraordinary times, you can expect the unexpected pretty much every day.

So - to make it easier, you can use the road map to slightly change some of your teammates' priorities and tasks to accomplish.

A project roadmap is an extremely useful tool in the workplace. It keeps stakeholders informed, makes everyone on the same page about project milestones, and shows what comes next, who does what, and why.

It’s one of the more interesting ways to organize your work and your workplace at the same time. A good project roadmap can save you a lot of time and trouble by making everything seem so clearcut and without issues. 

Finally, if you have any questions about this or any other software/gaming-related topics, feel free to let us know! We’ll be more than happy to get you acquainted with the beautiful word of gaming and software.