Plan
IT roadmap and quarterly review
A twelve-month IT roadmap with the dependencies made explicit, and the quarterly review cadence that keeps it true. Including the number most organisations cannot produce: what it costs to keep the lights on versus what it costs to change anything.
Duration
6-week build, then quarterly
Built on
ITIL · COBIT · ISO/IEC 20000
Indicative price
from €2,500 per month
Who this is for
CIO or IT director
Has a plan that has quietly diverged from what the team is doing.
CFO
Wants to know how much of IT spend is discretionary.
Managing director
Needs technology decisions to arrive with options rather than as requests.
Operations leadership
Keeps being surprised by changes that were apparently agreed.
A roadmap without a review is a wish list with dates on it
Most IT roadmaps are built once, presented well, and then diverge silently. Nothing dramatic happens — an urgent request jumps the queue, a dependency slips, a supplier moves a date, someone leaves. Six months later the plan and the work have nothing in common, and nobody can point at the moment it went wrong because there wasn't one.
The missing mechanism is a review with teeth. Not a status report, which describes what happened, but a quarterly session where the plan is actually changed: what moved and why, what is next, what it will cost to run once it is delivered, and what we are switching off to pay for it.
That last question is the one nobody asks. Almost every IT estate carries things that could be retired and are not, because retirement is nobody's project and the licence renews automatically. A review that never retires anything produces a roadmap that only grows.
The number that makes the whole conversation possible is the split between run and change. Most organisations cannot produce it, which means every new request looks like it competes with every other new request, when in fact it competes with the cost of maintaining decisions made years ago. Once leadership can see that ratio, the conversation changes character.
We build the roadmap, we build the review, and we run the first cycles with your business leaders in the room — because a technology roadmap agreed only by technologists is the version that diverges fastest.
How we do it
- 01
Baseline
2 weeks
The estate, the committed work, the supplier contracts and the spend — separated into run and change. This is the part that takes the effort and it is the part that makes everything afterwards possible.
- 02
Priorities workshop
1 day
With business leaders, not only IT. What the organisation is trying to do in the next year, and what technology has to deliver for that to happen.
- 03
Roadmap
2 weeks
Twelve months, sequenced, with dependencies stated and the long-lead items flagged. Each item carries an owner, an estimate and a run-cost implication.
- 04
Review pack and cadence
3–5 days
The quarterly pack designed once so it can be produced repeatedly: what changed, what is next, run versus change, risk and technical debt, retirement candidates, decisions required.
- 05
First quarterly review
half a day
We chair it. The output is a decision log, not minutes.
- 06
Ongoing cadence
quarterly
We run it, or we hand it over once your team has seen two cycles. Both are fine; we will tell you which we think fits.
Named artefacts
What you receive
- Estate baseline — systems, contracts, renewal dates, owners
- Run versus change spend split
- Twelve-month roadmap with dependencies and long-lead items identified
- Quarterly review pack, designed as a reusable template
- Decision log, maintained across quarters
- Risk and technical debt register
- Retirement candidate list, with the annual saving of each
What we need from you
- Access to spend data, contracts and renewal dates. This is usually the hardest thing to assemble and the most valuable.
- Business leaders for the priorities workshop. Without them this becomes an IT document.
- Honesty about committed work that is not going well. The roadmap is worth nothing if it records the optimistic version.
- Someone empowered to decide in the quarterly review, otherwise it becomes a reporting meeting.
What changes
- 01Leadership can see what proportion of IT spend is discretionary.
- 02Changes to the plan are decisions with a date and an owner, rather than drift.
- 03Long-lead items are visible early enough to act on.
- 04Something gets retired each year, and the saving is visible.
- 05Technology proposals reach the board as options with trade-offs.
What it costs
from €2,500 per month
All prices exclude VAT.
Questions
How is this different from a steering committee we already run?
Often only in discipline. If your steering committee changes the plan, records decisions and looks at run cost, you have this already. Most do not — they review status against a plan nobody is allowed to alter, which is why the plan stops being true.
Can you just build the roadmap and leave?
Yes, and it will be a good roadmap. But the value is mostly in the cadence — a plan built once decays at a predictable rate. We would rather build it and run two reviews with you than hand over a document.
Does this include security?
Security work sits in the same roadmap, because it competes for the same budget and the same people. Pretending otherwise is how security programmes end up unfunded halfway through.
Leave with your top three risks documented
Thirty minutes with a senior practitioner. No slideware, no sales engineer.