Identify the Scope of your Architecture
The objective of this method is to define the scope and the business rationale of your innovation project and its architecture. Using the Statement of Architecture Work template, you will describe the business background of your architecture, define how your aspired solution is supporting the goals of your organization, and come up with acceptance criteria to validate the goals. The Statement of Architecture Work focuses on the business perspective and can be created without considering technical requirements or other implementation aspects.
GOAL
Define the scope and business rationale of your architectural work
PARTICIPANTS
Lead architect
TIME NEEDED
60 minutes
PHASE
Explore
Before you start
- Align with your Corporate Strategy
- To make sure that the selected business area and innovation project are chosen according to your company’s strategic goals and objectives, we recommend you to create a Strategy Map with the following method:
Align with your Corporate Strategy - Use Case Exploration Workshop
- Generate use case ideas for the identified challenges and identify the most promising ones to implement. Understand which stakeholders have an interest in the identified use cases. See Method: Use Case Exploration Workshop
Materials you will need
Templates for Download
Steps
Understand the architecture request and business background
The first step is to understand the rationale and other background information behind the innovation project. To assess this, you need to define how your solution supports your company’s goals. Use the business challenge as a starting point. You find the information about the business challenges covered in the method Use Case Exploration Workshop.
Then, inform yourself about your company´s strategic goals. You will find this information in the Strategy Map template covered in the method Align with your Corporate Strategy. Discuss the business problem and other relevant background information with the stakeholder who stated the problem. From this discussion, you should be able to understand in which way your solution is going to support your company’s business goals. Define the title of the project and write a short description of the rationale for the project.
If you are uncertain about your business challenges and use case ideas, revisit the method Use Case Exploration Workshop and return after you have successfully completed it. The Strategy Map will provide you with a lot of input regarding the nature of your organization´s goals, making it easier to point out the parts that your solution is supporting. Go to the method Align with your Corporate Strategy to complete it.
Define the scope of the architecture
In this step, you briefly describe the scope of your architecture including a high-level vision diagram of the aspired solution. You can derive the scope of the architecture from step 1 taking as a basis the information about the business challenge and the goals of your architecture, as well as its relationship to the company´s goals. Fill in the “Architecture project description and scope” and the “Overview of architecture vision” of the provided template. For the “Architecture project description and scope” are enough, for example:
“Plan for the development of a finance request & approval workflow application integrating with the existing finance system”
For the “Overview of the architecture vision,” you can draw a simple diagram.
See the Completed Example
You can consider the Statement of Architecture work as a direct reaction to the identified use-case, i.e., the request of architecture work. You take insights from the Strategy Map as input for writing the Statement of Architecture Work.
Define acceptance criteria
In this step, you ask yourself what criteria the architecture of your aspired solution must meet in order to be accepted by the stakeholders. These don’t need to be concrete, measurable requirements at this point, but rather a description of the expectations that must be fulfilled and who need to validate or accept the architecture proposal.
Fill in the next two points of the template provided: Roles, responsibilities, and deliverables, and Acceptance Criteria and Procedures.
The Architecture project plan and schedule make reference to the Architecture Roadmap and can be created later.
Optional: Define who is participating in your solution and with which responsibility. Use the roles from the Stakeholder Matrix.
While points 1 to 4 in the template describe your architecture project, points 5 to 7 in the template have more project management characteristics.
You are done!
Congratulations! You have now defined the scope and business rationale of your innovation project and its architecture. You can keep the Statement of Architecture Work as a reference in the next phases. Follow the next methods in the Recommended Path to continue setting up your innovation project.