b u i l d y o u r o w n

TECH RADARImproving the process and the outputs.

AGENDA

▫︎ The Tech Radar

▫︎A Personal Tech Radar

▫︎An Enterprise Tech Radar

▫︎ The ThoughtWorks Tech Radar

▫︎Building your own!

▫︎A Project Radar

2

THE TECH RADARConcepts & types

3

4

“A living document to assess the risks and rewards of existing and nascent

technologies”

WHY BUILD ONE?

▫︎ It helps guiding your career decisions.

▫︎ It helps restoring the sanity to purchase decisions.

▫︎ It steers the technology direction.

▫︎ It’s cool.

5

A PERSONAL TECH RADARAvoiding the technology bubble.

6

THE BUBBLE

7

SO IT HELPS YOU TO…

Understand what’s happening outside of the bubble. Keep you in sync with other nascent technologies. Guide your decisions when investing in other technologies.

8

AN ENTERPRISE TECH RADARAnd its affairs

9

CHALLENGE & INNOVATIONThere’s a lot of risk when adopting new technologies. Having a company radar help balancing this risks and makes the continuous innovation easier.

10

INNOVATION ADOPTION LIFECYCLE

11

12

“For any given technology, your organisation has an ideal location on the innovation curve, balancing risk

versus reward”

CONTINUOUS INNOVATION

13

NEW THINGS

EXISTING THINGS

14

“Technology never sits still; you must (re-)evaluate it constantly or risk drastically falling behind your

competitors”

COMMUNICATION & BUSINESS ALIGNMENTUnified Message from the Technical to the Interested-but-non-technical

15

A COMMUNICATION TOOL

16

“In most organisations, there is no feedback loop from the people who use technology to

the people who choose it.”

TECHNOLOGY & BUSINESS ALIGNMENT

17

“A tech radar allows more intelligent decision making and career planning”

THOUGHTWORKS TECH RADARScope & structure

18

THE STRUCTURE

19

TOOLSTECHNIQUES

PLATFORMS LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS

SCOPE

20

It is “about things you are looking towards, not recriminations about the past”.

BUILDING YOUR OWNScope & structure

21

DEFINING THE THINGS (BLIPS)

22

What’re the things you want to capture?

Categorise them and capture the state

TOOLSTECHNIQUES

PLATFORMSLANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS

DEFINING THE CYCLE (RINGS)

23

How fast can you assess the things?

The lesser the cycles the greater the risk in adoption.

HOLD ADOPT

DEFINING RE-EVALUATION

24

NEW THINGS

ASSESSMENT

EXISTING THINGS

EXECUTION GUIDE

25

▫︎ Have a white board with your structure.

▫︎ Put all the blips (cards) separated by the categories.

▫︎ Have some one facilitate the reading, discussion and placement of them in the rings.

▫︎ Have someone else writing down the motivations for the placement.

▫︎ Review and re-evaluate.

OUTPUT AND DIGITAL VERSION

26

The output will be a list of things (blips) separated in categories (quadrants) distributed in the

adoption lifecycle (rings).

You can use tools to plot this radar in a digital version

github.com/bdargan/techradar

A PROJECT TECH RADAROur experience building our own radar

27

THE PROCESS

28

Whiteboard + Post-its

+ Discussion = Radar

THE PITFALLS

29

▫︎ Long passionate discussions

▫︎ Things we couldn’t change or assess

▫︎Don’t like vs. not worth assessing

▫︎ The “adopt all” symptom

▫︎ The hold vs. avoid

THE OUTCOME

30

▫︎ Knowledge sharing

▫︎ People in sync with the things

▫︎ Snapshot of the present

▫︎Better visibility of the future

For questions or suggestions: Bruno Trecenti

twitter@brunotrecenti github@trecenti

For more information, check-out Neal Ford blog-post:

http://bit.ly/1hmfwNS

THANK YOU