This fictitious example has been developed to illustrate the use of Archimate modeling language in the roadmap development.
The example concerns the pharmaceutical company X-Farma, which is located in one of the regional centers of Russian Federation.
X-Farma is a private, mean-sized company. Now it is a candidate for withdrawal from pharmaceutical market, but after almost one year efforts the company understood what necessary to do and prepared a large transformation initiative.
X-Farma is going to launch a new product creation program. This program will allow to become one of the leaders on the pharmaceutical market.
The key program point is to create manufacture of pharmaceutical preparations on the base of the new technology that will be needed by market.
In our case a generalized form of roadmap is used [1].
The roadmap consists of a Time axis and such layers as States, Programs & Projects, Actors and Results.
The Time axis and layers consist of the elements that can dispose in certain order and can link with each other by a certain manner.
The first variant of roadmap format is shown on the Figure 1:
This view of roadmap looks rather overloaded: there a lot of relations and it is even without indicating X-Farma in the Actors Layer, each actor is depicted by means of two elements (business actor and business role).
To improve the roadmap readability reformat the first variant as follows:
1) Exchange the places of Time Axis and States Layer;
2) Show only list of projects in each program without a description of the sequence of their implementation. Stakeholders can find out the sequence from a separate view;
3) Remove Assignment relations that links Business Role elements with Work Package elements. Stakeholders can find out which Business Role execute what Work Package from a separate view;
4) Remove Assignment relations and remove Business Role elements from Actors Layer;
5) Make the length of all elements in all layers equal (as far as one can);
6) Place the elements in the different layers under each other so that these elements form a likeness of columns:
- An event triggering a state is placed under this state;
- A program triggered by the event is placed under this event;
- The actors taking part in this program are placed under the program;
- Results created by program are placed under the actors.
7) Add an actor to a column if this actor takes part in the program related to this column;
8) Add X-Farm to each column.
The second variant of roadmap format (Ordering Format) is shown on the Figure 2:
In many cases there is worth while to continue a further simplification of roadmap format.
If there is a shared understanding of relations types and order between the states, events, programs, actors and results (for example, when there is a corporate standard), then there is a sense to remove the rest of relations and also to return the Time Axis on the first place.
The third variant of roadmap format (Tabular Format) is shown on the Figure 3:
One and the same layout is used to form columns from the first to the last but one. Every column cell includes a list of elements (from 1 to N) corresponding to a certain column. The column layout is shown on the Figure 4:
The roadmap of tabular format can be very useful in the high-level roadmap development:
1) It is “easy on the eyes”;
2) It can be placed on the one page;
3) Its designing can be automated.
References:
1) Robert Phaal, Clare J. P. Farrukh, David R. Probert, Developing a Technology Roadmapping System, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, CB2 1RX, UK 2005.
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