Project Roadmap with Resource Utilization
Project Roadmap with Resource Utilization

A project roadmap with resource utilization shows a high-level overview of a project's deliverables as well as the resources required to complete the project.

A project roadmap with resource utilization shows a high-level overview of a project's deliverables as well as the resources required to complete the project.

Al Chen

What Is A Project Roadmap?

In project management, a project roadmap gives your team a high-level overview of a project’s objectives and deliverables. You may not see all the individual tasks in a project roadmap, but rather the high-level components of the project that can be further broken down to sub-components and tasks. One of the main differences between a project roadmap and a project plan is the scope or perspective you will receive from the roadmap.

The project roadmap is a bird’s eye view of the entire project. It is usually interactive so that all stakeholders in the company can see the components of the roadmap that matters to them. This template is an interactive project roadmap that grows and changes as your project changes.

Resource Utilization

Project resources must be allocated efficiently, which is why resource utilization is one of the most important factors to consider for your project. Simply put, resource utilization is a metric that shows how much work is being allocated across all your team members. Some team members may be over utilized, which means you need to allocate some of that team member’s work to others. A project has a limited amount of resources, so the project manager must make the most efficient use of those resources to complete the project.

If your team practices the scrum methodology for project management, you may be utilizing story points. What are story points? Story points are an abstract measure of effort to finish a specific task or user story. As opposed to hours, story points don’t have an assigned dollar or time value. The important concept to know is that the estimated story points for a task are meaningful relative to other tasks with story points.

Breaking Down a Project by Effort

Whether you use hours or story points, a set amount of effort must be established for each task. This template allows you to enter in start date, end date, team member, the team member’s role, and effort for a specific task. This allows you to see a chart that shows resource utilization across your team, and can help you make the decision on where to allocate your team’s resources. Since you have the start and end dates for tasks, the same data can be visualized as a gantt chart as the project roadmap.

Gantt charts in Coda are interactive, so you can dig deeper into a specific bar to see which team members are booked for that task.