Roadmapping is often falsely assumed as the act of designing a roadmap. And indeed, as you can see in the picture, a vital output of the roadmapping process is a roadmap :-).
However, creating such a roadmap requires a synthesis of all your knowledge and expertise. It determines all the significant components and the prioritization hierarchy to solve the problem of your client. And most importantly, it also secures buy-in and support from executive stakeholders. In the case of this project, on the picture, this was a group of >20 people.
Apart from the solution components, the prioritization, the resources, and the stakeholder involvement, the upstream consultant leverages the roadmap to inspire the client to self-sufficiency. And promoting client self-sufficiency should always be a key responsibility of every upstream consultant. Reason: you don’t do implementation work yourself.
Of course, as we did with the roadmap on the picture, we ran multiple workshops to get all the stakeholders in sync and to help them get ready for their implementation work in the following months (roadmap time span was 12 months).
A few resources:
● The virtual collaboration tool Miro has a special section on roadmapping. You can use their roadmap templates to collaborate with your client. Enter the search term ‘roadmap’ in the search bar.
● Cambridge University has a department that provides roadmapping expertise and training! Great expertise!
Step 3: The long tail: your advisory retainer, the client’s ‘peace of mind’
It doesn’t matter, being a big, small or solo consultancy, I’d advice any expert-like consultant to stay away from hardcore implementation work to protect your time and altitude of involvement (upstream, strategic).
If you have excess capacity (e.g. in big consultancy firms), the roadmap (step 2) is your starting point to sell implementation work. It has all the components of the problem-solving approach and you can decide which components you can provide implementation work for.
If you are a solo consultant, I’d advice you to stay away from implementation. You limit yourself to diagnosis, roadmapping and providing high-level roadmap implementation guidance (the advisory retainer).
There’s a lot of great content about advisory retainers, here’s a great article from Hubspot (my business software). You can read all the pro- and cons, reasons, costs, payment, etc.
But here’s how I see it: your client is buying ‘peace of mind’ over a longer period of time (e.g. 6 or 12 months). The client pays ‘access to you’ and you are available to them with your expertise. ‘Being available’ is the essential difference between ‘pay for access’ (upstream advisory retainer) versus ‘pay for work’ (downstream implementation work).
I’d always advice you to give the retainer a basic structure, such as reviewing the roadmap once a month with the team or the C-person (preferably) in a workshop-format.
Two watch-outs I experienced with my clients:
● Limit your contact to the C-level (or senior project owner), avoid getting dragged into the implementation work by the implementation team (being in cc in 100’s of mails, help!). That’s why you’d better define the boundaries of your retainer (e.g. 1x workshop per month for roadmap review, C-level contact only, etc.).
● Selling AR’s is a great way to have predictable income/revenue but you also have to be careful to oversell and running out of capacity all of a sudden with too many retainers.
That’s it for this newsletter. In the next edition #35 I will finalize the productization topic with these subjects:
● Pricing of your productized consulting services
● 10 Examples of productized consulting services you can learn from
● Tips to help you make a move to productization in consulting |
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