Against the two-year roadmap

The problem is not the ambition. Keep the ambition. The problem is the precision. A roadmap that names deliverables eight quarters out is asserting knowledge nobody has, about what the market, the organisation and the first six quarters of evidence will have done to the plan. In our audit work the average two-year roadmap survives contact with reality for around five months, after which it is maintained as theatre and revised quarterly to keep the fiction continuous.

The theatre costs more than its maintenance. Teams read long roadmaps as insulation, because the deadline is far away and the sequence is someone else’s problem. Boards read them as certainty, which is worse, because it makes honest re-planning look like failure rather than learning, and a board that treats learning as failure will be shown a tidy roadmap instead of the truth.

The alternative is not planning less. It is committing at the resolution knowledge actually has. The full ambition stays on the page as direction. Commitment is issued one drawn phase at a time, with owners, baselines and dates, three or fewer commitments, fourteen to fifty-two weeks, verified before the next phase draws. Beyond the current phase the roadmap states intent, labelled as revisable.

The programmes that run this way in our data deliver more of their original ambition rather than less, at 71% against 22% at the extremes of concurrent load. Those are the extremes. Most organisations sit between them, where the effect is real but smaller than that pair of figures implies. The irony holds either way. The document that promises the whole journey is a reason so many organisations never finish it.