Conveying Roadmap Progress to Board

 

Conveying what the Engineering organization has accomplished to a Board is often a challenge.  I have seen (and caused) a range from no coverage of accomplishments of the past period to, at the other extreme, lists of dozens of features delivered and in progress.  Neither extreme is terribly useful for the Board to understand how Engineering resource is being allocated nor to understand delivery effectiveness .  Recently, one of the companies that I work with used a very effective visualization to convey roadmap information.  I have shown an example of this approach immediately below.

There a number of things I like about this approach.  First it clearly shows what has been deliveed and what is in progress.  It also shows how the overall R&D effort has been allocated in the past period of time, including between the most important features and the more run-of-the-mill ones.  Finally, the nature of the chart forces prioritization of which features are surfaced, which avoids the problem of long lists of features without an ability to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.  There is one additional capability that could be added, which would be to visually indicate with red/yellow/green (or something of similar visual simplicity) how each feature is doing compared to its original projection in terms of level of effort and schedule.  In the case of larger engineering organizations, a separate chart could be used for each major area of work

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