Our Top Athlete – Lean, FIT and Agile EA

In the Lean and Agile Centric world of delivering work, how do we ensure the final product is not so emaciated that it fails to provide value aligned to the overall enterprise objectives?

This presents the perfect opportunity for Enterprise Architecture to ensure the Lean and Agile product is delivered with the most robust and “FIT” technical strategy aligned with business strategy.

Bill of Materials for the Architecture Runway
To source the runway, we need to procure the technology i.e., the materials. The business capability model acts as the sourcing blueprint. The first step in building the runway then is to ensure that we have the complete list of available capabilities (similar to a bill of materials) from the blueprint that would be required to establish the runway.

The Foundational Mesh
To identify the materials (capabilities) specific to a product, we need to map business capabilities to value streams. Value streams are a sequence of long-lived steps required to deliver value to the customer. By connecting business capabilities to value streams to agile release trains (decomposed into releases, epics, and stories), enterprise architects establish the foundational mesh or grid of agile release trains and business capabilities. We can now identify the functional components (materials) specific to the release, but what about the technical strategy?

Selecting the right FIT
The final step in completing the bill of materials is to identify the IT components (apps and microservices). To achieve this objective, Enterprise Architects map business capabilities to provisioning applications and underlying microservices that make up that application. These applications are assessed continuously for Technical Fit and Business Fit to identify both the empirical disposition of the apps and any business and technical debt for the apps. The Enterprise architects must align the capabilities to the applications with the highest assessment scores to ensure both the robust bill of material and alignment with underlying standards and quality.

The dual forces of digital transformation and agile delivery approaches have resulted in a mindset shift from transactional, fixed duration projects to the continuous product-centric world. Thus, it becomes all the more imperative to ensure your digital products are delivered backed with data-driven, fact-based blueprints that intersect the delivery streams to value streams to capabilities to the underlying technology, aka the “Converged, Integrated Portfolio.” The robust data foundation of EOS ITPM coupled with rich data-driven visualizations enables enterprise architects to play the role of strategic advisors in furthering the value proposition of Lean, FIT, and Agile EA. Reach out to us for a demo 🙂