Tag Archives: Togaf

There are no Pit Stops In Enterprise Transformations really ?

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IT Transformation , Digital Transformation , Keeping Your Lights ON while you make changes to your bread winner applications in the Enterprise, move certain others to the cloud, rework on your SMAC strategy, going digital, change your tires while your speeding Enterprise needs to overhaul itself at the same time needs to keep moving and least not loose time at a pit stop.While all of these sound easy to write about but when faced with the challenge of turning your enterprise around , you need a mindset, culture , appropriate tools, talented people who understand the nuances of the change , tools required and how to go about it.

Firstly Mindset : You need to know that people need to change the way they think about the they are standing on a burning bridge with water beneath if you were to borrow a line from the Nokia chief’s mail to its employees. Unless people perceive it this way change is difficult to force it down their throats. Fluidity in all process and people boundaries such that people can reach out and interact with folks across their immediate process lines. This needs a mindset change which can happen when their is strong management support towards moving away from silos and encouraging decentralization.

Be Proactive ALWAYS – Look at the windscreen and not often at the rear view mirror

Usual mindset is look at time, money , resources and progress once you have finished your product or solution. Instead create a pro active process measurement and improvement dashboard where you are measuring everything while moving instead of reflecting when it is all over. This is process independent and no matter which agile methodology you use or which project / process framework you are currently executing. The idea to embed metrics in your journey can be right from the beginning where you look at

1. Review all internal process.

2. Requirements stability

3. Change Management processes

4. Your speed of execution , ability to close projects / activities within time and budget.

5. What market forces are currently influencing your product / solution.

Once you start improving these factors then your outcomes or business results follow on account of these steps or measures.

Tools at the Pitstop

One of the ways to capture these would be to implement a balanced scorecard.

Digital flexibility:

This key skill would mean how often are you ready to change gears midway and skill / re-skill yourselves when you hit transformation roadblocks.

Integrated Operations data : Ability to respond to complex process data and act on them in real time when transformation is underway.

Experimentation and POC hotbeds : Ability to rapidly experiment test beds where simultaneous low cost fail fast experiments and proof of concepts can be carried out and more importantly reduce the cost of failure.

Data driven decision making : Put check and capture data of all kinds which can be useful to driving change and arrive at decision based on those.

Eliminate , Eliminate all kinds of communication barriers across teams. How do you stop one . Meet review and action on the points that are found as causing delays. Delays can be anything from waiting for snacks in queue in the evening to not getting appropriate sign-offs in time. Teams working on agile communicating with non agile or semi agile waterfall teams can slow things down. Use your own process tailoring to get across these barriers.

Promote quicker decision making using the following concept decentralize implementation and centralize interoperability

Wiping the dust off the screen , spare tires and everything in between.Re work on your strategy when there is a downtime .

What to do when others are racing as hard as you as well.

1. Remember what you are transforming is not only a technology issue and see it is as a business problem and technology is a leverage. Most often companies do not learn

2. Always eat a part of the pie instead of full fledged transformation on all cylinders. It is nice to say we are changing the whole machinery while the vehicle is moving instead it is better to change the parts one at a time. It is not easy in a large transformation program but things become much easy to test waters when strategy is broken down to segment and then to the solution level. Let’s say 5 competing product lines are ready for transformation and then out of them only 3 are handpicked for transformation , then out of these 3 pick 10 % functionality and iterate and continue this till you can increase your velocity.

3. Get people to meet the change agents often instead of hanging organization change mandates across the hallway, coffee stations , places where your resources spend most time. Else they end up being fodder for light banter during coffee breaks. Strategy should be de-centralized and no one person’s or team’s prerogative to succeed. And communicate , live them day in and day out instead of them being poster board material.

4. Setup innovation and design thinking workshops across the length and breadth of the organization for people to go about doing there jobs with more fun and independence at what they are doing. Do this when during happy days and not so happy days in the company. Make this part of your core routines then it becomes easy to flex think and act nimble.

This is not the full list of course would love to hear from you on what points went to your refueling enterprise journeys.

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Webex Based Accredited TOGAF 9.2 Trainings – Attend from Anywhere

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We understand people can’t always make it to a classroom, so we have leveraged virtual technologies, to extend the classroom to you – at your workplace or home to provide you with the same feel.Attend TOGAF Trainings from anywhere over webex. The training schedule for webex is listed here.

Key Features of the Online Training

Similar to a classroom based training except that the material will be presented over webex / gotomeeting webinars. The class is made quite interactive using bamboo presenter as an illustrator which gives the classboard feel.
All students will be provided with URL information, to link to the webex/gotomeeting class that they have signed up for, the required lab facilities, and a toll free number for completely integrated audio.
Interactive lecture, labs, and discussion are all enabled by making the participants the presenters when needed to enable a seamless classroom experience.
There will be tea/coffee/bio breaks just as in a classroom training session.
The material of the course (hard copy) shall be mailed to the folks attending the course and a full ebook of the TOGAF 9.2 body of knowledge shall be mailed to the course attendees.

Pre Requisites for attending the Online Training

People attending the training need to have a decent internet connection to be able to

Contact Details : maileturnti[at]eturnti[dot]com

Course Details : https://test.eturnti.com/togaf9-1training/

Sample Webinar :

SampleSOA_Togaf_LIVE_Webinar from Eturnti Enterprise Consulting on Vimeo.

Course Info : https://test.eturnti.com/course-info/

About the Trainer : Kiran Divakaran

Testimonials : What people had to say

Terms and Conditions : Terms and Conditions

TOGAF® is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.

US Library of Congress – Knowledge Management Where are you in your Organization’s journey ?

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The US Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries where knowledge of most facets of humanity such as arts, science , astronomy , folklore, traditions , math,architecture etal is stored and preserved over years. This has survived many a century or two as we march in the 21st century and is a laudable effort in knowledge management by any standards. When you want an organization to be built that it wants built to last kind of foundations then it is imperative that the knowledge management surrounding it should be quite solid and future looking.

Knowledge management is an essential component to the Enterprise transformation exercise. The reason being if you are not sure where you currently are then it is not possible to go where you want to go ? It is like having a blueprint of what artifacts you have on your product portfolio and get to know how they all fit in.

Knowledge is like data in a database and management often would how you would manage the data and give meaningful information around it. Knowledge management would be about easy retrieval of information which would mean that you have to a good job of configuration management system around it this is a given and true of all configuration management systems.

Typically in an organization knowledge management would involve storing design documents, code , configurations , tar/war files and all such information that is useful to them and would need to retook at them from time to time.But most often in companies you have people asking around saying do we have an RFP to respond to that client request. Do we have an reference architecture document that would help us is not reinventing the wheel and respond to the client from a similar geography without having to go through specific region specific customization needs. What this means that all of this promotes for greater reuse and reduction of rework and help more better time of an organization’s time and resources.

Do you know what all can be stored in an Organization’s repository ?

1. Industry Standards Information

2. Internal Standards Document

3. Project Closure Documents

4. Governance Log Details

5. Artifacts of all kinds in a company ( code , docs ( SRS , user stories (if you are an agile shop ), architecture specs , business process docs, diagrams,matrices,catalogs)

6. Solution Specific Artifacts

7. Reference Architecture models for the product or service that you are positioning yourself.If you are new to reference architecture then here is a link to a video explaining the same.

8. Have you ever thought of linking this knowledge base to the extent that the information sharing makes sense to your client , partners and vendors ecosystem giving all the IP protection , NDA etal in place.

This is exactly what enterprise continuum in TOGAF paves way for and help an organization create a knowledge ecosystem that will help organization make faster procurement decisions, buy v/s build decisions and simply provide for agility during business transformations.Enterprise Continuum in TOGAF is a concept that has provisions for all of the above and is indicative of how an enterprise should structure its assets if you want to thrive in the knowledge economy. If you know what you have well then you can go ahead and add / subtract the features needed. Most companies at times think it is an overhead along with their day to day run the business model to keep their knowledge base updated.

Most often unit / organization heads have this moment of ground shifting from under their feet when asked “How are we go from this product to the next version of the product?” or “What is the effort involved in getting this product multi currency enabled?. These questions become much easier to answer if you have a strong knowledge management practice. These facts cannot be gathered on their finger tips but with working towards a culture where the knowledge within the company is available to one and all and most important easily structured and retrievable would decide how good it is at business agility and moving ahead.

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Is it time to throw away your Product Baseline ?

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Baseline as per the wikipedia is an agreed description of the attributes of a product, at a point in time, which serves as a basis for defining change.

Most of us can relate to that statement which means the product or solution has come to a certain maturity in abstraction of its features and now you can call that a baseline. Some companies work a great deal to arrive at a baseline which is what they have worked over months , years to finally arrive at one milestone in their journey and call it the baseline. Now the title is why do some companies decide to throw it away. We shall see how and why this happens ?

Togaf has a concept of going about iterations on how you can go from one state to another in your organization transformation journey. There is a baseline first and target first approach when you go about iterating across its phases for architecture development.

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Baseline First : Firstly you go about considering the edifice for building future work is your current baseline and then it becomes the starting point for doing any work henceforth. What this means is that you as an organization has significant has accumulated a lot of collective knowledge and arrived at the baseline which is still relevant and useful in going about the organization churns.Lets say you are a n oil and gas major and all the data models,process workflows,architecture documents ( business,data,application and technology) are at a point where they need further pruning and tailoring to meet the new market realities. And hence any work that you do keeping this as the basis will end up being called as baseline first approach.

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Target First Approach : With disruption in every industry at times your baseline becomes completing irrelevant and new forms of transacting , doing business gets precedence. Examples of this would be Banking industry being caught in the wallet war from google,apple etal and further danger from the block chain , bitcoin and newer forms of currency exchange without the middleman. When this is more true for your current state then the baseline or the accumulated knowledge in the organization is found to be not very useful to go ahead with the organization transitions.

In reality this is not very true as there could be pockets sometimes huge areas of the existing knowledge base that can be turned / fine tuned to better meet market or product relevancy in the market. In the case of bitcoin based transactions disrupting banking for example the banking fundamentals such as credit / debit still would remain the same. But again it is upto the organization to see what parts of the baseline is relevant in your journey and then use it to your advantage. This needs good brain storming withing the company weighing the pros and cons and then take it forward.

What’s true in practice

Reminded of a joke that was going on in a company .They estimated that they would need a 100 developers working on the baseline for about 1.5 years to overhaul the product and make it market ready then there was a side remark saying give us 30 developers “throw away your baseline and we’ll rewrite the product afresh in six months.

So the fact of the matter is throw parts of your baseline away where it makes sense keep the ones that aid your transformation. This needs sound existing knowledge of your baseline and also where you want to go. Many organization find this to the biggest challenge “Where are we going and how ?”

Having the clarity of baseline first and target first approach helps …..

Would love to hear from you on what occasions did you have to chuck away your baseline if not great. If so how much of it was throw away and what portions could you keep ?

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