EA 872 Week 7 Delivery approaches

Hello again! As always, thank you for reading!

My last couple of blog posts have been focused on different tools or techniques that I have used to establish support, agreement on vision, and key metrics. All of these approaches have been targeted to moving an organization or project to a future vision or state.  This week, readings on "Logical Levels" talked about creating or defining process patterns, viewing information points, and services architectures.  So, as I have done the last couple of weeks, I'm going to reach into my past and discuss another approach that I have successfully used.  We derived a lot of the data that I have written about during a week long Strategy & Planning session. When all of this is pulled together, the other artifacts get us to some of the logical views that are discussed this week. This information happens to be focused on Business Intelligence Solutions. So, it will be biased to reporting and data analysis. But I feel these approaches and techniques can be useful in any EA effort.

We would often utilize a workshop-driven approach to accelerate our client’s knowledge acquisition and planning of the process, organizational change, and capabilities necessary for planning and delivery of key initiatives. This could easily be the Future State we often discuss in EA.  Here is a diagram that better depicts this approach.

If you look back to the last couple of weeks blogs, you will see that there are a series of artifacts created that include SWOT, GQM and Project Complexity. The workshop takes this information and then works to tie this together into more logical views focused in three key areas necessary for development and ongoing execution. These are:

• Reuse Library: Contains all reusable assets, certified for use in the Application Architecture.

• Application Architecture Repository:  Software structure for each application of business intelligence & reporting solution, verified for delivery into the Deployment Architecture.

• Deployment Architecture: Technical structure for all business intelligence & reporting solutions to be designed, developed, and released into a production environment within an enterprise.

We refer to this collection as a "Service Factory Architecture" which can be depicted as such:

I could go on a deeper dive into each of these three areas, but the primary goal with this approach is to drive increasing value for business through a delivery model capable of:

• Repeatability – Increasing consistency, quality, and reliability for client value
• Maintainability – minimizing (and ultimately eliminating) critical resource dependencies and constraints
• Sustainability – managing resource allocation (internal and external) to optimize delivery
• Reusability - leveraging conventional approaches, software, and tools across multiple solution delivery projects.

This Delivery Framework is  based on the industry principles present in change management and continuous improvement methodologies, and thus its structures relate back to the ‘plan – act – measure’ paradigm.  This begins to tie into how we manage from one state to the next.  To understand more completely, here is a view of the other two fundamental aspects of this framework, organization and process.

As with the Service Factory Architecture, I could go into each of the areas in more detail and may do so at a later date. As we go deeper into each of these areas, what results are artifacts very similar to what was discussed in this week's readings, logical views of the organization and processes.

 I continue to read a lot about frameworks in class, but I sometimes feel that how to deliver within these frameworks is relatively light in detail.  A quick Google search for service delivery frameworks of IT project delivery nets very few results. It would be great to hear other approaches to this.

Thanks again! I look forward to your comments.