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| Photo by Wayne Bishop on Unsplash Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/7YUW7fvIYoQ, |
Here's a quick start at creating a list of ideas for Suggested Practices for Highly Effective Enterprise Architecture (EA) Teams.
1) Asynchronous Communication: Your team adopts and uses a web-based team collaboration/communication/chat tool. If your team is relying on email for your primary means of communication - if you are passing documents back and forth via email - you are the canonical example for why I wrote this list. Hint: You should be posting links to your repository-based artifacts.
2) Simplified Asynchronous Collaboration: You use git as your primary collaboration repository / publishing mechanism for EA artifacts - with a web UI (e.g. private Github, Bitbucket, etc.). A wiki is an excellent choice as a complement for some categories of content (e.g. published for consumption outside of the EA team).
3) Simplified Processes for Asynchronous Authoring/Publishing: You use markdown, stored in the git repositories, to write the majority of your EA documents. Also see #2 above, re: Wiki.
4) Asynchronous Governance Processes: Your governance tooling and processes are based on the premise of a geographically distributed team - that operates in an asynchronous manner (i.e. artifacts are published for review, comments are collected, and voting is conducted - completely asynchronously). If the basis of your governance process is that you must interrupt team members ability to stay focused on high value tasks - by insisting on scheduling recurring mandatory governance meetings - on a very frequent basis - you are doing it wrong. Meetings should be the exception - not the norm. Meetings for governance processes should primarily be called when there has been a lack of consensus in the voting - or there are significant questions/discussions that cannot be serviced via a discussion thread within a private (and obviously, secure) discussion forum tool.
5) Automated Reminders: Your governance tooling and processes are designed to send out timely reminders for assigned tasks to be completed.
6) Automated Search: You leverage powerful automated search tools (e.g. Apache Solr, Elastic Search, etc.) to make finding artifacts easy and painless.
7) Automated Annotation: You have processes that automate the majority of the effort to annotate, tag, and index the entire corpus of all the artifacts in your EA artifact repository.
8) Diagramming (Elements: - Root Definition/Reuse) : Whatever EA diagramming solution you adopt - supports a core capability of managing a master reference inventory of element definitions; reusing those definitions in different diagrams; easily visualizing the AS-IS/transition/TO-BE views. (hint: As a baseline example for this type of capability, look at the Diagram Filter capability of Sparx Enterprise Architect. YouTube demonstration video)
9) Diagramming (Element Relationships/Connectivity): Creating relationships between elements; and being able to quickly and easily explore, discover, query, reuse, and report the elements in the master inventory - across different diagrams. (hint: LucidChart, Gliffy, SmartDraw, Creately, Archi, Google Draw, LibreOffice Draw, PlantUML, Umbrello, and Visio are not such solutions). Automated Dependency Impact Analysis is thus possible.
10) Asynchronous (Diagram) Repository Collaboration: EA team members are able to collaboratively work together, asynchronously, in the same repository - while crafting diagrams, components, etc.
11) A Culture of Cultivating EA Artifact Reuse: There is a process defined, resources are staffed (rotated assignment among EA team members is suggested) and effort is allocated - to continually support the creation, harvesting, management, and refresh of reusable artifacts, exemplars, patterns, templates, white papers, technology position papers, etc. - to help accelerate/optimize the efforts of the team.
12) EA Kaizen: You conduct frequent retrospectives to review WHAT you do, HOW you do it - and analyze your own EA processes for improvement. Minimally, this should be done at least quarterly. This means EA should have a BACKLOG of improvements to manage.
13) Ruthless Efficiency: The relative cost vs. value of governance processes are rigorously challenged - before adoption, and are reviewed periodically for adjustment - or elimination.
14) Secure Asynchronous External Collaboration: You leverage cloud-based, encrypted-at-rest, file storage mechanisms for collaboration with external partners (e.g. Box, DropBox, Google Drive, even private Github repositories, etc. - GPG encrypted files, if/when needed/warranted)
15) Automated Generation/Update of an EA Dashboard: You need to tell a story to your peers and stakeholders. A dashboard is a good starting point. But, you cannot really afford the luxury to assign vital resources to manually assemble/update such a dashboard. So, yours must be automated. Some ideas for possible metrics to collect (automatically), for a selected look-back period (e.g. Last Week, Last Month, Last Quarter, Last Year, vs. ~Current Period): Number of Artifacts Created, Modified; Number of Governance Reviews Scheduled, Completed; Governance Review Outcomes, by Status w/Counts; Diagrams Created, Modified; Diagram Repository Elements/Components Created, Modified; etc. If you have adopted the other recommendations in this list (in particular, #2, #3, #8, #9, #14) - then you have a solid basis on which to simplify the automation for information collection, analysis, and publishing.
16) Internal URL Shortener: You use an internal, enterprise-wide URL shortner. This allows you to manage updates/corrections to the final target - without having to edit/update documents everywhere. Bonus Points: A separate batch refresh process to associate a computed hash of the files that URLs that point to - so that you can identify and rationalize/consolidate references to duplicate instances of documents.
17) Daily Journals: Each EA team member publishes a Daily Journal - that is visible to the team. Wiki or git Markdown files suggested. This does four things for team members:
1) Asynchronously catch-up on status updates - without interrupting conversations, and avoid the n (n – 1) /2 communication channel servicing problem;
2) Tribal knowledge is captured;
3) Reduces the need for team meetings - members can just quickly read/scan each of the members' most recent daily journals for an update.;
4) Supports Business Continuity - in the event someone leaves the team unexpectedly/suddenly.
18) Continuous Knife Sharpening: On a rotating, periodic basis - each EA team member is tasked with researching, organizing, and giving a one-hour demonstration / technical talk on some new/interesting area of technology, methodology, strategy, practice, etc. Suggested minimal frequency: Monthly. Invited speakers from other internal groups (or vendors, or other companies are also good variations to consider).
19) Awesome Lists: There should be an "Awesome List" git repository - in which team members can record interesting, useful new ideas, resources, articles, open source (or vendor) solutions. This creates a valuable, persistent knowledge repository for the team - that grows over time. Hint: If you are primarily using emails (or tools like Slack) to communicate such information to the team - you are doing it wrong. The added benefit of this approach is that new team members have immediate access to the historical record of the team's growing body of knowledge (which they won't have - if you continue to just send emails to each other - and Slack sucks for scrolling back in time).
20) Tips Repository: Rationale: See "Awesome List" #19 above. Within this repository are separate Markdown files, with the following suggested naming convention: Tips.{subject area}.md (examples)
21) Automated Knowledge Dissemination: Automated publishing of content for non-IT consumption - from the repositories and automated governance processes - is greatly simplified. This eliminates a huge cost barrier to making EA artifacts widely available across the enterprise (i.e. automated publishing of static HTML content, or Markdown files - vs. having to pay massive licensing fees for users to access a more complex commercial EA tool/repository). Sharing is Caring.
