Building a Global Product Portfolio Roadmap with RMsis

Owned by Sanjay Sahani
Last updated: Apr 10, 2012
4 min read

Collaboration across geographies and development of shared vision remains one of the key problems in large organizations. In this article, we demonstrate how RMsis can be used by multi-locational teams to effectively collaborate and develop a shared product portfolio roadmap.

The Problem

A large multinational organization wants to chart out a roadmap for it's futuristic products with the following prevailing conditions

  • It has products belonging to approximately 10 categories.
  • It's spread out across 5 countries, each with a country head and many product managers reporting into each of them.

The company is looking for a solution,

  • which helps in feature prioritization.
  • where common themes can emerge.
  • The local needs are preserved, tracked and incorporated in a country specific product model.
  • A whole hierarchy of requirements can be build, starting from country specific requirements at the top and ending with  product specific requirements at the bottom.

The solution should possess the following characteristics

  • It should support, collaboration across multiple geographic locations.
  • It should require minimum customization and user training.
  • The solution should have high level of reliability and availability.
  • Once configured and basic data provided, it should provide sufficient analysis for decision making.
  • It should be scalable; (for example the categories can go upto 30 and countries can go upto 100).

Outline of a solution using RMsis

We will assume that

  • there is a coordinator, directly reporting to CEO / VP Product Management / VP Marketing, as the case may be, who owns and manages this process.
  • One cycle is treated as a complete project.

Establish a Project Management Mechanism

  • If we are running a manual process, lot of time will be lost in exchanging information through unstructured mails.
  • A bare minimum infrastructure is required, where coordinator can communicate the overall plan and keep track of the progress.
  • This plan should have global visibility.
  • The tasks should clearly correlate with the Requirements at any level.
  • Sophistication of the system will depend upon complexity of the project.

The following snapshots show the

  • Tasks created in RMsis

  • Tasks mapped to Requirements

Create Hierarchy of Requirements

  • with Corporate Goals at the top
  • country specific product features at the bottom

The following snapshot demonstrates a hierarchy of requirements created in RMsis

Create individual spaces for all participants

  • Where each participant should have an entire hierarchy available under his / her control.

In the screenshot below,

  • a set of requirements are allocated to a user, who owns and manages a the requirements.

Establish a Prioritization Mechanism

This function is generally defined by the user organization. Some of the choices could be

  • Number of Votes by Evaluators
  • Revenue / Risk
  • Σ (Priority*Criticality) for all evaluators

Establish dependencies between Requirements

Run a bottoms up process, starting at the country level and consolidating into corporate level Requirements. The following view shows the dependency between requirements.


Elaborate the Requirements

Once consensus has been built on high level requirements, respective owners can elaborate the requirements using PDF / MS Word / Wiki documentation and share it with other participants for review.

Define Key Milestones

A list of Milestones is shown below.

Build Consensus on the Roadmap

Once the requirements have been reviewed and agreed upon, a baseline can be created for the Plan. The following snapshot depicts one such baseline for the plan.

References and Resources

Demonstration
Feedback

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