Roadmaps and Roadmapping    Technology Futures    Strategy        Measuring the Value of Roadmapping The Roadmapping Scorecard The best measure of a roadmapping process is the value created for society, an industry, or a corporation’s shareholders by executing the plan incorporated in the roadmap, but the time delay is often very long (sometimes measured in years or decades) and many other factors during implementation of the plan can influence the outcome.  For example, external events may change the market environment or internal changes or problems may affect the development process.   A short-term, forward looking measure is provided by a roadmapping “scorecard” of the teams’ self-evaluation of progress framed by the four-part architecture (see Roadmapping Frameworks).  The scorecard captures the teams’ perceptions and/or a facilitator’s review of the completeness and quality of each part of the roadmap as it is developed.  It enables the team to conduct a structured review of gaps and develop plans for closing those gaps.  The scorecard tracks the team’s progress and confidence through several roadmapping sessions.  It can then be used to track periodic updates as the team gains confidence in its plan or recognizes the need for redirection. For more detail on roadmapping scorecards, read A Unifying Architecture for Roadmaps Frames a Value Scorecard (PDF), presented at IEEE Engineering Management Conference, October, 2003, Albany, NY. Constructing the Scorecard  A scorecard may be constructed based on the common framework, and an example scorecard is shown below. Each major section is weighted by its importance on a relative scale. Within each section, the individual topics are also assigned individual weights. In the example, a few topics of the standard template are not used, so are given zero weights. All others are weighted equally, and given weights of one. The team that created the scorecard shown below created its roadmap over a series of four sessions (one session devoted to a section of the roadmap). At the end of each session, the members of the team rated their confidence in the parts of the roadmap completed to that point on a five point scale. The scorecard shows the team’s progress in completing the roadmap both in the table and the accompanying graph. In the first session, the team drafted a Market and Competitive Strategy. At the end of the session, the team was highly confident of its competitive strategy, and moderately confident of the market definition, customer drivers, and competitive landscape. This showed a completion score of about 16% – good confidence in work completed so far, but lots more work to do. As the team progressed through roadmapping sessions, the elements of the market and competitive strategy were reviewed and revisited, and the teams’ confidence in the initial sections increased as additional parts of the roadmap were completed. The team’s progress in developing the parts of the roadmap is evident as the sections of the roadmap are scored. The bottom line of the table and the bar chart show the progress toward completion or 100% confidence. The confidence is computed by weighting the scores for each topic by the section weights. At the end of the first session, the team was 16% of the way to complete confidence in their roadmap. By the end of the fourth session, the team scored itself at 93% confidence. To reach confidence nearer 100%, the team will continue to work on the topics with the lowest scores first to build their confidence in the quality of their roadmap. Roadmapping Scorecard

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