Why did I decide to stop doing a yearly HR roadmap?

Welcome to 2023. New year, new resolutions!

For years now, I’ve been told I should communicate more about my work The fact is that I usually prefer doing things rather than talking about them. I'm naturally a behind-the-scenes person and I enjoy working on projects quietly.

But (because yes there is a ‘but’, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this), one of my personal development goals this year is to communicate more about my work as an HR professional. And in fact, it’s largely thanks to my personal coaching journey with Wave that I really discovered the power of self-reflection through writing, and decided to give it a try.

So here I am on a challenge to write at least one article per month in 2023.

For a while, I wondered where to start, but suddenly it became clear: with the beginning (pretty obvious, isn’t it). My HR roadmap. As someone who values structure and organization, I've always created yearly roadmaps in all of my roles. This helps me relate my work to the overall context of the company and prioritize my initiatives.

My HR roadmap, the old-fashion way

I remember when I joined Wave in March ‘22. You know how it is: you’re the first HR person at a rapidly growing start-up. In addition to the CEO, every manager and most of the employees have numerous and varied expectations for you (expectations you obviously won’t meet but they don’t know it at this stage). While many of these expectations were legitimate, they couldn't all be answered at the same time by one person (at least not by myself).

So after handling a few ‘welcome emergencies’ and before diving headlong into those expectations, I whistled a short time-out to do a proper analysis of the company’s needs which I then transformed into the 2022 roadmap.

This led to an awful presentation I was actually pretty proud of at the time which was composed of no less than 70 slides. Yes. 70 slides.

I even imagined a fancy framework to classify projects by complexity with famous surf spot names (Lacanau for small complexity, Biarritz for middle complexity, and Nazaré for high complexity).

Luckily, in the process I’d held on to an ounce of mental clarity and did single slide synthesis to give you an idea of what that roadmap looked like:

Adri, our CEO, gave me his blessing. Officially, this was because he trusted me and wanted to give me full ownership, but I suspect he was just groggy after the 70 slides and was desperate to escape that painful conversation. So I went to work on all the topics and subjects outlined in the roadmap, full of optimism and a fresh mind.

Well, it was a bias of optimism actually but I’d only discover that later. At that time, I was happy to believe that all of our main HR pillars would be structured and implemented at Wave by the end of the year. We would create best-in-class HR practices and an amazing employee experience for all my beloved colleagues, who really deserved it!

This yearly roadmap was also my personal weapon to answer the recurring “Oh Raph, I was thinking about this amazing idea *insert a great BUT super time-consuming idea here*” question. The kind of thing that usually makes me feel guilty, but thanks to that yearly roadmap, I was able to say ‘actually, that topic will be opened next quarter - so I’m afraid I won’t be getting to it before then’.

But this roadmap sneakily became my worst nightmare (ok I might be exaggerating a little bit).

Building good things takes time, and the life of the one and only HR employee of a 30-person company in the tech industry is full of surprises (good and bad - but I’ll tell you more about that later) and you NEVER actually have the time to work on everything you planned to.

What was written in the stars happened.

Week after week, I was derailing from my yearly roadmap and that created a lot of discomfort for me. I had made a promise to the company and its employees, and I HAD to deliver.

But the reality of the situation is that we only delivered on subjects and initiatives (but pretty good ones, if I do say so myself) that were planned for Q2 and Q3. And nothing planned for Q4 has yet to see the light of day.

I still have a lot to learn as an HR but I mean, it’s not the first time I’ve built up an HR department from scratch. Yet looking back today, I really don’t know how I could have believed that 70 slides worth of initiatives would fit into just 9 months. The only conclusion I can come to is that this is the exact definition of a bias of optimism.

I tried to anticipate it, of course. As proof, you can check out the disclaimer from the beginning of my now-infamous 70-slides-presentation:

Facing the reality

At the end of the day, I realized (though not alone), that I’d created my own conditions for failure in the way I’d designed that roadmap.

And the sad part is that if I dig into my past - and once again, I’ll admit I only did this in the context of my personal coaching with Wave - I realize that this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Every. Year. I build a fancy and ambitious but ultimately unrealistic roadmap.

Wave, as both a company and a coach, push you toward continuous improvement. And thanks to that push, I could see it was the right time to get rid of that recurring frustration and discomfort.

That’s why, once I finished mourning my 2022 non-achievements, I started to think about a way to keep all advantages of having a roadmap :

• Structure my work
• Prioritize according to the company's needs
• Communicate about what will be done
• Follow-up my delivery

But without the disadvantages of doing it once at the beginning of the year:

• The obvious inability to evaluate accurately in advance what I could be able to do during an entire year
• The lack of flexibility (so many things can happen during a year that would require changing the roadmap)
• The creation of internal expectations that may be difficult to meet
• The anxiety it generates for me when I realize I can’t deliver what has been promised

Guided, or should I say ‘coached’, by Adri (who probably didn't wanted to re-iterate the 70-side experience) I came up with a different framework.

My 2023 ‘roadmap’, aka ‘a new me is born’

I kept the habit of defining a few main objectives for the year. They’re not particularly original but they help me structure my ideas and provide a context to all initiatives.

Then, and this is where the magic happens (or so I hope), my ‘roadmap’ is actually a backlog of initiatives I’ve created. And the process I’ve decided to follow is that at the beginning of every month, I pick a restricted number of those initiatives depending on our current priorities. And I focus on only those initiatives until they’re done, at which point I can bring on something new. At the end of the month, I check what has been done (or not) and re-prioritize for the coming month.

This is how it looks:

The entire company has access to this Notion dashboard and I hope it gives visibility on the work I’m planning to do as much as it avoids creating too many expectations I won’t be able to meet (because we’re focused on a quite short time frame). And when someone suggests a new idea, it goes directly to my backlog.

Why is it powerful?

It might seem simple but:

• It changed something in the pressure I feel
• It’s allowed me to be more accurate with my scheduling
• It helps me keep track of my ‘delivery’
• I can still (and should!) prioritize my actions
• Anyone can see/understand my priorities and contribute to the backlog
• I keep having a global overview of where I want to go ultimately

I can already see that this way of working is not only more comfortable, but more efficient, and I know I won’t have to write a new article about methodology in January 2024.

What about you? What practices allowed you to step back and gain perspectives on ways of working for 2023?

PS: ???You can find a Notion blank template ready to use here if you’re interested (you just need to ‘request access’ to the Notion page).

PPS: The first article is done, 11 left to do ??