4 Business Roadmap Types to Help You Scale Strategically

Business roadmaps help chart a strategic path for your business and are a valuable complement to your business plan.

With a business roadmap, you can quickly compare actual results against your assumptions and make adjustments to improve operations and profits.

The recent post Top Business Planning Tools for 2019, Rated and Reviewed shows some of the best tools for preparing your business plan. Now it is time to review some of the business roadmap models to add to your business intelligence.

Here are four business roadmap types to help you scale strategically.

1. 1. Strategic Roadmap. This high-level roadmap articulates your vision over the long term by outlining the steps necessary to achieve your goals. It is most often used by senior leaders in the organization and shows key dates, deadlines, strategies, and milestones. For this type of roadmap and many others, the construction usually is done from one of two views:
      1. 1. Timeline. It focuses on deadlines over months, quarters, or years and tracks initiatives and milestones.
         2. Swimlane. This is less focused on timing and more on the status level of initiatives for each functional area. Each area, such as finance, sales, or operations, has its own “lane” and initiatives are tracked based on where they are in the pipeline, such as proposed, in development, or scheduled.
   2. Change Roadmap. As your company grows in size, you may find it necessary to map out major changes to the business over time. This roadmap shows how the business plans to evolve to scale appropriately. Key functional areas such as leadership, operations, marketing, and human resources plot their key planning periods and initiatives over time, giving everyone a clear sense as to the pace and progress for each area.
   3. Business Development Roadmap. When your business is in a rapid growth mode, this roadmap helps to visualize the critical tasks needed to grow market share and revenue quickly and is usually built in a one-year timeline. For each month or quarter, key business development tasks are mapped, such as sales (market research, new accounts, and expansion), marketing (market research and content creation) and product (development and growth). At the top of the roadmap, the key performance indicators are laid out, while at the bottom, exterior influences such as new laws, regulations or technologies are mapped.
   4. Business Intelligence Roadmap. To fully understand where your business is, you need to look at more than just financials. With a business intelligence roadmap, your team collects, reports, and uses data for deeper analysis and understanding of your business results. This roadmap helps leaders identify operational inefficiencies and improve them. It allows leaders to make better-informed decisions and helps other staff understand how and why changes are to be made. These maps are also helpful for charting out process improvement strategies designed for growth and change management tasks throughout the company.

Roadmaps give your company actionable insights and more depth into how your company is doing. At Benetrends, we offer companies solutions that drive efficiency and synergy, including retirement plan management, and credit card processing. To learn more about how Benetrends can help you chart a course to business success, check out our Resource Center.