In many organizations, strategic planning can seem like a ghost story. Executives gather once a year to define high-level objectives, which are then documented on an intranet site or buried in disparate files. These strategies are shared during the initial selection process but rarely influence the daily grind of execution. By the time a project is halfway through its lifecycle, the connection to the original strategic play has often made like a ghost and vanished into the ether.
This gap between intent and execution is where roadmapping in Clarity® by Broadcom becomes a critical differentiator. Clarity transforms the roadmap from a static slide into a dynamic governance model that ensures every dollar and every hour of labor is spent in a way that aligns with the organization's goals.
Beyond the intranet: Capturing strategy with rigor
The first hurdle in effective roadmapping isn't the visual layout. It is the upfront capture of strategy. Most organizations struggle because they lack a one-stop shop to house their strategic objectives alongside their burn on spend and resource capacity.
How can you align project execution with corporate strategy in Clarity? Clarity provides a centralized location for executives to document their strategic plays. Whether you are using traditional frameworks, like PESTLE or Porter’s Five Forces, or modern methods like Hoshin Kanri, the platform provides the necessary governance to make these strategies visible to the entire portfolio team. This transparency is vital when new regulations or market shifts require an immediate pivot in focus.
The language of decision-making: Labor and currency
Once strategies are documented, the real work of roadmapping begins. This involves making hard choices. Strategic stakeholders and portfolio managers need to decide where to apply their currencies, which in Clarity are defined as both labor and non-labor resources.
In practice, this means every work request that enters the organization is legitimately tied to a strategic objective. Imagine a scenario in which a portfolio lead is presented with a proposed initiative. If the primary strategy is market share growth, the team can use Clarity to visualize the trade-offs of executing on the initiative.
Perhaps it makes sense to sunset a legacy application that is soaking up heavy investment to free up the productivity required to support the new initiative and achieve the desired growth. Without an integrated roadmap, these decisions are often made in isolation, leading to technical debt and shadow IT.
How we do it: The Broadcom perspective
At Broadcom, we follow this same logic through our annual operating plan (AOP) process. We align our strategic intent with specific investment categories, balancing requests for enhancements (RFEs) against technical debt and new features.
Our leadership teams use these roadmaps to segment capacity based on what is approved for strategy realization. When an executive asks what we are doing to reduce back-end overhead or what bets we are placing to gain market share, the portfolio leads don't need to hunt through spreadsheets. They can provide a summarization of the roadmap that shows exactly how current execution aligns with approved funding models.
The consolidation crisis
When asked where most organizations fail, the answer is almost always the consolidation of information. The reason roadmapping is so difficult for many isn't a lack of vision. It is that they have no documented place to see everything in one spot.
People often create presentations to show strategic leaders what they are working on, but they can't tie the value back to the work in real time. They can't easily say that the five things executed this quarter are directly responsible for attaining their organizational strategy. Clarity solves this by bridging the gap between strategic portfolio management, value stream management, and traditional project planning.
The cost of a disconnected roadmap
How is integrated roadmapping better than relying on static timelines? Operating without an integrated roadmapping tool reintroduces manual coordination and increases the risk of siloed data. When strategy is separated from the burn of resources, the quality of decision-making inevitably degrades.
By using Clarity, teams move away from endless meetings and toward a model of real-time intelligence. The solution allows portfolio leads to manage budgets set by the executive team, covering both headcount and dollars, with total confidence that they are executing on the right priorities.
A foundation for the future
As we look toward AI-driven predictive analytics, having a documented, centralized roadmap becomes even more mission-critical. You cannot train an AI model to help with strategy realization if your data is scattered across disparate files and intranet sites.
The ValueOps® by Broadcom platform, fueled by the roadmapping capabilities in Clarity, provides the necessary data integrity to fuel these future innovations. It ensures that your innovation is not just accidental, but a direct result of disciplined alignment and governance.
Bottom line
Roadmapping in Clarity is not about drawing bars on a Gantt chart. It is about creating a resilience-focused operating model in which every action is a reflection of strategic intent. By consolidating information and enforcing governance around strategy capture, you ensure that your organization isn't just busy—it's effective.
If you want to continue the discussion, please contact us.
Frequently asked questions
How is roadmapping in Clarity different from a standard timeline or Gantt chart?
Traditional timelines are typically static slides that quickly become disconnected from daily work. Clarity transforms the roadmap into a dynamic governance model. With this model, every hour of labor and every dollar spent is directly tied to a documented strategic play, ensuring real-time, continuous alignment.
How does this approach help with decision-making when market shifts occur?
Clarity provides a "one-stop shop" for strategy, labor, and spending. When regulations or market conditions change, portfolio leaders can visualize trade-offs in real-time—such as sunsetting a legacy app to fund a growth initiative—rather than making decisions in isolation.
How does Broadcom use these roadmapping principles internally?
Broadcom utilizes Clarity in its AOP process, helping teams align strategic intent with investment categories. This allows leadership to segment capacity based on approved strategies, making it easy to track progress toward specific goals like reducing overhead or gaining market share.
What is the risk of not using an integrated roadmapping tool?
Organizations without integrated tools often suffer from "consolidation crisis," where data is scattered across spreadsheets and intranets. This leads to manual coordination, technical debt, and an inability to prove to stakeholders that the work executed actually delivered strategic value.
