Roadmapping

To make progress on a software project, you will need to plan a set of strategic objectives and a feasible path to achieve them. Priorities and resource allocation. Roadmaps are essential to keeping team members efforts aligned. Roadmaps are also a great way to communicate your plans with the wider audience.

Project description

A declaration of the aims of the project. Answers the question “what does it do?”

Project descriptions serve to attract interest from and promote alignment between various stakeholders. They are also used to target a project toward a particular “market” of users or other stakeholders. In our field, there can be a delicate balance between the objectives of developing tools that enable scientific advances and delivering products that meet commercial needs of high economic value. Project descriptions can help identify products that can fit an existing market as well as markets that might fit an existing product.

A project may have several descriptions, tailored to different sets of stakeholders. These tailored descriptions are a form of marketing material, helping you target your product to different markets.

• Description for funders: Focus on the pain points funders experience and the value that your software can add to their operations.
• Description for users: Focus on the specific capabilities of your software, giving a useful and realistic impression of when and how it could be used.
• Description for OMSF: Focus on the alignment of your project with OMSF’s values and vision. Emphasize the scientific value of the software, your commitment to open source, open science principles, and where your project fits into the broader software ecosystem.

Project roadmap

A project roadmap adapt the long term vision of the project into discrete steps, features, or deliverables, sequenced in time. The project roadmap serves as a long-term tracker of time towards the outcomes of a funded project.

A project roadmap should include the following components, which answer the following questions:

• Goals: What major features can stakeholders expect in the future? What capabilities will your software provide?
• Timeline: When should stakeholders expect to gain access to these features? Even if it’s impossible to predict the number of quarters or years the development may take, putting goals in sequence can help convey the scope of the project.
• Milestones: Are there incremental steps along the way to the major features? How will stakeholders know what progress the project has made?

Strategy

A large-scale, or strategic, roadmap should be developed with scientific stakeholders at the outset of the project. It should translate the project description into a timeline format, planned over a period of around 5 years.

Tactics

An annual, or tactical, roadmap, should be developed annually as an exercise of the strategic function of project governance. In our projects, this process usually starts with project leadership producing a list of possible priorities for the coming year, with reference to the strategic roadmap. Project staff join in a brainstorming process to add to or refine this list. Next, leadership consults with external stakeholders (most importantly, the advisory board) for feedback on the feasability, scientific merit, and value of items on the list. Staff estimate the effort required to deliver each of the items on the list, taking into account the scientific feedback received. Leadership then proposes a priority ranking of these items to the governing board for discussion and final approval.

Since the prioritized list of objectives is approved as a governance decision, the annual roadmap serves as the definitive guide to the desires of the governing body.

Tips for success

• Instead of asking a large group of people what they want, the group with the best understanding of the problem, capacity and resources should propose a solution and ask for feedback. You want to avoid open-ended questions because it rarely comes to a consensus.
• Avoid having decision-makers too far removed from the problems on the ground. At the least, the decision makers must be well-informed, but a good information passing mechanism is hard to achieve in practice.