Roadmaps have recently been release from Microsoft.  Roadmaps are a great way to summarize a PMO, Program, Project or anything that needs a summary.  When I first saw them, it seem like an easy thing to put together.  However, as I started to put together my Roadmap example, I released that its may be much harder than I thought.  After working thru a few examples, I discovered, that basically, it takes planning and a vision to make a Roadmap.  Duh!

Roadmaps can be used for many visions. One useful display of a Roadmap is to showing key milestones and dates in a program. My example is composed of several projects with dependencies between them. Visualizing key deliverable and milestones across a program can be best be done using a Roadmap.  When you think about it, there really isn’t any other tool within office to do this for user.  There hacks, web parts and web pages that a SharePoint admin could do, but not really one for typical users.  The following Roadmap consists of three projects, each with their own project manager and deliverable dependency between the projects.  Looking at my program Roadmap, I can easy determine the major deliverables and if it is on track on now.

As mention earlier, it takes planning and vision to build a Roadmap.  It may seem obvious now, but before building a program Roadmap in this blog, I had to go thru several iterations of a building my master project before I could get my Roadmap off the ground.  Once that was done, building my first Roadmap was simple.