Konexis vs Enterprise Planning Tools: Communicating Strategic Roadmaps
Strategic roadmaps are arguably the most important output a strategy or planning team can produce.
When done properly, it’s a clear, visual guide to transformation. It shows the journey ahead, highlights dependencies, presents the business with options, and becomes a powerful communication tool for aligning teams and engaging stakeholders.
But for teams using traditional planning tools, strategic roadmaps often fall short when it comes to real-world communication. Many of these tools are built for data management, not storytelling. This creates a disconnect between strategic intent and stakeholder engagement.
By focusing on the key outcomes you need to achieve and ensuring OKR alignment, you can advance your business objectives and propel your business toward its strategic goals.
Stakeholder Access: Not what the vendors promise
When was the last time a senior business stakeholder, or anyone outside of your strategy or delivery team logged into your portfolio planning tool? Probably never.
Most traditional planning tools are complex and built around data-heavy interfaces. While they shine at capturing project and portfolio metadata, they’re not exactly designed for stakeholder-friendly storytelling. This makes it hard to share strategic roadmaps meaningfully across the organisation.
Konexis flips the model. Viewer mode allows a simple point and click to explore any part of the roadmap. No special training. No confusion. Just clarity. This level of accessibility means your roadmap doesn’t just exist; it gets used and shared where it matters most, in leadership conversations and strategic decision-making.
Time to Build (and Rebuild)
Anyone who has been involved in strategic planning will know that the data gathering stage requires a huge amount of effort.
This often involves many months of effort from multiple teams to get the data into a condition that it can be translated into a roadmap. Gathering data, validating it, configuring views, it’s a process that can take weeks or months. Once you have the information it can quickly become out of date due to time taken to get it into the tool. Then even once the roadmap is built, keeping it up to date is often a challenge. Many tools have rigid structures that make even small changes slow and frustrating.
Konexis makes roadmap building fast and iterative. As one of our clients at ACCA, Simon Hendy, put it:
“What took many days and lots of shouting in [our old tool] took a few hours in Konexis.”
Speed matters. If your strategy evolves faster than your tool can keep up, it’s no longer serving you.
Storytelling That Connects
Strategic roadmaps are communication tools. But too often, traditional planning tools fail to support tailored conversations for getting buy-in from different stakeholders. These stakeholders may have conflicting priorities and will have slightly different opinions and perspectives on initiatives. The problem with most planning tools is everyone is given the same view whether it’s relevant to them or not. That’s a missed opportunity.
Konexis is built for storytelling. The ability to filter and tailor every roadmap in Konexis means that you are able to tell a unique story to each and every stakeholder.
Focus on one department, one objective, or one time horizon. Strip out the noise. Highlight what matters most to the people you’re talking to.
No two stakeholder conversations are the same. Your roadmap should adapt accordingly. With Konexis, it does, and takes a matter of minutes to show two very different roadmaps from the same data source.
Strategic Roadmaps UI Your Stakeholders Will Actually Like
Even the most ardent of portfolio planning tool enthusiasts would struggle to say that any of the enterprise tools have a modern and visually appealing UI. Most are built for internal teams, not for communicating up or across the business. Their roadmap visuals are functional, but they often rely on rigid formats like Gantt charts, which don’t suit transformation-focused timelines or complex multi-year programmes. Visualisations are sometimes seen as basic, not providing granular control or detailed filtering options required to give an insightful snapshot to your stakeholders.
Konexis has a modern and intuitive interface. It has been designed so that within a few clicks you are able to see:
- Either 100 different items or one
- The whole multiyear transformation journey or a tiny subset
- 20 different items relating to an initiative or just the description
- the budgets across all initiatives, broken down by filters, dependencies, timeframes or categories
Also, it might not mean a lot if you are a more technically inclined person, but something your business stakeholders will appreciate, is that Konexis is styled with your corporate brand identify. This makes it easy to embed your strategic roadmaps in presentations, reports, and stakeholder packs that look and feel like your organisation, not like a technical back-office system.
The Cost
Let’s not ignore the numbers.
For around 5–10% of the cost of a traditional strategic planning platform, Konexis gives you a purpose-built tool designed specifically for communication, alignment, and clarity of your strategic and transformation roadmaps.
Whilst most planning tools were built to manage data. Konexis was built to tell a story. And that difference matters when it comes to engaging stakeholders and accelerating strategic delivery.
Final Thoughts
If your strategic roadmap is buried in a heavyweight planning tool that few people understand, and even fewer engage with, it’s not working as hard as it should be.
Traditional tools are valuable for managing data. But when it comes to communicating your strategic intent, aligning cross-functional teams, and helping leaders make decisions—they fall short.
Konexis gives you a better way. Faster to build. Easier to understand. Designed for storytelling, not just storing information.
Try it for free
Experience the difference Konexis can make to your strategic communication. Get started and try our roadmap tool for free with a one month trial.
