Without mincing words, project activities often get messy, a situation where Project Managers struggle to keep their projects under their belts and experience difficulties managing the timeline of their projects. In such instances, the possibility of achieving the project goals is very slim, thereby causing you to miss out on the expectations of your clients.
Undoubtedly, the integration of roadmap tools into Project Management helps overcome complexities in projects; it aids you in attaining ease in managing the project’s activities by creating an effective timeline that you and your team can leverage. The roadmap tool will help you break your projects into different parts; aid you assign the estimated dates that the tasks will take to be completed.
Also, it saves you from the rigour of manually creating your project roadmap and saving a lot of time in the process. Furthermore, the use of a roadmap tool helps you get the best from your employees because you can allocate the number of hours an employee is expected to spend on a task. Also, you can track the actual hours they spend on their tasks, thereby enhancing their productivity.
Sinnaps, an online Project Management tool, can be used as a roadmap planning tool to achieve the project goals by simplifying the work schedules of the entire team. Again, it promotes collaboration among the employees by sharing project files among themselves and enhancing their communication.
In this article, we will discuss the roadmap tools, different types of roadmap tools, and the values that they bring to your table as a Project Manager.
All about Project Roadmaps
Roadmap tools
The roadmap tool’s roles in the success of your project cannot be overemphasized; it allows you to be innovative and dynamic in the management of your project activities. Again, project roadmap tools help you develop better planning decisions, and you can also easily evaluate your plans against the expected outcome of your project.
Best roadmap tools
Some of the best roadmap software are discussed below:
Airfocus: this is an effective roadmap tool that will help you and your team hit the ground running with its drag-and-drop interface. It will help in creating the roadmap of your project with ease. On Airfocus, you can select your preferred view; it comes with the Gantt Chart and Kanban Chart. Again, it has a multi-dimensional chart that can manage multiple projects while showcasing their priorities.
Wrike: Wrike is a roadmap planning tool that ensures effective workflow in your project. You can view the activities of your project in a list format or Kanban view. On Wrike, you can see your project and its tasks in different locations at a time. It boosts effective communication and collaboration among the project team by helping them share vital information about the project.
Aha!: it allows you to design your project’s roadmap using the different templates on it. The onus is on you to select the one that suits the needs of your project. It allows users to drag and drop their goals, ideas, techniques, and feature on the roadmap templates. Again, it will enable users to share their roadmap with the relevant stakeholders.
Sinnaps: as a roadmap tool, Sinnaps enables you to have an overview of your project and properly plan every stage of your project. It comes with the Kanban board that will enable you to gain an insightful overview of your project at a glance. It can be used to manage multiple projects and effectively track the activities of your project, thereby boosting your team’s optimal performance.
Roadmap planner
Roadmap Planner is a tool that ensures effective team management in Project Management. It helps you in creating your Project Team and managing their activities properly. It simplifies new members’ addition to a team and can assign the team members with roles and duties.
Roadmap Planner offers the Project Manager the team’s control by tracking their task progress and monitoring their overall workload. Again, you can view each project task’s status and deduce the dependencies between the tasks with the roadmap planner.
Furthermore, a roadmap planner as a tool can be used with ease and edited when updating the project roadmap. Also, it allows you to keep a close tab on the milestones of the project by noting important activities and dates that the team must monitor closely. It can visually display the timeline of the project with the Gantt Chart feature on it. This makes it effective for reporting the progress of the project to the relevant stakeholders.
Creating roadmap
A roadmap helps create an overview of an upcoming project’s vital aspects, such as goals, timeline, and resources. The following steps are what you can use in creating a roadmap for your project;
Step 1: carefully define your project strategy: here, you are required to ponder on what the project aims to solve. You will examine how the expectations of the clients will be met.
Step 2: Gather requirements: this is usually done by brainstorming on the ideas and entertaining the customers’ feedback to prioritize their project suggestions.
Step 3: Assign a timeframe to the project activities: here, you are required to assign deadlines to the project’s activities to deliver on time and within budget.
Step 4: Make your roadmap suit your stakeholders: this helps you gain the support and participation of every key stakeholder in your project. This is also crucial because it can go a long way in convincing a stakeholder to sponsor the project.
Step 5: share the project roadmap: this is an important step because it boosts communication among the stakeholders, thereby keeping everyone updated about the project’s progress.
Project roadmap online
Project roadmap online is an online roadmap tool that is easily downloadable which can be leveraged by the project teams in creating their project roadmap. Project roadmap online is available for free for the use of the project team in customizing their roadmap.
It is embedded with icons, charts, fonts, and custom colours that suit your project’s unique needs. The interface of the project roadmap online is easy to use, editable, flexible, and suitable for any project type.
A roadmap generator is a ready-to-use project roadmap template for creating the roadmap of any project. It has different models that can be used to input the timeline and resources of a project, thereby saving you a lot of time in the process.
In Agile Project Management, agile roadmap online is a tool that can be downloaded for the use of the agile team in the creation of their roadmap. It ensures collaboration, prioritization, sharing of plans, and soliciting feedback from the customers. Sinnaps is an agile tool that embraces agile methodologies, making it useful for the agile teams in managing their project activities.