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Understanding the Jibility Steps
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How to approach building your strategy roadmap?
How to approach building your strategy roadmap?

Where to start? From beginning to end, middle out or backwards?

Chuen Seet avatar
Written by Chuen Seet
Updated over a week ago

The Jibility Canvas is comprised of six Jibility Steps: Challenges, Objectives, Capabilities, Actions, Initiatives and Roadmap.

Ideally, most people will start building their strategic roadmap from the very beginning by defining their challenges and then working through to objectives, capabilities, and so on.  But, in reality (depending on where your organization is at) this may not be practical given that you may already have a set of objectives, or you have already defined some initiatives.

Jibility is designed to support an Agile approach to developing your strategic roadmap.  That is, you can choose to start building your strategic roadmap from the first Jibility Step (Challenges) or from a middle step (such as Initiatives) and work your way backwards and forwards to iterate through multiple cycles.  Jibility enables you to rapidly develop a minimal viable strategic roadmap so you can gather feedback as early as possible.

There are three main starting points (which is discussed further here):

  1. Understanding the Why? - Challenges and Objectives steps

  2. Analyzing the What? - Capabilities and Actions steps

  3. Visualizing the How? - Initiative and Roadmap steps

However, you can start developing your strategic roadmap from any of the six Jibility Steps.

1. Start from the beginning with Challenges  

You are starting a new strategic roadmap from scratch.

This is the most common starting point when you are building a brand new strategic roadmap.  When you are starting from a blank canvas, then logically you should start from the first Jibility Step by describing your challenges and then just follow the rest of the steps.

Understanding your challenges is a good starting point to understand "Why?" your roadmap is required.

2.Start with your Objectives

You were given a set of objectives and now need to understand why and how.

In Jibility, you can create an objective before creating your challenges.  This is particularly useful when your set of objectives is already known, or it's imposed on you by your manager or a higher-level function.  For example;  

  • Reduce operating cost by 20%

  • Reduce headcount by 10%

  • Zero lost-time injury

  • Maintain regulatory compliance X

When you start with a set of objectives, you have an opportunity to ask yourself "For these given objectives, what challenges are we solving?".  This will help you clarify your understanding of the challenges and therefore your objectives.  You may discover that you are missing some objectives or you are not clear why a particular objective is essential.

After defining your objectives, you can also proceed straight into defining your capabilities and come back to your challenges later, but we suggest that you clearly understand your challenges first to ensure that you have the right context when mapping your capabilities.

3.Start with your Capabilities

You want to understand what capabilities exist before defining what you can achieve.

If you are a business or enterprise architect, then you may have already developed a capability map for the organization. But, you are not sure which capabilities should be targeted for change and what you are solving for.  

Jibility will let you document your capabilities first, then you can either verify that these are the right capabilities by defining your challenges and objectives and then link these to your capabilities, or move straight into defining your actions.  

Note, defining your actions without understanding your objectives is not recommended (even though you can do this in Jibility).  When your capabilities are not linked to objectives, then you could waste time defining actions for capabilities which are not delivering to your objectives.

4.Start with your Actions

Starting from the Actions step is possible but not common.  If you already have a list of actions and you just need to record these somewhere, then you can start here by creating a list of actions against an arbitrary capability.  Alternatively, you can create a list of unassigned actions in the Initiative step.

5.Start with your Initiatives

You have a list of initiatives but not sure whether these are the right initiatives that will achieve your strategic objectives.

You may have started with a strategic vision, and created a list of initiatives through a series of workshops.  Now you are wondering whether these are the right initiatives and you are struggling to prioritize them.

You can start your strategic roadmap at the Initiative step in Jibility, by entering the names of your initiatives. Once you have a list of initiatives, you can prioritize these using the 2x2 (value against risk) and then build a roadmap based on the selected initiative.

In the Initiative step you can add a list of actions to each initiative.  Actions can be derived from your capabilities or added directly in the Initiative step.  If you add actions directly from the Initiative step, then these are "Unassigned",  i.e. these actions have not been assigned to a capability yet.

6.Start with a Roadmap

You want to start with the outcome and work backwards to substantiate why later.

In the Roadmap step you can drag and drop initiatives directly onto your roadmap.  This is a quick way to draw a roadmap because you need to quickly show a result to your stakeholders.  However, these initiatives are not substantiated, meaning that you have not demonstrated through the Jibility Steps how you derived these initiatives.  

Jibility supports the ability for you to work backwards from the Roadmap step and back to the Challenge step.

Agile / Iterative Approach

For whichever starting point you choose, Jibility is flexible and can support an Agile or iterative approach so that you can progress your overall strategic roadmap step-by-step. You can deliver a minimal viable strategic roadmap quickly using Jibility by working on each Jibility step a little at a time.  

We recommend that you complete as much as you can in each step, but if you get stuck in a step, then move on to another step and build what you know.  Working backwards and forwards can help you to further elaborate on your thinking.  

You will find that as you progress the overall strategic roadmap and share it for early feedback, you will gain new understanding which will, in turn, help you further enhance and build your strategic roadmap.

Tips: you will never have a perfect strategic roadmap, and most businesses or organizations will change over time -  what you build today may no longer be valid tomorrow.  Therefore, build a minimal viable strategic roadmap that is just sufficient to communicate and gain consensus with your stakeholders, then come back to Jibility and update it regularly.

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