Outcomes and roadmaps, answered in full.
Setting an outcome worth having, and planning a quarter against it rather than against a list of features.
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8 questions on outcomes and roadmaps, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
How to set an outcome
Answered on How to set an outcome, and rendered here in the same words.
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How do you price work with no revenue line, like compliance, security or platform?
Price the loss you are avoiding, not the feeling of safety. Regulatory work carries an exposure, a remediation cost and a probability of landing inside the horizon: £4m of exposure at a 30% chance is £1.2m, and legal or finance owns both of those inputs, not you. Platform work is priced through what it unblocks. If a migration is the precondition for £900k of epics that cannot start without it, that is the number, and it validates when those epics validate. What does not work is pricing effort, or pricing away a problem you were never going to have.
How precise does the price need to be?
Precise enough that two competent people re-running the arithmetic land within about 20% of each other, and no more precise than that. The number earns its place by forcing assumptions into the open and letting you compare one outcome against another, not by predicting the P&L to the pound. If flexing a single assumption moves the answer by an order of magnitude, that assumption is the real work: go and reduce the uncertainty before committing, rather than averaging it away and hoping.
Can one epic contribute to two outcomes?
No. An epic links to exactly one outcome. The moment its value is split across two, neither outcome's arithmetic can be checked and neither owner can be held to a number. If an epic serves two outcomes, decide which one it primarily belongs to, price its full share there, and note the second-order benefit on the other without booking currency against it. If that decision feels impossible, the two outcomes are probably one outcome that has been split for organisational reasons.
What happens when the value does not land?
Close the outcome as accepted as not realised, with the validation figures attached and a note on which assumption broke: the baseline was wrong, the movement was smaller than expected, or the value per unit did not hold. That closure is worth more than a quiet success, because it recalibrates the realisation ratio you use to size headroom on the next outcome. The failure mode to avoid is closing it as unvalidated. That teaches nothing and slowly inflates your calibration until the forecasts stop meaning anything.
How to put together a quarterly roadmap
Answered on How to put together a quarterly roadmap, and rendered here in the same words.
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What if an outcome needs longer than a quarter?
That is normal and the model expects it. Outcomes span quarters; epics do not. Put the epics that move the outcome this quarter on this roadmap with their share of the value, leave the rest of the target unallocated until the next planning round, and carry the remainder forward. The outcome stays open in Working On or Value Monitoring across both quarters and only closes when every epic under it has closed. What you must not do is write one epic spanning both quarters to avoid the split, because that is the single change that makes the whole portfolio unforecastable.
How do I set a calibration factor before I have any history?
Plan the first quarter at one to one and write on the roadmap that it is uncalibrated. Then record planned value against realised value for every epic, at each monthly outcome validation and again at the close. After two quarters you have a ratio worth using and after four it is stable enough to plan against. The first honest number is usually lower than the team expected, and that conversation is worth more than the arithmetic it changes.
Something urgent lands in week five. What do I do with it?
It takes the same route as everything else: shaped, priced and committed as an outcome, or attached to an existing epic if it belongs under one. Then it has to displace something. Find the epic with the lowest planned value per delivery week, move it to the cut list with its pounds attached, re-run the p85 forecast for the reduced set, and publish both changes together. The failure mode is adding the new work without naming what it pushed out, because by the close nobody can separate under-delivery from a quarter that was quietly reloaded.
Do the Tech Debt and Bug Budget epics carry a currency value?
No. They carry a share of the person-weeks, not a planned contribution to any outcome target. Their return is avoided rework and avoided incidents, which cannot be attributed honestly at planning time without inventing a number, and inventing one there corrupts the calibration data everywhere else. Count them in capacity, report their burn rate monthly, and never let their absence from the value column become the argument for cutting them, which is the exact argument the two fixtures exist to defeat.
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