1. Phase H, Architecture Change Management Steps
To phase H now of architecture change management steps. If you will recall, this is the last phase of the adm cycle that is post implementation. Your target architecture has been achieved and now you’re just waiting for business requirements to come in, change requests to come in, changes to the industry, things that are going to have to kick off another adm cycle. You’re also monitoring changes that don’t require adm cycle changes. So if it’s a minor change or an enhancement that does not change the fundamental nature of your architecture, those things can be done inside of phase H. Step one of phase H says establish value realization process.
So it’s a fancy way of saying you want to ensure the business is using your architecture to the maximum use that it can and get the maximum value out of your architecture that it can. And so you as an architect and an architecture group need to influence the business projects to exploit this architecture. So I’ll give you an example. If you’ve created a bunch of business services now, things that used to be done in a department by department basis, maybe they had their own time entry systems or they had their own tracking systems for certain processes. And you created companywide time management, company wide tracking, companywide services.
You have to sort of influence these businesses to use these services and not be tempted to either fall back upon their old services or as they’re developing new things, use the central ones instead of creating their own. Step two is deploy monitoring tools. So really there are lots of changes that could happen, technology changes, business changes. You want to make sure that your architecture is delivering value and continuing to deliver value. Your architecture capability, which is the ability of yourself and the architecture team to be on top of this architecture.
The processes that you have in place, tracking these asset management programs, assets of the company like the data assets and the technology assets and quality of service, which of course is how you are delivering as a company services to your customers and within the company, how departments are serving each other. So there are various tools, they’re going to be surveys, they’re going to be ways of measuring customer satisfaction, some automated, some manual. So these are the things that you’re going to want to keeping track of. So step two says deploy monitoring tools. Step three says manage risks.
And so as you’re monitoring this company and all of the quality and the performance and the changes, you’re basically tracking risks. Okay, so let’s say you’re finding that certain software versions are falling behind you’re now, three versions behind or four versions behind of a software version. And so now you’re going to start to say, well you know what, we don’t need to be leading edge or bleeding edge, but we need to keep up. There’s security risks right? There’s things that are happening in the industry that we have to be on top of. So as an architect, you can turn around to a stakeholder, like an It stakeholder, and say, I recommend you look into X because they’re the ones driving the requirements.
You’re not driving the requirements, but as a monitoring role in Phase H, you can then turn around and say, listen, this is what I’m observing, this is the competition is doing this, or there’s a change in the perception that people are having. That’s a strategy role. Step four says provide analysis for architecture change management. So the analysis that you’re doing is basically analyzing the performance of your architecture. Okay, so Enterprise Architecture Performance Reviews and the change requests may come through. So again, the business could say, we need to make this change.
This is not really working for us, or we’re having trouble with this, or new enhancements, again with the gap analysis. So these changes that are coming through, do they require change to your architecture? What is the gaps? And ensure you’re following the proper governance process. So during this whole time, architecture governance hasn’t gone away. If we need to make changes to the architecture, there’s still that governance process where they’re open and honest and fair balance. These things get logged, decisions get made properly. Step five says develop change requirements to meet performance targets.
So if your architecture is not delivering the value that is promised, okay, so let’s say you wanted to save a million dollars per month, and then you start tracking to that. It’s only three quarters of a million. So one of your roles is to make sure that you reach that target if you can, and so make recommendations on which changes need to be made. And this is part of to change your quest that already came in. We’re going to say, I recommend this and let’s hold off on that. Manage governance process is step six. And so as part of this architecture toga process, you’ve got the proper governance. The Architecture board is meeting.
It doesn’t have to be that often, depending on the nature of changes, but they’re meeting. And if there’s things that have fallen out, dispensations are approvals from the Architecture Board to be out of compliance with the architecture. So if changes come in, they’re approving them to be implemented, or they’re holding them off, or whatever those decisions are, and providing dispensations for architectures that have fallen out of requirement. And step seven, which is the last step of this phase, says to activate the process to implement change. So once you’re you’ve taken in these change requests, you’ve made some decisions.
The Architecture Board has decided now it’s time to activate the process for implementation. So again, architects are not always the ones doing implementation, are not often the ones doing that. So we’re going to produce, if you need to start off a new adm cycle, that’s a new request for architecture work. Or if things are to be implemented by implementation teams, then that’s giving the go ahead and whatever you’re doing, everything gets put back into the architecture repository. So that’s it for phase H. Now, there is this thing in the center called the Architecture Requirements Management phase that is in the center of it all. It’s a bit complicated, a bit tricky, and we’ll get into it in the next video.
