Choosing Boring Technology
Within any normal-sized team, the options for any class of technology should be capped at three: the current sensible default, the one being trialed as a potential replacement, and the legacy option that is slated for retirement.
The typical discussion goes something like this: a team wants to bring in a new messaging technology. How many are already in active use? Three—including one legacy system that is partway through migration and another that was experimented with previously but never gained traction. At that point, the limit is reached. To introduce yet another messaging option, the team must either finish migrating off the legacy tech or properly eliminate the failed experiment. This concept is closely related to limiting the number of Innovation Tokens in use within teams.
Scaling Coordination Across the Organisation
At a team level, such limits are straightforward to maintain, discuss, and act upon—teams share priorities, working practices, and high-trust, high-bandwidth communication. At the scale of an entire organisation, the challenge is similar in principle but far more difficult in practice: getting alignment takes considerably longer, and actual migration and consolidation efforts can stretch across many months. That is why organisations sometimes must permit greater variation in technology.
To engage the whole organisation in these broader decisions, MYOB publishes its own Technology Radar, following the format of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. This self-built radar approach gathers input from all verticals and teams, and makes a clear, organisation-wide statement on which technologies teams should adopt, trial, or—just as importantly—avoid.
