Building Your Own Radar

How many times you have said “I have this {thing} on my radar”.

In my case, working on a department responsible of identifying, selecting and introducing technologies in Hotelbeds Group it’s almost routine language. But do you know how this radar looks like?

Some time ago we asked this question ourselves and drawed a big radar on a flipchart. It was a funny exercise and the results very useful. Then we wanted to draw that radar on something more portable and digital and we looked for different approaches, excel, powerpoint, cacoo, etc. After some research we found an interesting tool called “Build Your Own Radar” from ThoughWorks.

BYOR is a small node.js app that reads a googledoc spreadsheet and draws an interactive radar. I highly recommend to read this article about how to build a technology radar and also try to apply to other things that are not technology. Then, you can build the radar using their online application following this guide.

In our case we have reviewed our original Radar in order to include only the most important technologies we are working on. Then we hosted our own BYOR (available on github), in order to share this information without needing to know the spreadsheet URL and introducing every time.

You can see the results here: http://technologyradar.hotelbeds.com

Whats next

Now that we have our radar in a more dynamic platform, we want to use it as part of our day to day job in order to know what are the current status of the technologies we are working on. We are going to review this radar every quarter and send a memo with the main changes in order to identify the different technologies progress inside our business.

By doing it we expect to improve our communication with internal departments. The understanding of what are we working on, what are the next comings and what we have putted on hold is a valuable input to the production departments that, probably, will need to adapt his teams in accordance.

For sure, we expect that opening it for external people will help us on our conversations with Partners and Suppliers in order to quickly set a clear technology context. But Also, we expect it to help on our recruiting conversations as it will let candidates identify what kind of technology we use.

Please keep in mind that the content of this Radar is for information purposes only.