Planview has announced a new solution, Planview Roadmaps. The solution enables business leaders to have complete visibility of their portfolios and projects across the organisation. It enables them to link portfolios to strategic goals and outcomes. It also can identify how progress across different portfolios is affecting progress towards those goals.
Where Roadmaps is different from other solutions is that it fully integrates with Planview AgilePlace. This enables organisations to quickly create new cards to add additional tasks and projects. These will fill the gaps where they might exist in their operations. Planview Roadmaps delivers complete visibility across organisational initiatives and investments. It delivers not only insights but also enables actions to be taken quickly without leaving the solution.
Razat Gaurav, CEO at Planview, commented, “Enterprise survival relies on an organization’s ability to quickly adapt and pivot to market shifts and customer needs, yet a staggering 85% of executives say their company’s ability to adapt to change falls short.
“Planview Roadmaps acts as the connective tissue between strategy and work, connecting every team with unprecedented visualization across the business. This enables executives to detect and respond to changes swiftly, ensuring that strategic pivots cascade seamlessly to the team level, eliminating uncertainty around executing strategic initiatives. The future of connected work is here, empowering organizations to thrive in this fast-paced environment.”
Solving a known challenge
The new Roadmaps solution enables users to quickly create new roadmaps. Drawing in a subset of their portfolios from within Planview. Or a subset if they want to focus on a specific area. This creates a simple Gannt chart-like view. Where they can change dimensions to view projects and progress by months or by year for longer-term initiatives.
As well as portfolios, users can add work items and outcomes. The view can also put portfolios in context, such as how they track towards achieving strategic goals. Once the various portfolios are added, the user can add dependencies between different elements. These can help the viewer understand the impact of delays within one portfolio on another. There is also a data difference mode. This highlights the difference between the planned and actual dates and visualises the impact of the delays.
With the integration of Planview and the dependencies between portfolios, Planview has created a solution that solved what often hinders siloed roadmap tools and spreadsheets. Roadmaps give users a visual representation of what is happening across the organisation. It will update as changes happen within portfolios that are updated within the business. It allows business leaders to react quickly when a portfolio is delayed. Enabling them to re-plan faster or create new initiatives using the integration to AgilePlace.
Louise K. Allen, Chief Product Officer at Planview, commented, “Throughout my career, I’ve spent thousands of hours juggling siloed roadmap and presentation tools to visualize our plans, only to find they’re often out of date before I even hit save. That was then, and this is now. With Planview Roadmaps, it’s easy to ensure that our whole organization is aligned on what’s important to deliver and to adapt to any changes.”
Organisations are complex and often use a mix of Agile, Waterfall, hybrid or other methodologies to track initiatives, both product and project-based. Roadmaps draws them together into a single view of the organisation’s investments. Where they are consecutively linked or working in parallel with each other.
Sam Aldred, Sr. Manager of the Enterprise Program Management Office at Blue Shield of California, commented, “Planview Roadmaps takes connectivity to the next level by helping our organization unite work across the entire business. Whether it’s traditional project management, Agile product development, or hybrid approaches, this will help eliminate silos and foster a shared understanding of related efforts and their impacts on our business objectives.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
First, there was task management, then project management, then portfolio management. Roadmaps bring strategic portfolio management to the fore but also connect organisations all the way down to task management. Business leaders can now see how plans, strategies, and outcomes are coming together. Or not coming together in a single view. It means that if there are issues, they can react faster rather than waiting to be informed.
While users can filter and highlight different portfolios in different colours, the Gantt chart style layout seems a bit limited in some ways. One is left with a feeling that there might have been a better way to visualise the roadmaps. To deliver a better understanding as to what is happening in the organisation. Taking a look at a more traditional roadmap for inspiration, could Planview have created something more intuitive and visually arresting, or even in 3 dimensions?
Planview has also published a demonstration of Planview Roadmaps (registration required) which gives a simple overview in less than ten minutes.
