Ask the platform what it would do in your shoes: an investment roadmap across all 529 use cases, built from your own data.
Every maturity assessment ends at the same question: fine, but what should we actually do, and in what order? This week the platform answers it. Ask it what it would do in your shoes, and it hands back an investment roadmap across the entire use-case catalog: what to fund first, what to fund next, what it would decline, and why.
The Roadmap tab: your funding sequence, computed
On your company's maturity report there is a new Roadmap tab. Generate it and the system works through all 529 use cases the way a disciplined CFO would: it sizes each opportunity using your team's own survey answers, prices the enablers behind them with all-in deployment estimates scaled to your revenue, buys shared infrastructure exactly once, and funds the next-best move until the returns no longer justify the spend.
The result is not a wishlist. It is a sequence, laid out in yearly waves sized to how many initiatives your organization can realistically absorb, because no plant runs 40 projects at once no matter how good the math looks. You get an investment frontier showing what each dollar buys, the use cases ranked by delivered value, and, just as telling, the list of things the system would not fund, each with its reason.
When the roadmap looks right, one click turns it into initiative lists, one per funded step plus a backlog of the lighter people-and-process moves, and those flow straight into the propose, program, and value-analysis workflow you already use. And if you want a written brief, an executive read is one click away. That one is strictly opt-in: generating it sends a summary of your results to our AI service, and nothing goes anywhere unless you choose it.
In ValueMaps: the decision-grade version
The Roadmap tab models your financials on industry-typical numbers, which is the honest starting point when all we have is your survey. ValueMaps now has the version for when the decision is real. Point the new Roadmap page at one of your saved baselines and the same analysis runs on your actual P&L, your negotiated costs, and the systems you already own, and the whole sequence re-plans around what is already in place.
Then constrain it the way real decisions get constrained. Drag the budget slider and ask what the biggest impact is for a fixed spend. Switch to "use what you own" and see the roadmap with no new capital purchases at all, just policy, people, and process moves running on the systems you already have; we think this cut will surprise you. Or change the objective entirely: pick a single KPI, say First Pass Yield, and the system funds whatever improves it most per dollar, with one guardrail we won't remove: it never funds a KPI win that destroys net value.
Show your work
A recommendation you cannot interrogate is a guess with good formatting. Every cost estimate on the roadmap is labeled as an estimate until you replace it with your own number. Enabler types are color-coded so you can see at a glance where the sequence leans on technology versus people and process. The theoretical ceiling is marked as a model bound, not a forecast. And any number on the page can be chased down in the audit walk, which replays the calculation one link at a time, from use case to measure to finance line. Nothing here is a black box.
Coming soon
Two things will make the roadmap sharper. A guided way to tell the platform which systems you already run, so "use what you own" starts from your real stack instead of a blank page. And teaching the sequence that an MES rollout and an accountability policy consume very different amounts of your team's bandwidth, not just different budgets.
Questions, feedback, or want a walkthrough? Reply to this email, or hit the Feedback button on any of the sites. We read everything.
— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions