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What the Roadmap shows

The Roadmap answers one question: given the ranking and a fixed capacity, what goes in this period and what waits. It works in both planning modes. It unlocks once the project has a capacity and an effort on at least one feature. Set both in Project Settings under Roadmap Planning, or type the capacity into the field the locked tab offers.

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Settings

The card at the top of the tab explains itself:
  • Capacity, in hours or points per planning period. Once you change it, Save and Cancel appear under the field; Enter saves too, and Escape puts the saved value back.
  • Effort unit, hours or points. Every feature’s effort is read in this unit.
  • Strategy: Maximize value fills the capacity with the set of features whose total weighted value is highest. Maximize delivery fits as many features as the capacity holds, and uses total value only to choose between plans of the same size. The card states what the other strategy would change, so switching is an informed choice rather than a guess.
Must-haves go into the plan first under either strategy. If the must-haves alone exceed the capacity, the tab says so.

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The capacity bar

One bar shows every planned feature against the capacity line, in plan order, with the deferred work hatched beyond the line. Read it left to right: how much of the period the must-haves take, how much the value picks take, and how much would not fit.

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Plan and Deferred

Two tables share one set of columns. Recommended plan lists what fits, must-haves first and then by priority, each with its overall rank, effort and share of capacity. Must-have rows are tagged. Deferred lists what did not fit, by priority, each with the reason, for example how many more hours it would have needed. Each deferred row has Force into plan, which marks the feature as a must-have and recomputes the plan; the item it displaces moves to Deferred. The Decision Report’s Roadmap section is these two tables, in this order, on the same scale.

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Worth checking

Beside the capacity bar the tab carries the same Worth checking list as Analysis and the report: must-haves that would not have made the cut on value, disputed items in the plan, capacity nearly all taken by must-haves, and so on.

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Tips

  • Capacity is per planning period, not per year. If you plan quarterly, enter one quarter.
  • Effort in hours lets the Allocation budget follow the roadmap capacity automatically. Effort in points keeps the two separate.
  • Groups are not scheduled; their children are. The plan names each item’s parent so a program’s spread across the period is visible.
  • The whole project, roadmap included, exports to .xlsx with Export project data.