What is Radar?

Radar is exercice introduced and popularised by ThoughtWorks. Its purpose is to assess and review decisions, technologies or tools across a company. A very important feature of Radar is also sharing results and collaborative nature of it. To get a better understanding what it is, I highly recommend watching their short introductory video.

Why?

To quote official ThoughtWorks Radar introduction page it serves to:

  • Objectively assess what’s working, and what isn’t
  • Pollinate innovation across teams and experiment accordingly
  • Balance the risk in your technology portfolio
  • Work out what kind of technology organization you want to be
  • Set a path for future success

On a personal level, I have decided start doing Radar exercise for two main reasons:

  • It is something new to play with :)
  • Radar metaphor to visualise data, organise information and the interactive visualisation is cool :)

The other reasons are:

  • effectively asses and prioritise important and useful things in life
  • keep track of decisions made and learn from any mistakes
  • share the things I’m interested in with friends and other people and get inspiration for other great ideas
  • ensure sustainability of career and personal life

Meaning of the Rings

With little help from ThoughtWorks, I will include their and my meaning of the rings.

Adopt

  • TW: We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.

  • ME: I do regularly or did and can recommend to others without hesitation.

Trial

  • TW: Worth pursuing. It is important to understand how to build up this capability. Enterprises should try this technology on a project that can handle the risk.

  • ME: Actively experimenting with but not having enough information to make further decisions or recommendations and more time to evaluate is needed.

Asses

  • TW: Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect your enterprise.
  • ME: Interested in and collecting more information about it, looking at different alternatives or waiting for a suitable project to try on.

Hold

  • TW: Proceed with caution.
  • ME: It pops up on my Radar but for various reasons, I assign to it a lower priority at the moment. Also, items from past Radars that stop serve their purpose or do not satisfy my needs anymore.

Plans and Call for Suggestions

The ThoughtWorks do multiple ceremonies around creating and publishing the Radar. Out of publishing it in various online formats(website, pdf) the do also event in their office, where leaders from the company choose to present their favourite items from the current issue of Radar. It is an interesting and inspirational event and I was lucky already attend once in past. My plan is to do the Radar few times (3-4) per year, primarily publishing on a website in form of visualisation but very likely will also experiment with other formats. Stay tuned! :)

If you have some good suggestions, feedback or ideas for things that I should put on my Radar please contact me through e-mail below or any social network you prefer. I would be especially grateful for tips in quadrant:

Art and Pleasure

  • Do you have a book, album, concert, movie or exhibition to recommend?

Finance and Social

  • You have investment tips (like bitcoin 5 years ago .)). Is there an interesting event happening in future or you have experience with things I may be interested in?

Health and Life

  • Do you work in these domains or actively following latest trends? What are the latest recommendations, do’s and don’ts to follow?

If anything from above sounds familiar to you or you may come across and you think I may be interested, please, send it my way. Thank you!

And maybe you will start doing and share your Radar.. :)