Technology Strategy Patterns

Chapter 8. Templates

This chapter and the next contain very specific templates that you can use directly in your work to help you advance your technology projects. The two primary vehicles for this are spreadsheets and slide decks.

Here you’ll get the following collection of eight practical tools that you can modify or use out of the box. They’re reusable rubrics to help you be sure you’ve covered the key aspects of strategy proposals and help you bring all of your technology project ideas into sharp focus. With these, you can usher the considerable raw material you’ve generated so far from the developmental concept realm into the material realm:

• One-Slider

• Use Case Map

• Priority Map

• Directional Costing

• Technology Radar

• Build/Buy/Partner

• Due Diligence

• Architecture Definition

These represent tools of my own device that I’ve used effectively. It’s not a project management collection; there are plenty of tools for that elsewhere. They’re most useful in the early stages of your project when you are trying to figure out what you’re doing, and what you want to propose to executives or share with the broader team.

One-Slider

Challenge: You need to pull together the huge and diverse volumes of analysis work into a simple summary that you can use to inform teams and executives of the strategy.

Solution: You need to create a single slide that forces you to crystallize and succinctly state your strategic goals, the initiatives or practices as propositions that follow from ...