As I went for a walk this evening, on my own, in the dark and with no fear for my safety I thought about Sarah Everard and all the tweets I’ve read since she disappeared from women expressing their experiences of not feeling safe when out on their own.
I thought back to the time Sara Payne was abducted in broad daylight and murdered. Back then, in the year 2000, the dominant narrative was of a lone male perpetrator who had done something so unthinkable that whilst every parent in country must have been scared for the safety of their child, there is no suggestion of a systemic social issue going on.
Twenty years later, the message from the police is for women to not go out alone at night, not for men to not attack women. All across Twitter, the response from women is an expression of fears and experiences of being out alone at night. This shows us what an endemic and systemic issue this is in a way that what happened to Sarah Payne never did.
Violence towards women and girls was just as much of a social issue twenty years ago as it is today, but today it is recognised as such, and talked about as such.
It’s terrible that society only changes through trauma and tragedy. And that change is so slow. Maybe the change isn’t even enough to be considered progress, but I hope more change towards a fairer society comes soon.
Pre-2020 an organisation could get away with designing a strategy that only measured progress towards its goals. Now, and for the foreseeable future, strategy measures are going to have to include signals to change direction.
So many discussions must take place in digital teams about the difference between a roadmap and a delivery plan. They are very different tools that serve different purposes, and you probably need them both, but it’s easy to say one and mean the other. So, here’s what makes a roadmap different from a delivery plan.
Roadmaps
Roadmaps are usually (or at least should be) goal-based, whether implicitly or explicitly (which is better). They state what you’re trying to achieve, hopefully because those goals will help the organisation implement its strategy for being successful.
Gov UK Roadmap
A roadmap is used to prioritise the work, which means choosing what you will and won’t do. It’s logic is ‘this, not that’. As it the example above from gov.uk, some of the things that can be done to achieve the goal are being worked on now (they’re in the ‘Now’ column) and some might be worked on later, which expresses the either/or choice that roadmaps require.
Good roadmaps also express options and uncertainty. The items in the ‘Later/Future/Exploring’ column might never make it into the ‘Now’ column because as they are investigated and shaped it could be that it’s found that the option wouldn’t help to achieve the goal.
Once we have a roadmap, then we produce a Delivery Plan to describe when the work in the ‘Now’ column can be delivered.
Delivery plans
A delivery plan is used to sequence the work. It describes when the work will take place and when it is expected to be finished. It’s logic is ‘this, then that’. It helps to understand what work can happen in parallel and what is dependent on a piece of work being finished (the dependency might be technical or because people are busy).
An example Delivery Plan
A reliable delivery plan needs work outside of the plan to consider people’s availability and capacity and some idea of whether the work can be achieved in that length of time, otherwise it’s a bit of a guess rather than being based on facts.
Yes, it definitely can, but those dates should be for information against each of the goals, for example, ‘Goal 2 must be met by date x for this reason’.
No, a roadmap isn’t just an ordered backlog. A backlog is a whole other tool that does a different job. Roadmaps help to understand what the goal is and options for how we’re going to achieve it
For as long as it takes to achieve the goal. That’s why roadmaps are often organised in columns of ‘Now’, ‘Next’, ‘Later’, ‘Done’ as they convey a past and future without being constrained to a date on a timeline.
It shouldn’t go to the level of tasks, but it depends what other planning tools you use. If, for example, week 14 shows that an identity management solution is being developed, and the developers have user stories to take into a sprint planning session, then the delivery plan doesn’t need to be detailed.
