Create a digital roadmap

Create a digital roadmap

The aim of a digital roadmap is to bring together your transformation goals into a priority order or timeline.  Your roadmap will form part of your digital strategy, and coupled with delivery plans and resourcing, it will enable you to deliver digital transformation. 

Who to involve

You’ll need your core transformation team as well as stakeholders for this step. 

Depending on how many digital transformation goals you identified in the ‘Vision, mission and strategy’ step you might also need input from staff, stakeholders and members/sport participants and potential participants too.

What to do

Where to start

When creating your digital roadmap you should start with the work you did in the ‘Vision, mission and strategy step’, considering the digital strategy goals that you defined.  You will likely have delivered one of those now and applying learning may lead you to revisit some of the undelivered digital strategy goals.  It will also hopefully have given you some ideas for other areas to focus on.

You’ll need to consider some new digital strategy goals (see Vision, mission and strategy above for the process to follow) so that you have a list of goals to include on the roadmap.  How many digital strategy goals you include is up to you and will be dependent upon the size of your organisation, available resources etc.If you are able to include five as a starting point, that would be ample.  As you evolve and look further into the future you may be able to increase this number.

Remember the following: 

• Don’t just apply new technology to old operations - this isn’t true digital transformation - you need to focus on how process changes too.
• Digital strategy should always start with vision, mission and overall strategy, which should be driven by user/staff and stakeholder need - not by technical solutions.

Creating your roadmap

Once you have your list of digital transformation goals you need to get your core team and stakeholders in a room to agree what order you should deliver the goals in. 

You could consider the following when applying priority:

• Make sure you start small, expanding complexity when you have a few digital transformation goals under your belt.
• Make sure the work you do has a tangible and measurable benefit. You can use this to gain buy in from your wider team and stakeholders.  This is especially important for the first few digital transformation goals in your roadmap.
• Consider the digital transformation goals which relate to the most important elements of your vision, mission and overall strategy.  These might be higher priority in your roadmap.
• Consider any dependencies. Is there one goal that needs to be delivered before others can be started? Apply this logic to the ordering of your roadmap.
• Cost benefit analysis - consider the approximate cost of delivering the digital transformation goal alongside the benefit it is projected to deliver.  You might want to deliver digital transformation goals which will provide a large benefit earlier in your roadmap.

When you are applying this learning for the first time, aim to define your roadmap for the coming year.  When you’ve gained more experience, it makes sense to align with the timescale of your vision, mission and overall strategy. 

Just like your vision, mission and strategy, your digital strategy and transformation goals will evolve over time.This is an exercise that you will need to undertake continuously to ensure you are leveraging digital to achieve your overall goals.

Displaying a roadmap is relatively simple and can be done using various tools including a presentation page or document editing tool.See Using your Tools effectively here. 

An example roadmap is below:

Putting your roadmap into action

You’ll need to create a plan to put your roadmap into action - again we suggest starting small and planning for delivery of one or two of digital transformation goals, as you grow in experience you can increase this number.  You may also want to consider aligning with your organisation’s planning and budget cycles. 

Once you’ve decided which part(s) of the roadmap to plan for, involve the right people. You’ll need to:

• Flesh out requirements, based on your early digital transformation goal work (see Discovery and Digital Requirements)
• Draft a plan (see Ensuring Effective Delivery).

You’ll also need to agree on who will be involved and any other resources needed for the project (see Resource step below). 

Your digital strategy

A digital strategy brings together your prioritised roadmap and your plans for achieving your digital transformation goals.The roadmap is a visual representation of the goals you will be working through, whereas your strategy covers your approach to delivering them. 

Developing a presentation or slide deck which gives an overview of the above can be a helpful tool to communicate your roadmap to your organisation to encourage buy in.

Outcomes

On completion of this step, you should have:

• Considered your digital transformation goals and possibly identified new ones according to your vision, mission and strategy.
• Prioritised roadmap and digital strategy
• Planned for the next digital transformation goal you are going to deliver.