At my organization to better understand the business context, we begin by drafting a High Level Requirements (HLR) document. Our HLR is not as detailed as the Common Requirements Vision (CRV). At this point, we need only enough information to provide a level of effort (LOE). The request is only an idea and does not have funding to move forward.
After the LOE is complete, the business relationship manger working with the business requester and enterprise architect will take the HLR and LOE and present this information to the Information Technology Request Review board (ITRR) for approval and funding (CapEx). Since not all ideas move beyond this stage, we don't invest a great deal of time creating a plethora of artifacts.
Only ideas that have been approved and secure funding move onto being a project. At this time, the enterprise architect will use her discretion and create artifacts that she deems are necessary to help transition the approved idea to a project. At some point the project team is armed with enough information to begin project planning and execution. For most projects the enterprise architect may roll off the day to day activities and only stay involved for status meetings or be brought in if they project needs to consult with the architect if foundational or major changes are needed.
The business requester is always eager and anxious to move forward quickly with the project and for the enterprise architect, it is a balancing act as to how much information is required to move things forward. Too many artifacts, the business requester grows impatient and sees IT as someone that is an obstacle and not an ally. Not enough artifacts, the project team is uniformed and likely not to understand the business ask.
Thank you for sharing! I like the process flow you follow with getting a high level requirements document and then estimate what the cost will be. I think it is awesome that ideas are driven by your community for inclusion as part of your EA initiatives. A challenge for your process might be: Did you align the item defined in the HLR against with the actual business objectives? Perhaps the CIO makes this call, but if he makes it based only on cost or ease of implementation you might end up with a lot of individually useful initiatives but none that attack a high level business objective that the CEO and other leadership may have.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like your company has a very logical approach to implementing EA initiatives. I like how there is a relationship between the high level business requests and the detailed EA artifact conversion. It seems like there would also be a benefit in the HLR to outline how the "ask" aligns with corporate strategy. These types of documents would fit nicely in the program charter documentation as well. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. We are changing the way we do our project and it seem pretty similar to the way you do it. Have you ever worked with a work breakdown structure(wbs). It provides a structural view into the project
ReplyDelete