Double Diamond: improve your design process
4 stages derived from design thinking to develop an innovative and functional concept as a team.
Technology radar
Your engineers may sometimes have difficulty finding their way through the jungle of technology solutions available. Yet these are vital choices! The technology radar is the best tool to help you clearly visualize all the technologies in use within your organization while keeping an eye on all the latest developments. Using this off-the-shelf tool, your team will be ready to map the whole range of technologies in use or likely to be used within the company and be able to choose the most appropriate solutions for each project.
The technology radar was designed by Thoughtworks, the IT consultants, as a visualization tool used by engineering teams to map all the technology solutions in use or likely to be used within the company, according to type and stage of use.
The technology radar can be used to choose the best solutions by listing all the technologies in use within your company, looking forward to future developments and identifying possible risks. It will become a reference document, allowing engineering teams to choose the technologies they need and to have a better knowledge of in-house resources.
It can also be used as an HRM tool to match up applicant profiles with the company’s technological resources.
Klaxoon’s Board is an unlimited digital whiteboard where you can easily share ideas in the shape of text, images, videos, documents or links, displayed in colorful thumbnails that work wonders for visual communication. With its built-in videoconferencing tool, Live, all the team members can share ideas in real-time, in person and/or remotely. People can even contribute in asynchronous mode.
Creating a technology radar implies team work involving different tech profiles (developers, security and operations experts, architects, etc.), so Board is the ideal interactive platform to share ideas quickly and efficiently.
You can choose three different viewing modes to display your results according to your needs:
Use this off-the-shelf model from the Klaxoon Template library to complete your company’s technology radar, as a team.
On the radar, each Idea represents one technology or method. As a team, pool your ideas and keep the list to 100 items maximum to optimize the mapping process. In case of disagreement, launch a yes/no Poll Question to decide as a team. Keep track of all the other suggestions in the "off the radar" space, as you may want to include them at some later stage. Then place the selected technologies in the right quadrant, according to type, and allocate the appropriate color (techniques in blue, platforms in yellow, software languages and architectures in orange and tools in red).
This classification depends on a number of criteria, such as security, competencies, costs, iteration speed, etc. If need be, run a multiple choice Question to decide as a team. All you need to do now is to allocate the category for the stage of use, i.e. adopt, trial, assess, or hold.
Text, images, videos, links to a website, all kinds of documents: use whatever you consider most relevant to add detailed information about each technology on the radar, while keeping the map easy to read. Use the “Open Question” feature by linking it to an idea: the documentation will remain easily available in the background.
Technology is constantly changing, so update your technology radar at least once every 6 months to keep it topical. Complete the “Status” field by adding “new”, “moved” or “unchanged” to each technology to show whether any changes have been made since the previous version.
One thing is for sure: with contributions from your whole IT team, no technology will remain off the radar!
With Templates, innovate in the management of your projects, represent them visually and move forward as a team in a synchronized manner