Navigating Organization-Wide Roadmapping Through Maturity Assessment

Organization-wide roadmapping enables alignment across departments and business units with overarching strategic objectives, ensuring that functions, such as research and development, operations, product and service development, marketing, and finance, share a common understanding of priorities and timelines. However, achieving this alignment is challenging for many organizations. This is because roadmapping is inherently flexible and adaptable, often requiring a complex integration process involving a broad range of stakeholders. To address these implementation challenges, the authors carried out a series of industrial case studies, which led to the development of an organization-wide roadmapping maturity model and a set of analytical dimensions. A further challenge then emerged regarding how organizations could effectively utilize the maturity model to deliver practical benefits in roadmapping implementation. This article addresses this challenge by introducing a maturity assessment approach. The approach applies the maturity model to review the past experiences and evaluate the current state of roadmapping practices to navigate toward effective organization-wide roadmapping implementation. The approach's practical relevance was demonstrated through an in-depth case study with a British material processing manufacturer. This article concludes that the approach provides organizations with a detailed understanding of their progress in developing implementation capabilities, offering valuable insights for future actions navigating toward organization-wide roadmapping.