As a project manager, you need to continually communicate with your team, senior management, or clients about your project details. A project roadmap does precisely that. It maps out the significant details of your project without going into explicit details.
A project roadmap is a project-planning tool that helps you map your project aims/objectives, key milestones, dependencies, and key deliverables. The graphical and visual nature of the project roadmap helps communicate critical information in an easily-digestible manner.
Thus, the two main objectives of a project roadmap are to serve as a reference guide for you and your team members and to communicate important project details.
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When To Use A Project Roadmap?
To Communicate With Stakeholders
Project roadmaps help you share important details with the stakeholders and ensure that there isn’t any miscommunication. A high-level overview of a project will help everyone be on the same page.
To Communicate Team Goals
Once your team is clear about the project’s goals and objectives, it will become easier for them to follow and execute their tasks and duties. Additionally, it will help your team members stay on the right track as they will be aware of what is expected of them.
For A Robust Project Kickoff
Project managers can use a project roadmap before or during project kickoff to set standards, share timelines, establish key milestones, and other necessary groundwork.
If you are trying to make a project roadmap from scratch, you should look at these Project Roadmap Templates from SlideUpLift. These presentation templates are specially built for project managers to showcase varied types of Project Roadmaps. They are fully editable and designed by industry professionals who are proficient in vision science and PowerPoint.
Below are a few popular Project Roadmap Template Examples:
This is a great Roadmap PowerPoint template that you can use to effectively showcase your overall approach, objectives, activities/tasks/actions, and deliverables. The template is divided into five phases that correspond to different processes i.e., designing, creating, operating, etc. The name of the phases can obviously be changed to suit any process or activity, depending upon your need. Below each phase, you can mention the corresponding objective, activities, and deliverables to paint a complete picture.
This project roadmap template is especially helpful in providing your audience a progress report or a project update. This template can comfortably map out various tasks/activities over a period of time. If you are not comfortable with showcasing tasks and months, you can easily change them as per your need.
Opposite every task/activity, there are progress bars that denote the extent to which a task has been completed. You can also describe your tasks/activities in the text boxes provided below.
The above is a great product roadmap template that utilizes different colors to denote important activities and key drivers. This template will help you demonstrate your product execution strategy and milestones accurately and succinctly while helping you organize key planned activities and corresponding timelines.
This is a complete project roadmap template that will help you showcase everything from scope planning to the project closure of the project. As you can see, the template has been divided into various phases that are placed on a timeline. The template can be used to track your project from start to finish. You can also mention some key milestones and their completion dates.
This project roadmap template can be highly effective at providing your audience with a high-level and bird’s eye view of the whole project without going into unnecessary details. The template covers all the major aspects of the project i,e., business case, initiation, plan, implementation, and closing. You can describe each element by giving it a brief but informative description in the provided text-box.
This is an all-comprehensive Project Kick-Off presentation deck that you can use to showcase your project planning. The deck contains slides for every aspect of project planning, therefore, saving you the trouble of editing different templates and combining them later into a presentation. The deck starts with an agenda slide that you can use to introduce all the topics that you want to discuss. It also contains a separate Project Charter PPT template and multiple slides to show the phases of your project management plan.
To see some more templates, check out this collection of Roadmap PowerPoint Templates from SlideUpLift.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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