Why to do a Roadmapping Session before any D&I project commitment

And how it benefits my clients! 💯

Typically, people come to me with one of these two D&I problems:

I. HIRING: “We’re struggling to attract talent from underrepresented groups.

OR

II. INCLUSION: “Our company scored low on Inclusion in the last engagement survey.”

To help you with your Diversity & Inclusion challenges, we need to take into account your

• ✅ business objectives
• ✅ current performance: KPIs related to hiring pipeline, employee journey, employee engagement survey results, etc
• ✅ company context: values, leadership, recent org changes, etc

That’s why after our initial chats and before we commit to working together on a specific D&I project, we will start with a Roadmapping Session that looks exactly at those.

What is a Roadmapping Session?

• Objective: defining value for you + creating a plan to guide progress toward your goal
• Duration: typically, 2–4 hours
• Participants: your team (max 3 people) and I
• Confidential: under a non-disclosure agreement
• Cost: a paid engagement
• Prior to the session: I will send you the agenda for the Roadmapping Session together with a list of questions. They are related to your KPIs and current practices related to talent pipeline, employee journey, employee engagement, and beyond. You will share the data with me prior to our Roadmapping Session.
• Deliverables: Based on our Roadmapping Session together, I will send you: A) an action plan for your immediate D&I focus and a roadmap for the next up to 12 months, B) proposal on how to approach our first D&I project together.
• What’s next? You can use the plan we’ve created together to execute it on your own, with my help, or shop for offers from other D&I consultants.

How does a Roadmapping Session benefit you?

• 1. Focusing on the right problem first: during the analysis, we look at all challenges related to your talent pipeline and stages throughout the employee journey, as well as your current state of inclusion. This allows us to make sure that we’re not just jumping on one of your challenges, but consciously picking the right one that we should start with in terms of its urgency, impact, and importance.
• 2. No strings attached: It’s up to you if you want to execute the plan we’ve created during the Roadmapping Session on your own, with my help, or with other D&I consultants.
• 3. Financially makes sense to you: It saves you money, as it’s a much more accurate estimate of the cost. As we give priority to the projects that would make an engagement worthwhile for you, I prepare a proposal that makes sense to you in terms of budget constraints and ROI.

How often do I do Roadmapping Sessions?

• Typically, I do 1–2 Roadmapping Sessions per month due to ongoing projects.

Vessy.com is a Diversity & Inclusion Consultancy

I identify and remove obstacles to Inclusion and talent growth for businesses based in Ireland 🇮🇪 and Bulgaria 🇧🇬, so they can innovate at full capacity.

On Medium, I write articles with practical advice on how companies as small as 20 employees and as big as 16,000 employees approach Diversity & Inclusion across dozens of countries around the world.

➡️ See “2019 Diversity in the Workplace Report”, published in January this year.

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