How should you create a roadmap for your digital finance initiative?

The roadmap you create will depend on the scope and vision of your project. Below are a few examples from finance professionals. To learn more about creating a roadmap for your digitally-enabled finance function, read the AFP Guide: Implementing Planning System: Part 1, Laying The Groundwork.

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All-Finance Transformation

This roadmap is an example of a company thinking through a complete digital strategy for finance, with the planning system as one element. The four-step plan assumes that innovation will continue even after the completion of the workstreams.

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Becoming an Analytics Hub

For successful digital transformation, finance must align its mindset, people, process and systems in relation to its desired analytics intelligence — these five axes represent the roadmap to implement an analytics culture for data-driven decisions.

The left Y-axis is analytics intelligence, ranging from reporting data to deriving predictions from data. The X-axis is the mindset of decisions. The right Y-axis is thesystems (tools) that yield analytics intelligence. The two z-axes, people and process, are the remaining components of digital transformation. The figure’s large central arrow represents the intersection of each persona with the five-axis.

The roadmap is a clear guide to your aspiration, that is, your aspirational persona. Once you have chosen your persona, simply extend the lines to each axis to know the associated mindset, people, process and system that achieves the associated analytics intelligence.

For example, to be a strategist requires the mindset to impact decisions and sufficient people with the requisite skills, along with written processes of data governance and decision governance, which achieves the predictions of analytics intelligence from AI-enabled analytics tools.

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Digital Maturation

This roadmap assumes an increase of maturity along the horizontal axis, from the current foundation of Excel through digital enablement. The vertical axis shows the process steps relevant to this company, and the intersecting cells show how each is realized, with the “+” indicating new functionality.

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Tool-Centric Plan

This sample roadmap was developed for a company with a project scope that was limited to a planning system. It is a “Land and Expand” plan that assumes that the solution implementation is just one step on the journey, to be followed by additional refinements as the team gets to know the tool as both a discrete step and an ongoing process.

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FP&A Modules

This sample roadmap plots time against major areas of effort; the boxes represent deliverables that were identified in a scoping exercise (not shown here). Each box would have its own project plan that includes define, design, develop, test and deploy steps and resource allocation. Notice the change management workstream that supports all these efforts.